Bloomberg Connects and Guru solve different problems, and pretending otherwise would not help you choose. Bloomberg Connects gives your institution a free presence inside a shared cultural directory. Guru gives you your own app, under your own name, built around your collection, your stories, and your data. This page lays out the real differences so you can decide what your visitors need.
Bloomberg Connects is a philanthropic project of Bloomberg Philanthropies. It hosts digital guides for more than 1,500 museums, galleries, and cultural spaces inside one shared app, at no cost to the institution. For many organizations, that is a generous and genuinely useful offer.
Guru is a dedicated platform. Your institution gets its own branded app in the App Store and Google Play, or a web app with no download at all, with audio tours, augmented reality, indoor wayfinding, visitor information, and a CMS your team runs without developers. You own the visitor relationship, the brand moment, and the engagement data.
The decision usually comes down to one question: is your digital guide a listing, or is it part of your institution's identity?
Comparison reflects publicly available Bloomberg Connects information as of July 2026. If we have something wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
The national average capture rate for museum apps is 1.5 percent. Battleship IOWA's Guru app has reached 75 percent on some days, and multilingual content on the app has increased foreign tour group sales by 60 percent. Holocaust Museum LA's web app sees an average take-up rate of over 30 percent. Those numbers come from institutions that treated their app as core to the visit, not as a listing. Read the full stories: the Battleship IOWA case study and the Holocaust Museum LA case study.
A visitor who downloads your app sees your institution, not a directory. That matters at the moment of connection in the gallery, and it matters again after the visit, when the app is still on their phone.
Augmented reality that puts a visitor face-to-face with history. Blue-dot wayfinding through complex buildings and grounds. Themed tours that follow curiosity rather than a fixed route. These are the experiences Guru partners build, and they need a platform designed for them. Explore audio tours and AR and wayfinding.
Engagement analytics show you what visitors actually do: where they linger, what they skip, which stories land. Institutions use this to make exhibit, staffing, and funding decisions with evidence instead of instinct. See CMS, analytics, and integrations.
Honesty makes this page useful, so here it is. If your institution has no budget for digital engagement, no capacity to manage an app, and needs a simple guide visitors can reach today, Bloomberg Connects is a good answer, and its onboarding support is real. Some institutions run a Connects guide as a low-cost discovery channel while operating a dedicated app for the in-building experience. If that is your situation, we are glad the option exists. When your digital experience becomes central to how you serve visitors, that is when a dedicated platform earns its keep.
Yes. Bloomberg Philanthropies funds it, and institutions pay nothing to join. The cost is positional, not financial: your guide lives inside a shared app rather than under your own brand, and the experience is shaped by the platform's template.
It can. Most partners run tours on visitors' own phones, which removes device maintenance and queues. Institutions that still want on-site devices can load the app onto managed hardware.
It depends on scope. Holocaust Museum LA went from start to a working audio tour in about a month to meet a reopening deadline. A full app with AR and wayfinding takes longer. We will give you an honest timeline in the demo.
Guru supports integrations with ticketing, CRM, membership, and collections systems. Feasibility and effort depend on the target system's API and how custom the setup is, so integrations are scoped per project.
Yes, and some institutions do. A Connects listing can serve as a discovery channel while your dedicated Guru app carries the full on-site experience.
You know your institution. We know what it takes to get a digital guide into visitors' hands and keep it there. Book a demo, tell us your goals, and we will show you what museums like yours have built, including the numbers.