Bloomberg Connects has put digital guides within reach of more than 1,500 institutions, free of charge. But a shared directory is not the right shape for every museum. If you want your own brand on the app, deeper experiences like AR and wayfinding, or engagement data you can act on, you have options. Here are six, compared honestly, including where each one is strong and who it suits.
Three reasons come up again and again in our conversations with museum teams.
Your guide sits inside a shared app alongside 1,500+ other institutions. Visitors experience Connects first and your museum second.
The template covers audio, video, and text well. It is not built for augmented reality, blue-dot indoor navigation, or interactive experiences designed around your specific collection.
When the platform owns the visitor relationship, you see guide-level insights rather than the full engagement picture that informs exhibit design, staffing, and funder reporting.
None of these makes Connects a bad product. They define the boundary where a free directory listing stops and a dedicated platform begins.
Guru builds fully branded museum apps, native or web-based, with audio tours, augmented reality, indoor wayfinding, visitor information, and a CMS built for non-technical museum teams. Engagement analytics come standard, and integrations with ticketing, CRM, membership, and collections systems are scoped per project. The difference shows up in adoption: against a national average capture rate of 1.5 percent for museum apps, Battleship IOWA's Guru app has reached 75 percent on some days, and Holocaust Museum LA's web app averages over 30 percent take-up. Best for museums, zoos, gardens, parks, historic sites, and science centers that treat the digital guide as part of the institution, not a listing. Yes, this is our platform. The numbers are published in our case studies, so you can check our math.
Cuseum pairs mobile engagement with digital membership cards and CRM integrations such as Salesforce, Altru, and Tessitura. If your primary digital goal is membership growth and donor pipeline rather than the in-gallery experience, Cuseum's stack is built around exactly that. Tours and guides are part of the offer, but membership is the center of gravity.
STQRY offers no-code app building, audio tours, and a managed device fleet for institutions that still lend hardware. It suits organizations that want to assemble their own guide from flexible building blocks and publish across formats, including kiosks. Brand presence and experience depth sit between a directory listing and a fully custom app.
Smartify is a consumer app known for scan-to-identify artwork recognition and a large audio tour library spanning hundreds of venues. Like Connects, it is a shared platform, so the brand trade-off is similar, but the scanning experience and its existing audience of art lovers are genuine strengths for collection-led museums.
Locatify specializes in location-triggered guides and indoor positioning. If your core problem is automatic room-by-room content triggering in a complex building, it is worth a look. Expect more of a technology toolkit than a full visitor engagement partnership.
A free, self-service audio guide platform. You write and record everything yourself, and your tour lives in the shared izi.TRAVEL app. The right choice when budget is zero and staff time is available; the trade-offs in brand, depth, and data are the same as any shared platform, with less onboarding support than Connects provides.
Competitor rows reflect public materials as of July 2026 and are summarized in good faith. Verify current feature sets directly with each vendor; most of these platforms ship new capabilities every year.
Ask four questions, in this order.
If a listing is enough, stay with Connects or izi.TRAVEL and spend the savings on content. If the app is how visitors experience your institution, you need your own.
Complex grounds and multi-floor buildings point to wayfinding. Story-rich collections point to audio and AR. Membership-driven institutions point to CRM depth.
A dedicated app is only as good as its content operation. Look hard at the CMS and ask to see the publishing workflow before you buy anything.
If engagement analytics will inform exhibits, staffing, or grant reporting, make sure the platform gives you more than download counts.
It depends on what you are optimizing for. For a fully branded app with AR and wayfinding, Guru. For digital membership, Cuseum. For self-service assembly, STQRY. For zero budget, izi.TRAVEL.
Yes. It is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and free to participating institutions, with onboarding and marketing support included.
Yes. Some institutions keep a Connects listing as a discovery channel while running a dedicated app for the full on-site experience.
It varies with scope: content volume, AR, wayfinding, and integrations all move the number. Talk to vendors about your specific project rather than trusting generic price lists. We tailor every Guru demo to the institution's goals for exactly this reason.
The national average capture rate is 1.5 percent, which is why adoption strategy matters more than the app itself. Institutions that integrate the app into the visit see radically different numbers: Battleship IOWA has reached 75 percent on some days. How you launch matters as much as what you launch.
If your shortlist includes a dedicated, branded app, we would like to be on it. Book a demo and we will walk you through what institutions like yours have built with Guru, with real adoption numbers rather than promises.