Exporb vs Bigin — lead capture app vs small business CRM
Bigin by Zoho CRM is an affordable pipeline CRM for small businesses. Exporb is a purpose-built trade show lead capture app. They solve different problems, and most teams end up using both — Exporb at the booth, Bigin to run the pipeline afterward. Here is the honest breakdown.
What is the difference between Exporb and Bigin?
Bigin is a pipeline-centric CRM built and priced for small businesses — deals, contacts, built-in cloud telephony, and 150+ integrations, starting around $7/user/month. It has a mobile business card scanner, but no offline-first capture mode, no badge scanning, and no booth conversation recording or AI analysis. It was built to run a business day to day, not to capture leads on a noisy show floor with no WiFi.
Exporb does one thing: turn a booth conversation into a scored, actionable lead. Record it, transcribe it, score it, rank it (Hot, Warm, Fresh), and push it to Salesforce, HubSpot, or a CSV/JSON export. It does not run your sales pipeline, track deals, or make calls — that's what a CRM like Bigin is for. The common setup: capture and score at the show with Exporb, then hand the leads to Bigin as the system of record.
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Feature comparison
Side-by-side on the capabilities that matter for trade show lead capture and pipeline management.
| Capability | Exporb | Bigin |
|---|---|---|
| Record and transcribe the booth conversation | ||
| AI summary + buying-signal / sentiment scoring | ||
| Ranked follow-up list (Hot, Warm, Fresh) | ||
| Works fully offline at the booth | ||
| Badge / QR code scanning for event check-in | ||
| Scan business cards (OCR) | ||
| Multi-stage sales pipeline & deal management | ||
| Built-in cloud telephony (call from the app) | ||
| Push leads straight to Salesforce | ||
| Push leads straight to HubSpot | ||
| 150+ pre-built app integrations | ||
| Built specifically for trade show / event capture | ||
| Free plan, no credit card required | ||
| SSO / SAML for enterprise login | ||
| SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 certification |
Bigin data sourced from public-facing website and pricing pages as of August 2026.
Which one should your team use?
Exporb is best for
Teams that need to capture and qualify leads at the show, then hand them off clean.
- Works fully offline — no WiFi, no problem on the show floor
- Booth conversation gets recorded, transcribed, and scored automatically
- Reps get a ranked follow-up list (Hot, Warm, Fresh) before they leave the venue
- Exports clean to Salesforce, HubSpot, or your CRM of choice — including Bigin
Bigin is best for
Small businesses that need an affordable CRM to run their day-to-day sales pipeline.
- Multi-stage pipeline and deal management, not just a contact list
- Built-in cloud telephony — call prospects right from the app
- 150+ integrations and the wider Zoho ecosystem if you ever need to scale up
- Priced from $7/user/month with a genuinely usable free edition
Bigin vs Exporb FAQ
More on the main FAQ page.
They are different categories of tool. Bigin (by Zoho CRM) is a pipeline-centric CRM built for small businesses to manage deals, contacts, and customer operations day to day. Exporb is a trade show lead capture app — it records the booth conversation, transcribes it, and scores the lead so a rep knows who to call first after the show. Most teams that use Bigin as their CRM would use Exporb only at the event itself, then push the leads into Bigin afterward.
Not natively. Bigin has a mobile business card scanner, but it has no offline-first capture mode, no badge or QR scanning for event check-in, no booth conversation recording, and no AI conversation analysis. It was not designed for the floor of a trade show — it was designed to run a small business's ongoing sales pipeline.
Yes, and that is the most common real-world setup. Capture and score leads at the show with Exporb, then export as CSV/JSON/ZIP and import into Bigin as your system-of-record CRM. Exporb also pushes directly to Salesforce and HubSpot if that is where your pipeline already lives.
Bigin offers a free edition with no credit card required, plus a paid Express tier around $7 per user per month with annual billing discounts. Exporb's free plan includes 10 AI credits per month with no time limit, and paid plans start at $9/mo.
No. Exporb does not do multi-stage pipeline management, deal tracking, or built-in cloud telephony — those are Bigin's core strengths as a CRM. Exporb's job ends at "capture the lead, score it, and get it into your CRM correctly." If you need to run your whole sales pipeline in one tool, Bigin (or a similar CRM) is still necessary.
Bigin runs on Zoho's infrastructure and documents SSO/SAML support for enterprise plans. Neither Bigin nor Exporb publishes a SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 certification today. Exporb runs on Supabase and Vercel (both SOC 2 Type 2 today), enforces Row-Level Security on every database table, and is scoping its own SOC 2 audit for late 2026.
Because Bigin is a well-known, affordably priced CRM, some buyers researching lead capture options end up comparing it to purpose-built trade show apps. It is a capable small business CRM — it is just not built for the specific problem of capturing and qualifying leads on a noisy show floor with no WiFi.
Try Exporb on your next show.
Free for 7 days, no credit card. The free tier has no time limit.