If you're shopping for visitor kiosk software, you already know what a kiosk does — you're trying to work out which one to buy, and comparison pages are unhelpful in a specific way: they're written by vendors, about vendors, using feature checklists where everyone ticks everything. This one is written by a vendor too, so here's the deal up front. We are not going to name other products, tell you what they cost, or tell you what they can do. Prices and feature sets in this category change quarterly, every vendor publishes its own, and a claim about somebody else's product in a blog post is out of date the week after it's written.

What we can usefully offer is the shape of the market: the axes along which these products genuinely differ, the questions that surface those differences in a demo, and where WeDisplay sits on each. You can then apply the framework to any shortlist, including ours.

The five differences that actually change the number

1. What the pricing is attached to

This is the biggest one, and it's rarely on the pricing page in a form you can compare. Visitor management is commonly priced per location — each entrance, each floor, each building is its own line. That model is completely reasonable for a company with three offices in three cities. It is expensive and slightly absurd for a company with one office and two doors.

The question to ask, in exactly these words: "We have one office with two entrances and one shared reception. What does that cost, and what would a third door cost?" Vendors answer that question very differently, and the answer usually tells you more about fit than any feature demo.

Watch also for what counts as a location, whether tablets are licensed separately, and whether a location you turn off for the winter still bills.

2. Which capabilities are the base product and which are modules

Every platform in this category has the same headline flow — check in, notify the host, keep a log. The differences live in what sits on top: document signing and e-signature, a security watchlist, employee presence and evacuation, integrations with your chat tool, analytics.

Some vendors bundle those. Some make each one a tier. Some make them add-ons that price per user rather than per site, which changes the math completely once your staff list is on the system.

Ask for the quote with your required capabilities selected, not the list price of the tier they lead with.

3. Whether the vendor also runs the screen on the wall

Most lobbies have two pieces of glass in them: a tablet at the desk and a screen on the wall. They are usually bought separately, from different vendors, on different renewal dates, with different support numbers — which is fine until something needs fixing and each vendor is confident it's the other one's problem.

Some vendors do one and integrate with the other. Some do both from one account. Neither is automatically right — a best-of-breed kiosk plus a best-of-breed signage platform is a defensible choice — but the bundled option removes a whole class of procurement and support friction, and it usually costs less than two subscriptions. Worth pricing both ways before deciding.

4. Hardware policy

Ask whether the product runs on a tablet you already own or on hardware you buy from the vendor. Bring-your-own-device is normal in this category, but "supported" and "supported well" are different things, and the browser matters: some features — camera-based badge scanning is the usual one — behave differently on iPad Safari than on Chrome for Android.

Get the demo running on the exact tablet model you plan to buy, not on the vendor's demo unit.

5. What happens when things go wrong

The failure cases are where products separate, and they're almost never demoed.

• The network drops. Does check-in still work? Does the evacuation list still open? A roll call that needs a live connection fails on the exact day it's needed.
• The plan doesn't include a feature. Does the visitor see an upgrade prompt at the door? A lobby full of visitors should never meet a billing screen.
• A document is edited. Are prior signatures still tied to the text they agreed to, or has the wording been changed retroactively under all of them?
• Somebody forgets to check out. Does the system close them out on a schedule, or does your on-site count drift all week?

Three more questions worth asking

• Data residency and retention. Where does visitor data live, how long is it kept, and can you set the period? In Québec this is not a theoretical question — Law 25 makes deliberate retention a habit worth having.
• Language at the tablet. Not the admin dashboard: the screen the visitor reads. If your site receives drivers, couriers or trades, the languages offered on the check-in screen matter more than any feature on the list.
• Getting out. Can you export the full visit log to CSV yourself, without asking support? Check before signing, not during the migration.

A one-week evaluation plan

Shortlist two or three, then stop reading pages and test claims.

• Day 1 — Write down your real requirements: number of entrances, which documents must be signed by whom, who needs to be notified and where, and whether staff need to be on the evacuation list.
• Day 2 — Get quotes for your configuration, including the second entrance. Compare the numbers, not the tiers.
• Day 3 — Set up a real kiosk on the tablet you'd actually buy. Time it.
• Day 4 — Run five check-ins: a walk-in, a pre-registered guest, a contractor who must sign a document, a delivery, and someone who declines to sign. Confirm the host notice lands where your team actually works.
• Day 5 — Break it. Turn the Wi-Fi off mid-check-in. Open the evacuation list offline. Edit a document and check what happened to the earlier signature.
• Day 6 — Export everything and read the CSV.
• Day 7 — Add up the year-one cost including hardware, the second door, and the modules you actually need.

Where WeDisplay sits

Applying our own framework, honestly:

• Pricing is per organization, not per door. Adding a second entrance is another kiosk in the same account, not another location line. There's no public kiosk price list, because everything customer-facing here is sized and quoted personally — tell us about your lobby on the get started page and we'll come back with a shape.
• The bigger capabilities are plan features. Documents and e-signature, the security watchlist, employee presence and evacuation, the Slack/Teams/Zoom fan-out, and the reporting trends each sit on plans that include them. When one isn't on your plan it's simply absent — the visitor never meets a billing prompt at the door.
• We do both pieces of glass. The visitor kiosk and digital signage run from the same account, the same team roles and one bill, with a discount when you take more than one.
• Bring your own tablet. An iPad or Android tablet on a stand, paired once and bound to that kiosk. One known limitation: camera badge scanning works on Chrome for Android and not on iPad Safari today, where people type their code instead.
• The failure cases are designed for. Evacuation runs offline from cached data, auto-checkout closes the day on your office hours and holidays, editing a document publishes a new version rather than rewriting old ones, and you can export the whole log to CSV yourself.
• Seven languages at the tablet — English, French, Spanish, Romanian, Punjabi, Hindi and Mandarin — with visitor data on a retention window you choose, 90 days by default.

One thing we are not: access control. We don't unlock doors, and if that's your requirement you want a different category of product.

If you want the same treatment for the screen on the wall, our digital signage software comparison applies a similar framework there. And if you're earlier in the process, visitor management for small business covers what a kiosk replaces in the first place.

FAQ

Why won't you compare feature-by-feature with named competitors? Because we'd be describing products we don't operate, from documentation that changes, in a post that stays online for years. Every claim we'd make would be simultaneously self-serving and going stale. A framework you can apply yourself is more useful and ages better.

Is a visitor kiosk cheaper than a receptionist? Wrong comparison, usually. A kiosk doesn't replace a receptionist — it covers the desk when the receptionist is elsewhere and handles the parts they shouldn't have to do manually, like chasing signatures and remembering who hasn't left. Offices that remove the receptionist rarely do it because of the kiosk.

How many entrances does one kiosk cover? One tablet is bound to one kiosk, so each entrance you want to staff needs its own tablet. What varies between vendors is whether that second entrance is another line on the invoice or just another device in the same account.

Can I use the same system across several companies in one building? Ask this specifically if you're in a shared or multi-tenant building — support for it is uneven across the category. WeDisplay handles it: one reception can front for several companies, each with its own logo and host list, with the company picker appearing only when more than one is active.