Meeting room booking, compared: panels, platforms, QR systems, tablets — and the sheet of paper on the door

Who wrote this: this page is written and maintained by Puresoft Ltd, the maker of Meet Me At Work — one of the products compared below. To keep it honest, every claim about another vendor links to that vendor's own page, and the sections say plainly where each approach — including the others — is the better choice.

All vendor pages, prices and specifications below were checked on 22 August 2026. Prices change; the links are the authority.

For over a decade, IT forums have carried the same question in slightly different words: how do we show meeting-room availability at the door, and let people book, without buying and cabling a screen for every room? The blocker in those threads is rarely software and rarely even price — it is power and network at the doorway. One sysadmin who built a tablet sign put it exactly: "The hardest part was getting electricity to it!"

There are five real answers, and they are genuinely different shapes of solution. This page compares them as shapes first and products second.

1. Purpose-built room panels

Dedicated scheduling displays mounted at each door: Crestron's TSS series, Evoko Naso (now a Biamp product), Yealink RoomPanel, and the certified Microsoft Teams panels category that several of those devices belong to. This is the most polished way to get a glanceable, zero-interaction display on every door — and the most expensive per door, in ways the brochure doesn't total up for you.

PanelHardware (street)Power at the doorRecurring licence
Crestron TSS-770 $870–$1,198 PoE / PoE+ — Crestron's own docs: "Single wire Ethernet connection with PoE or PoE+ power" None for the native app; the $8/device Microsoft licence if run as a Teams panel
Evoko Naso (Biamp) $875 incl. first-year licence PoE (802.3at, 13 W) or a 5 V adapter sold as an accessory — no-PoE installs need a power drop Per-room, per-year platform licence (~$120–$192/room/year street)
Yealink RoomPanel E2 $899 PoE 802.3af or a 12 V adapter (vendor datasheet) The Microsoft licence below, in its primary Teams-panel mode
Any certified Teams panel Hardware from the OEM (the two above, plus Logitech, Neat, Cisco, Poly and others) Microsoft's own deployment guidance: "Panels generally support Power over ethernet plus (PoE+) for power" $8 Shared Space licence per device, or a shared Teams Rooms Pro licence — plus a Microsoft 365 room resource account per room

Add the part no vendor prices: PoE or mains at every doorway. Microsoft's deployment page tells you to "work with your networking, facilities, and audio-visual teams… to make sure each site and meeting space is ready in terms of power and networking". If your doorways already have drops — or you're fitting out a floor and the electricians are coming anyway — this category delivers the best glanceable display there is.

Where panels win: zero-interaction, always-on status visible from down the corridor; deep native Teams/Exchange integration; procurement-grade build quality. If every doorway has PoE and the budget covers roughly $900–$1,300 per door all-in plus licences, a certified panel is the premium answer, and nothing phone-based fully replaces that glanceability.

2. Full workplace-experience platforms

Robin, Envoy, deskbird, OfficeSpace, Condeco (now Eptura Engage), YAROOMS and Skedda sell room booking as part of a wider workplace suite: desk booking, visitor management, floor plans, utilisation analytics. What they publish about pricing, checked on their own pages:

Where the platforms win: if you want desk booking, visitor management, floor plans and utilisation analytics as one system — and you have the headcount to justify per-user or per-suite pricing — these are the right products, and Meet Me At Work is not. We do meeting rooms (and simple hot desks). We do not do visitor management, interactive floor plans, or a workplace analytics suite.

3. Pure QR-code room booking

The direct answer to the forum question: put a code on the door, and the "display" is the phone that scans it. The field is small. The comparable products are Whatspot, Awaio, and our own Meet Me At Work.

Whatspot

Awaio

Meet Me At Work (ours)

The trade, stated plainly: Meet Me At Work's rooms are not Exchange resource mailboxes. With the add-in and Teams tab rolled out this barely shows — a meeting composed in Outlook or Teams is an ordinary Exchange meeting in the organiser's calendar with the invite going out through Exchange, the room books itself when the invite is sent, cancelling the meeting releases the room, and bookings made at the door or in the app mirror back into the organiser's Outlook or Google calendar. The one habit it does not survive: inviting a legacy room resource mailbox from plain Outlook, bypassing the add-in — that books a room we cannot see, so the room's source of truth has to move to one system. If you are determined to keep Exchange resource mailboxes as that source of truth, Awaio's sync-against-the-mailboxes model fits that constraint better. We also offer no zero-interaction door display unless you add a tablet, and Puresoft is a far smaller company than Robin's or Envoy's backers.
Where we win, plainly: the twelve-year blocker — power and network at every doorway — simply does not apply: the door gets a printed code, and the install is done. Pricing is per room with unlimited users, so there are no seat caps to outgrow (the free tier above caps users and monthly bookings), no per-user fees at platform scale, and no unquantified platform fee on top. A visitor or external guest can scan the door and book with nothing but their email — in this field that flow is otherwise gated to a top tier behind admin approval, or requires an account, SSO and an app install. The whole floor's live free/busy state is one glance in the app, which no per-door display answers. And booking rules that Exchange cannot express natively — approve only bookings over a length you set, per-occurrence conflict handling on recurring series — are settings here, not PowerShell workarounds.

4. A cheap tablet in kiosk mode

The perennial DIY answer: a consumer tablet on the door frame running a calendar in a kiosk browser. It works — the forum threads are full of working builds — with three honest costs the first post never mentions: power at the door (the same problem the panels have — and tablets left on PoE or chargers 24/7 are notorious in those same threads for swollen batteries), an enclosure and mounting, and upkeep of a fleet of consumer devices doing a job they weren't built for. Battery e-ink signs solve the cabling and then move the cost into a subscription — one widely-reported renewal jumped from $500 to $3,000 a year for seven signs.

Used sparingly — one tablet on the two or three rooms that genuinely need a glanceable display, phones for everything else — it is a perfectly rational hybrid. Any room-status web page (ours included) can be shown this way without special hardware.

5. The printed schedule taped to the door

The actual incumbent in most offices, and the thing the very first of those forum threads was trying to kill in 2014: "Do you schedule meetings at 9:00AM for the afternoon, only to see the room you have properly scheduled be occupied at your meeting time by someone who looked at the paper, not the outlook schedule?" Paper's failure is structural: it is a snapshot of a calendar that keeps changing, it cannot take a booking, and it is authoritative-looking enough that people trust it over the live system. Free, and worth exactly what it costs.

The comparison in one table

  Purpose-built panel Workplace platform QR booking Tablet kiosk Paper
Typical cost per door ~$900–$1,300 hardware + install; often a per-device or per-room licence Per user or per suite; displays extra (BYO tablet + add-on, or vendor hardware) £0–£20/room/month; the sign is a printout or a few euros Tablet + enclosure + mount (~$100–$300) + power ~£0
Power & cabling at the door PoE/PoE+ or mains required Required for any display option None Required (and hard on tablet batteries) None
Glanceable status without touching anything Yes — the category's whole case Yes, where displays are deployed One door: no. The whole floor: the app shows every room's live state at once Yes, one door per tablet Stale within the hour
Book while standing at the door Yes, on the panel Varies by display Yes — scan, see the live calendar, book on your phone Yes, on the tablet No
Desk booking / visitors / analytics suite No Yes — the category's whole case Limited (simple hot desks at most) No No

How to choose