Krane vs Popl

Popl is a digital business card and a lead-capture platform. The card side is a profile you share by QR code, NFC tap or Apple Wallet, with a card designer, email signatures and widgets; Popl sells physical NFC cards to go with it. The App Store now titles the app “Popl: AI Lead Capture”, and the team plan is where that happens: a badge scanner, a paper card scanner, event campaigns, qualifying questions, lead routing, reporting and sync to 30+ CRMs, run from a web dashboard. Leads live in your Popl account.

Krane is a scanner. You point an iPhone, iPhone Duo or iPad at a paper card or an event badge and get a contact with every field filled. Each card is filed under the event you’re at, and with Krane Pro it goes to HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive or a webhook from the phone. There is no account and no dashboard.

Popl’s app reads a paper card with AI OCR, creates a contact and looks the person up on LinkedIn. You can also upload card photos from your camera roll. Popl’s pages don’t say whether the read happens on the phone or on its servers, and they don’t give scan limits per plan, a list of card languages, or whether it reads several cards from one photo. The App Store lists English as the app’s only language.

Krane reads the card on your iPhone right away and checks it again when you’re back online. The fields are name, job title, company, phone numbers labelled mobile, work, fax and other, email addresses, websites, social profiles and street address. It reads cards in almost any language and script, including Japanese, Chinese and Korean; a name in a non-Latin script gets a Latin spelling added. Photograph the back of a card and both sides merge into one contact. The app itself runs in eight languages.

For a stack of cards, hold the phone over the table and lay them down one at a time; Krane shoots each card as soon as it is still. Free users can scan three in a row per session. With Krane Pro, the Group of cards mode reads a whole spread from one photo.

The free plan reads 10 cards or badges per rolling seven-day week; Krane Pro removes the limit. The business card scanner page lists every field.

Popl’s Universal Badge Scanner photographs the printed badge and reads the name and company from the print. Popl’s help says scanning only the QR code will not work, which is why it works at shows that encrypt their codes. The scanner is on the team Event Lead Capture plan; individual Pro and Pro Plus users get five scans as a lifetime trial. Leads are stored on the device with no signal, enriched when service returns, and synced to the CRM.

Krane’s badge scanner is free. It reads the printed name, title, company and event, decodes QR, PDF417 and Aztec codes, and merges any contact data in the code with the print. Encrypted badge codes can’t be decoded; Krane still saves the printed details, and if the person hands you a card, it joins the same contact.

Start an event when you reach the venue and every scan is filed under it, with where you met and the event’s tags filled in. With no signal, the card is read on the iPhone and checked again online. The event screen lists its cards, companies and top tags and exports them in one go. A full show day is on the trade show lead capture page.

Popl’s team plans sync to Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho, monday.com, Slack and others, 30+ in all, with custom field mapping and duplicate matching, at no extra fee. Popl’s pages don’t make clear what the individual plans include here, and the pages we checked don’t mention Zapier or a webhook. CSV export runs from the web dashboard; Popl’s own help article gives two different plan requirements for it.

Krane Pro sends cards from the phone, with your tokens stored on it and no Krane server in between. HubSpot gets a contact, updated if one with the same email exists. Salesforce gets a Lead or a Contact, your choice, with the event, tags and notes in the Description field. Pipedrive gets a person linked to an organization named after the card’s company, plus a note carrying the event and tags. The webhook posts each card as JSON to Zapier, Make, n8n or your own server, signed with HMAC-SHA256 when you set a secret. Empty fields are never sent, so a push can’t blank data already in the CRM.

Send one card, a whole event, or every new scan automatically. CSV export covers one event or all cards.

Popl doesn’t publish team pricing. Its pricing page says it quotes over a meeting, and that team plans aren’t priced per seat and carry no per-scan fees. Its App Store listing shows the individual plans as in-app purchases: Popl Pro $7.99 and Popl Pro Plus $14.99, with yearly options at $76.99 and $144.99, as listed on November 8, 2026. The listing doesn’t label the period of the two non-yearly prices.

Krane Pro is $11.99 a month or $95.99 a year (US). The App Store shows the price for your account and country. What each plan includes is on the pricing page.

Popl works from an account. Leads go to your Popl account and its web dashboard, where a team admin can see them and run exports. Popl’s pricing page states SOC 2 Type 2; its pages don’t say where the data is stored. The App Store privacy label lists a device ID linked to you, used for analytics.

Krane has no account and no sign-up. Cards, events and your CRM tokens stay on the iPhone. You can back everything up to one file and restore it any time. Each card is read on your iPhone first, right away, and checked again when you’re back online. The app has no ad SDK and no third-party analytics SDK.