Entrica vs SwipedOn

If you are reading this, you have probably shortlisted two or three visitor management systems and you are trying to work out which one you would rather be holding on the morning the alarm goes off. SwipedOn is a long-established name in this market and a familiar one in New Zealand, so it turns up on almost every shortlist drawn up here. That makes it worth setting out plainly where Entrica is different.

We should be straight about what this page is. It is our page, on our site, and it leads with the things we do well. We have not tried to write a neutral buyer’s guide, because nobody would believe one published by a vendor. What we have done instead is bind ourselves to a stricter rule: every factual statement about SwipedOn below is taken from something SwipedOn, or Sign In App, publishes about itself, it is linked, and it is dated. Where we could not verify something, the answer says Not published rather than a guess dressed up as a finding.

That matters more than it might sound. Comparative claims about a named competitor sit under the Fair Trading Act 1986, and an inaccurate one is a problem for us, not for them. So the table is short on purpose. It covers the ground we can stand behind.

Entrica is a visitor management system for organisations in New Zealand and Australia. People sign in by scanning a QR code or tapping an NFC tag with their own phone, or through a tablet kiosk at the door; the host is told their visitor has arrived, and the arrival stays on a live on-site list until they sign out. Nothing unusual so far: that is the category. The difference is in where we put the emergency capability and how it behaves once you need it.

Emergency is in the entry plan, not an upgrade. The evacuation list, emergency alerts, mark safe / self-safe, the emergency PDF and the emergency sign-in block are all in Core. We did that deliberately. The live roll is the reason most New Zealand organisations start shopping in the first place, usually after a drill that did not go well, and charging extra for the reason you came is a strange way to run a product.

The roll lives in your account, not on one tablet. The evacuation list is a view of your account that opens in a browser. The warden at the assembly point, the person still at the gate and whoever is on the phone to the fire service are all looking at the same list, and someone ticked off on one screen shows as ticked off on every other screen within seconds. There is no single device that has to survive the evacuation and no reconciling of two half-complete roll calls afterwards.

People can account for themselves. Mark safe and self-safe mean the emergency alert, sent by text or email, carries a link for people on the roll call to mark themselves safe, so a contractor who walked out the back gate can confirm they are clear without waiting for someone to shout their name in a car park. In a large site that is the difference between a roll call that finishes and one that stalls at the last four names.

The door closes behind you. While an emergency event is open, the emergency sign-in block stops new arrivals signing in, at the QR code and at the kiosk alike, which is exactly when a courier is most likely to walk up to an unattended kiosk and add themselves to the list of people you are trying to account for.

Beyond the emergency set, Core covers QR, NFC or tablet kiosk sign-in on one location and one device, sign-out, host search, host email on arrival, a duplicate visit guard, automatic sign-out and activity logging. The Professional plan adds multi-location and multi-device support, pre-registration and CSV import, digital badges, host SMS, roles and permissions, MFA, a blacklist, and company policies and digital signature, the two that matter if visitors have to accept site rules or an induction before they go through the door. The full split by plan is on our features page. If you are still deciding between a printed code and a mounted tablet, we have written up QR code visitor sign-in and tablet kiosk sign-in separately.

There is one thing a New Zealand buyer comparing the two in 2026 should know before signing anything, and it is not our opinion. It comes from the two companies’ own announcement, published on Sign In App’s website. SwipedOn and Sign In App are both part of Sign In Solutions, and the answer given to the question of what the combined product will be called is: “As part of the Sign In Solutions family, SwipedOn will be merging with Sign In App; the new and improved visitor management system will remain under the Sign In App brand.”

They are equally clear that existing customers are looked after. Their own wording is that initially “it’ll be business as usual”, that customers will be moved over to the upgraded platform without needing to download a new app, and that they will be notified in advance. We have no reason to doubt any of that, and we are not suggesting otherwise.

But it does change the question you are answering, and it is already visible from the outside. SwipedOn’s website now takes you to a page on Sign In App’s site that says “SwipedOn is now part of Sign In App”, and its “Free trial” button starts a Sign In App trial rather than a SwipedOn one. The pricing page you would go to in order to compare SwipedOn plans resolves to Sign In App’s Core, Enhanced, Pro and Executive plans instead. And the combined platform both products are heading towards is, in their words, “not live yet”, so whichever of the two you sign up to today, there is a platform upgrade in front of it. That is a perfectly normal thing for two merging products to do. It is just worth knowing that the thing you evaluate and the thing you end up running may not be the same thing. With Entrica there is one product and one roadmap, and the account you open this week is the account you keep.

Whichever system you choose, the duty stays with you. The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 puts a primary duty of care on every PCBU (a person conducting a business or undertaking) to do what is reasonably practicable so that nobody is harmed by the work it carries out, and that duty reaches the courier at the loading dock and the auditor who is in for the afternoon just as much as it reaches employees. Regulations under the Act require a workplace emergency plan with evacuation procedures, a way to communicate with everyone at the workplace during an emergency, and testing of those procedures. Many buildings also sit under an approved evacuation scheme, which adds the owner’s own obligation to run and record trial evacuations.

In practice, that testing comes down to someone standing at the assembly point, roll in hand, working out whether everyone who came in has come back out. That is the job the software has to do, and it is the reason our comparison table is weighted so heavily towards emergency behaviour rather than badge design.

The other half is the Privacy Act 2020. A visitor record is personal information: a name, a phone number or email address, often an employer and a host, and the times someone arrived and left. Collect only what you need, tell people why you are collecting it, keep it secure, set a retention period you can actually apply, and be able to find and correct someone’s record if they ask. We have written all of this up properly, without the sales pitch, on our guide to visitor management systems in New Zealand, and how Entrica handles the records it holds is set out in our privacy policy and on the security page.

You will have noticed the table does not compare cost. That is not coyness, it is accuracy. Entrica does not publish figures yet, and we are not going to put an invented number beside someone else’s real one. A row reading “from $X” against an empty cell would tell you nothing true about either product.

What we can tell you is what each plan contains, which is the part that actually decides whether a quote is good value. That is on features in full, plan by plan, and on pricing. Ask us for a number and you will get one for your actual situation (how many locations, how many devices, whether you need policies signed at the door) rather than a headline rate that turns into something else at checkout.