Blinq vs Beaconstac: Which Digital Business Card Platform Fits You?

Disclosure before the table: EZQR is a QR code generator. We do not sell NFC cards and we are not a competitor to either of these on the card product. Prices below were checked against each vendor's own pricing page on 16 August 2026. Digital business card pricing moves, so confirm before you buy.

The billing terms matter as much as the numbers. Blinq publishes both a monthly and an annual price. Uniqode publishes annual pricing only, on both its QR plans and its card plans, so the real commitment is a year either way.

Blinq Business costs less per user than Blinq Premium. That reads like an error and it is not.

Premium is $9.99 per month billed monthly, or $7.33 per month billed annually, and it covers up to five cards for one person. Business is $6.99 per user per month billed monthly, or $4.99 billed annually, and it requires a minimum of five cards. The per-user price drops because the seat count floor rises.

The practical consequence: a solo user cannot buy the cheaper tier. A three-person studio cannot either. At five people the Business tier becomes both cheaper per head and more capable, adding team management, an admin dashboard, lead capture and the CRM integrations. If you are sitting at three or four seats and evaluating Premium, price out what five Business seats would cost before committing, because the gap is smaller than it looks.

Blinq's free tier is also unusually complete. One to two cards, unlimited sharing through wallet, widget, email or SMS, unlimited contact creation, and basic customisation. For an individual who wants a digital card and nothing more, the free tier is a real answer rather than a trial.

One login for QR and cards. That is the whole pitch, and for the right buyer it is a strong one.

If your marketing team already runs dynamic QR codes on packaging, print campaigns or event signage, those codes need somewhere to live with scan analytics attached. Uniqode does that as its primary product. Adding cards for the sales team means one vendor, one invoice, one analytics view and one security review instead of two.

Uniqode also carries the enterprise apparatus: Microsoft Entra ID integration, invoice billing, 24/7 support and a published 99.99% uptime commitment. For procurement at a company that requires SSO and a signed contract, that matters more than a few dollars per seat.

The cost of that breadth is commitment. Every Uniqode paid plan is annual. There is no month-to-month option to test a rollout with, and the QR product is priced separately from the card product, so a team wanting both is buying two things. The 30-day money-back guarantee is the safety valve, and it is worth confirming its terms before you sign rather than after.

Beaconstac announced its rebrand to Uniqode in January 2024. The original name referenced beacon hardware the company had moved away from years earlier.

Existing accounts, codes and analytics carried over, and customers log in at uniqode.com rather than beaconstac.com. That is why comparison articles, review sites and your own search results use the two names interchangeably, and why some pages you find still say Beaconstac throughout.

One thing to check for yourself rather than take from any article: some users migrating through the rebrand reported that plan benefits changed and prices rose, with lifetime analytics access cited most often. We have not independently verified those accounts, and they come from user reports rather than company statements. If long-term analytics retention is part of why you are buying, ask Uniqode directly what the retention window is on the specific tier you are considering, and get the answer in writing.

Answer three questions in order, and the choice usually makes itself.

Do you need QR codes beyond business cards? If yes, Uniqode. If no, that entire half of the platform is spend you will not use, and Blinq is the focused product.

Can you commit to a year? Uniqode requires it. Blinq does not. For a new team, a pilot, or any situation where headcount might change, monthly billing is worth real money in avoided lock-in.

How many seats? Under five, Blinq Premium or the free tier. Five or more, compare Blinq Business against Uniqode Team directly, because that is where the two genuinely overlap.

Free tier is where these two diverge most, and the gap is bigger than the pricing table suggests.

Blinq gives you one to two cards with unlimited sharing through wallet passes, widgets, email and SMS, unlimited contact creation, basic card customisation, virtual backgrounds and personal email signatures. That is a working product. A freelancer can run on it indefinitely without ever seeing an upgrade wall on the core flow, and the sharing channels are the part that matters, because a card nobody can receive is not a card.

Uniqode gives you one digital business card with essential features. It is a genuine free tier rather than a trial, and for a single person it works. What it is not is a place to grow into. The moment a second person needs a card, you are on Team at $6 per user per month with an annual commitment.

The practical read: if you are testing whether digital business cards suit your business at all, start on Blinq free. It costs nothing, tells you honestly whether people scan the thing, and does not require a card purchase to find out. Test Uniqode free only if the QR platform is the actual reason you are looking.

Both platforms rent you a hosted profile. That sentence is the whole risk model, and neither product page states it that plainly.

The NFC card in your wallet stores a short URL. It does not store your contact details. Tap it and the phone opens that URL, which resolves to a profile page on the vendor's servers. When the subscription lapses, the URL still exists and the page behind it stops being yours: on Blinq you drop to the free feature set and anything premium you configured stops behaving as set up, and on Uniqode access ends with the subscription term.

The cards you already printed or ordered do not know any of this. A box of 250 paper cards with a QR pointing at a lapsed profile is 250 pieces of dead print. This is the single most expensive mistake in this category, and it is why the cancellation question belongs in the evaluation rather than after it.

Two defences are worth taking. First, export contacts before any downgrade — Blinq Premium includes CSV export, and getting your captured leads out is not something to attempt after billing stops. Second, for anything with a long print life, consider whether the destination needs to be vendor-hosted at all. A vCard QR encodes the details in the pattern, so there is no hosted page to lose, and a static code never expires for the same structural reason.

For anything past a handful of people, the admin layer decides the winner more than the card design does.

Blinq Business is where its team story lives: a team management console, an admin dashboard, lead capture with enrichment, event campaigns with attribution, and more than 20 native CRM integrations. Native matters. A native integration is configuration; a non-native one is Zapier, which works and is another subscription with its own failure modes. Blinq Enterprise adds enforced SSO, SCIM user provisioning and a dedicated customer success manager at 100+ cards.

Uniqode approaches the same problem from the platform side. Card administration sits inside the same console as QR campaign management, which is an advantage if both are in use and irrelevant if only one is. Business+ carries Microsoft Entra ID integration and invoice billing, which is the pairing procurement teams at larger companies ask for by name.

The question that settles it: does your identity provider need to provision and deprovision card users automatically? If someone leaving the company must lose their card access the same day, you need SCIM or Entra ID, and that requirement puts you on Blinq Enterprise or Uniqode Business+ regardless of what the entry tiers cost.

Here is the part neither vendor has a reason to tell you. If all you want is for your contact details to land in someone's phone, a vCard QR code does that for $0, forever, with no app and no subscription.

The mechanism is different in a way that matters. A vCard QR encodes your name, phone, email and company directly in the black-and-white pattern. Nothing is hosted. Scanning it opens the phone's native Save Contact dialog with the fields already filled, and it keeps doing that in ten years whether or not any company still exists. There is no profile page to expire, no account to lapse, no vendor to depend on. That is a genuine structural advantage, not a marketing claim, and it is the same reason a static code never expires.

What it does not do: lead capture, CRM sync, analytics, a designed profile page, or NFC tap. Those are real features and the platforms above genuinely provide them. If your sales team needs scanned leads dropping into HubSpot, a vCard QR is not the tool.

Most people buying a digital business card are not that sales team. They want their details shared cleanly at a conference. For that, the free option is the honest recommendation, and you can put it on the back of an ordinary paper card.

Buy Blinq for cards. Buy Uniqode for a QR platform that also does cards. That is the honest summary.

Blinq is cheaper under five seats and more flexible everywhere, because it is the only one of the two that bills monthly. The free tier is real. The app is good. If digital business cards are the whole requirement, this is the focused product and the price reflects that focus.

Uniqode costs more per seat and locks you into a year. What you get for that is a QR code platform running underneath, which is worthless if you do not need it and decisive if you do. Marketing teams already putting codes on print and packaging should look here first.

One more time on the option neither sells. If nobody on your team needs analytics, lead capture or a designed profile, and the actual requirement is contact details landing on a phone, a free vCard QR does that permanently for nothing. Test that before paying either vendor. It takes two minutes and it might end the evaluation.