Feature comparisons are written by vendors and compare what is easy to list. Whether a tool survives your Saturday night appears in none of those tables. These six questions tell you more.
1. How many guests can the door process per minute?
The only number that matters on the night. Do not accept "fast check-in" — ask for seconds per guest, then run it against your guest count as described in door planning. The gap between 4 and 12 seconds is over 25 minutes of queue at 400 guests across two lanes.
2. What happens when the network drops?
Not "is there an offline mode", but: with no connection, do I get an immediate answer on whether this code is valid? Many systems only queue requests and report back later, which is no help at the door. Detail in offline check-in.
3. Who owns the guest data?
This lives in the contract, not on the website. Check two things: can you export your guest data in full at any time, and in what format? And does the vendor use it for their own purposes? If the only export is a PDF, you do not have an export.
4. Does the price scale with what you actually do?
Per-event pricing punishes lots of small nights. Per-guest pricing punishes the full ones. Per-seat pricing punishes teams with many door staff. None of them is wrong — it just has to match your pattern. Run your last quarter through it, not a sample month.
5. How many systems does one guest need?
If ticket holders and guest list spots live in separate tools, the door checks twice. See ticketing or guest list. A tool that merges both is worth more at the door than one with twice the features.
6. What does leaving cost?
The question nobody asks before signing. How do you get out — guest data, attendance history, promoter attribution? A vendor without a clear answer has just answered question 3 as well.
The real test: do not take the demo. Set up a test event yourself, add twenty guests, put the phone in flight mode and scan. Whatever irritates you there will irritate you ten times more on a Saturday.