What’s bad?
Alright, downside time. Hot off the heels of that networking feature, some elements don’t work so well without volume. Randomised networking is great… unless barely anyone else has clicked the “networking ready” button, in which case it’s a lot of twiddling thumbs. Sorry Hopin, -10 points there.
Likewise the platform can pack a lot of different slots, but it can start to feel thinly spread very quickly, a sense of guest sparseness as there is so much to go around. While that’s partly on organisers for packing the agenda without driving the numbers, there isn’t really a way to manage it once it occurs, so that’s another -10 points.
Finally, it can feel a bit clunky at times, with an interface that sometimes lacks intuition. A blur of joining links with the same interface can make it easy for speakers to get lost, and whilst being able to chat across different channels (event wide/room specific/direct message) is nifty, its often underutilised or just a downright source of confusion for guests. Another -10 points then.
Pricing wise, Hopin continues its clunky feel with a pricing plan that is unnecessarily convoluted – it throws in an extra cost per guest once you go past the maximum guest number included in your plan, a dangerous approach where if registrations go through the roof, great news for your event, but terrible news for your bottom line. -10 points, as it smells of “stealth pricing”, when they could just allow you to set up a cap on your registrations and agree a fixed fee for that. I should add though that you have the ability to monetise your event by charging for tickets through Hopin registration, so +10 points back.
Oh, and of course its another one of those “loves to get blocked by corporate VPNs” platforms. Not entirely their fault, but still problematic, so -10 points there too.
