If you are evaluating Convo, you are almost certainly evaluating at least one other platform too. Every serious procurement process for an AI-era audio guide platform that I've watched in 2026 has had two to four vendors on the shortlist by the time it reached a decision.
This hub exists to do two things. First, to sketch the shape of the museum-audio-guide vendor field as it actually looks in 2026 — so a director who is new to the category can come in with a working map before the first vendor call. Second, to point at the side-by-side comparison pages we've written about the vendors we get compared to most often.
Why does the comparison conversation matter?
Procurement officers don't sign annual contracts on a single demo. They build a shortlist of two to four vendors, run parallel demos, ask each vendor to fill out a feature matrix, and then carry a side-by-side upstairs to the director or the board. The matrix is the artifact the decision actually gets made on.
The honest move from a vendor in this category is to write the side-by-side ourselves, before the buyer has to. We know our product better than anyone else. We also know our competitors well enough to describe them accurately — and the cases where they're the better fit. A vendor that won't write that page, or that writes it without ever naming a case where the other side wins, is signalling something. The buyer notices.
This pillar is where we host those side-by-sides. The point isn't to win every comparison. It's to give the buyer a document that respects their time.
What does the museum audio guide vendor field look like in 2026?
The field is more crowded than it looks if you only know two or three names. Roughly five categories, with one or two illustrative players in each. Most museum shortlists draw from across two or three of these categories rather than picking three vendors from one.
Direct-to-museum SaaS. Subscription platforms an institution runs under its own brand. The AI-era entrants — Convo, Musa — sit here, along with the institution-side product Smartify sells alongside its consumer app. Pricing is usually monthly or annual; the visitor surface is web-via-QR; the production tooling is AI-assisted. This is where most new shortlists start.
Free aggregator apps. Bloomberg Connects is the dominant player — a free, philanthropy-funded consumer app that hosts content from hundreds of cultural institutions in one place. The trade-off is distribution-versus-ownership: the museum borrows Bloomberg's app shell and audience rather than running its own.
Legacy hardware-plus-app vendors. Orpheo, Acoustiguide, Antenna International, and the rest of the legacy field. Long institutional book, hardware-handset business that still has takers in some contexts, and increasingly an app or web layer bolted alongside. The pitch is usually procurement familiarity and named accounts.
Adjacent visitor-experience platforms. STQRY, Cuseum, SmartGuide and similar — broader visitor-experience tools that ship some audio capability alongside maps, events, membership, or in-app commerce. Often the right answer for a science center or a botanical garden where the audio layer is one channel among five.
DIY on general-purpose tooling. Quietly the most common alternative. A museum builds something itself on Soundcloud, Google Sites, a basic CMS, or a QR-to-MP3 pipeline. Cheap, fully owned, and usually under-resourced past the second exhibition. We mention it because for very small institutions it's a real comparison set.
A specific museum's shortlist usually pulls from two of these categories — typically direct-to-museum SaaS plus either the aggregator app or a legacy vendor the institution has worked with before. Knowing which categories are on your shortlist matters more than knowing every vendor in each.
Where does Convo sit in the field?
Convo is direct-to-museum SaaS. The platform an institution runs under its own brand, delivered to visitors through a QR code that opens a web player on their phone — no app download. Curators upload reference materials; the platform drafts a tour grounded in those sources, voices it across the institution's chosen languages (40+ supported, up to ten active), and lets visitors ask follow-up questions at each stop that are also grounded in the curators' source set. Every plan starts with a free 30-day pilot; Studio is $600/mo (published, self-serve), Institution is quoted to the institution's size, Enterprise is custom. The full picture is on the product page and pricing.
The vendors we most often get compared to are Smartify (whose institutional offering is also direct-to-museum SaaS, alongside their consumer app) and Bloomberg Connects (the free aggregator). We've published the Bloomberg Connects side-by-side so far; we've also drafted internal comparison notes on Smartify, Musa, and the legacy vendors, which will ship as full pages over the coming weeks.
If your shortlist includes a vendor we haven't published on yet, email us with the name. We will write it.
What dimensions actually differ between platforms?
The feature matrices vendors hand out are usually fifty rows long and most of them are noise. The dimensions where platforms genuinely differ — the ones worth pushing on in a demo — are shorter:
- Pricing model and transparency. Is the price published or quoted? Subscription or per-tour? Per-language? Are unlimited edits included or metered?
- Who owns the visitor surface. Does the QR code open the museum's own branded web app, or does it drop the visitor into a vendor's consumer app with the vendor's UI, recommendations, and brand?
- Conversational vs broadcast AI. Can visitors ask follow-up questions at a stop, or do they only listen? If they can ask, where does the answer come from — grounded in the curators' sources, or pulled from the open web?
- Multilingual depth. How many languages, how are they produced, and how is each language reviewed before it ships? Ten languages auto-generated without a native-speaker review is a different product than five languages with sign-off.
- Accessibility posture. Captions, transcripts, screen-reader compatibility, dynamic type. Web-via-QR delivery usually inherits the visitor's phone settings; rented handsets usually don't.
- Time-to-launch. Weeks, months, or quarters from kick-off to a public tour. The legacy production model assumes months. The newer SaaS platforms assume weeks.
- BYOD vs handset. Visitor's own phone via QR, a rented handset, a downloaded native app, or a mix.
The cross-pillar piece on how to choose museum audio guide software treats these as a full evaluation framework. The category overview that frames the AI side specifically — what these platforms are and how the production math has shifted — is the AI audio guides hub.
What if our shortlist includes a vendor you haven't written about?
Tell us. Email eric@convo.app with the vendor name and we'll write a comparison page on it. There is no shortlist we haven't already considered internally — we track the field — but the order in which we publish is driven by which vendors actual museum buyers tell us they're weighing us against.
The pages we publish are the ones procurement officers asked us to. That's the right way to prioritize.
Continue reading
The live comparison pages in this pillar:
- Convo vs Bloomberg Connects — paid institution-owned platform vs the free aggregator app. Distribution, ownership, conversational layer, and the cases where Bloomberg Connects is the right answer.
In other pillars:
- How to choose museum audio guide software — the cross-vendor evaluation framework. The piece to read alongside any comparison page.
- AI audio guides for museums: the complete guide — the category-level overview. What these platforms are, how they work, and where they fit.
About the author
Eric Duffy is the founder of Convo, a platform that lets museums and cultural institutions publish multilingual audio tours their visitors can have a conversation with. He writes about the museum software market from inside it — including comparison pages on the vendors Convo is most often shortlisted against. Reach him at eric@convo.app or on LinkedIn.