Lobby vs the alternatives.

Joan makes excellent e-ink meeting room displays. Their hardware is genuinely beautiful, and the software works well across many calendar systems. If you need visitor management, desk booking, parking reservations, and a full workplace management suite, Joan is worth considering.

But if you're a 20-person company who just wants to know which meeting room is free, Joan will charge you $400–600 per room in hardware, plus a monthly subscription, and likely a sales conversation before you can even buy.

Lobby does the meeting room display part. At a fraction of the price. Without the rest of the platform you probably don't need yet.

Robin is an enterprise workplace platform. It starts at $419/month. If you're a 200-person company that needs desk booking, visitor management, and occupancy analytics, Robin may be right for you.

If you're a 20–50 person team that needs to stop the meeting room chaos, Robin is like hiring a facilities management company to fix a squeaky door. Lobby fixes the door.

SyncSign makes e-ink displays with Google Calendar support. The hardware is functional and the software pricing is very reasonable. However, SyncSign's setup experience is complex (you need a separate hub device), the design language is dated, and their onboarding requires considerably more technical effort than Lobby's.

If you're comfortable setting up a hub, configuring network addresses, and don't mind a utilitarian look, SyncSign works. Lobby is for teams who want a polished experience out of the box.

Meeting Room 365 is a software-only product at $9/display/month. It runs on any browser or tablet you already have, meaning you supply the screen. Its strength is that it's Microsoft 365 native (it's their whole pitch). Its weakness is that there's no purpose-built hardware option. If you want an always-on, glare-free display beside every meeting room, you're on your own for the device.

Lobby gives you both. If you want virtual, open the URL on any browser, tablet, or TV. Same idea as Meeting Room 365, included at no extra cost on every paid plan and up to 3 displays on Free. If you want purpose-built hardware, add TRMNL e-ink displays and mount them beside the door. Either way, the same dashboard.

On top of that, Lobby has a room overview display: one screen showing every room at once, for lobbies and kitchens. Meeting Room 365 doesn't have an equivalent view.

Lobby now matches Meeting Room 365 on Microsoft 365 support, and gives you a polished e-ink hardware option Meeting Room 365 doesn't have.