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.

One honest note on calendars: Joan supports Microsoft 365 today; Lobby doesn't yet. Microsoft 365 / Outlook support is coming soon on our side — for now, Lobby is Google Workspace only.

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.

The one thing Meeting Room 365 does that Lobby doesn't — yet — is Microsoft 365. Ours is coming soon.