Guestmate vs FuneralGuestbook: what each one costs, and who each one is for
Guestmate is $75 a month and we're $149. At one iPad they're cheaper, at three we are, and the reason is a pricing model rather than a feature list. Here's the arithmetic and the honest split.
Guestmate publishes $75 a month. We publish $149. If that were the whole story this would be a short page and you’d be reading theirs.
It isn’t the whole story, because the two prices are built differently: Guestmate charges per device, we charge per location. Which of us is cheaper depends on a number you already know — how many iPads go out at a busy visitation.
We make FuneralGuestbook, so weigh this accordingly. Everything below about Guestmate is quoted from their own site, read in August 2026.
The arithmetic
Guestmate’s own words: “You’ll need a mobile device license for each device connected to your account,” and “Additional mobile devices are $50 per device per month.”
| iPads at one funeral home | Guestmate Basic | FuneralGuestbook |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $75/mo | $149/mo |
| 2 | $125/mo | $149/mo |
| 3 | $175/mo | $149/mo |
| 4 | $225/mo | $149/mo |
Guestmate is cheaper at one device and at two. We’re cheaper at three and beyond, and the gap widens from there. Their Enhanced plan is $100/month and adds embedding recent services on your website; the per-device charge applies the same way.
If you put out one stand and that’s it, twelve months of Guestmate is $900 against $1,788 of ours — or $1,499 if you pay us annually. They publish no annual rate, so that’s their monthly price times twelve. Either way the difference is real money and no feature list should be allowed to obscure it.
What Guestmate does well
They publish their prices. Of the five digital funeral guestbook systems we could find, only two publish a full price list and Guestmate is one of them. If you have ever tried to comparison-shop this category on a weeknight, you know what that’s worth.
It’s lean on purpose. One iPad, unlimited events, export to CSV or XLS, export to Avery address labels. It does the core job — guests sign, you get a list — without a lot of surface area to learn. For a funeral home that wants exactly that and nothing else, more product is not automatically better product.
Bring your own hardware. They’ve “tested extensively with Apple iPads to be used for the kiosk,” and you supply the iPad and the stand. If you already have an iPad in a drawer, that’s real.
What’s different here
The handwriting is transcribed, not photographed. Guests sign with a stylus or a finger the way they’d sign a paper register, and what comes back is structured contact detail — name, phone, email, mailing address — rather than an image of a page. That difference shows up in the week after the service, when someone would otherwise be squinting at a signature to work out whether it says Erikson or Frikson.
It works with no signal. Offline mode with auto-sync, so a chapel with a dead spot isn’t a problem you discover on a Saturday. Guestmate makes no offline claim on their site either way.
The price doesn’t move with iPad count. That’s the table above, and it’s the main structural difference between us.
Address labels for thank-you cards. Both of us export to Avery sheets — theirs is a headline feature on their cheapest plan, and it’s one of the things they got right early.
Count the iPads at your busiest visitation
Not your average one. That single number settles most of this page.
At one or two, Guestmate is the better buy — plainly, and we’d rather say it than have you work it out after signing with us. At $75 a month it is the cheapest published price in the category, it does the job it says it does, and paying us $149 to solve a problem you don’t have would be a waste of your money.
At three or more the arithmetic flips, and it keeps going the same direction with every stand you add.
Two things sit outside the count and can override it either way. One is your building: if a chapel has a dead spot, or you’ve moved a service to a hall with Wi-Fi nobody can log into, ask both of us what happens when the iPad has no signal for an entire visitation. The other is what you want back on Monday — a typed list you can mail from, or a set of files somebody still has to read through.
Every price and quotation here was read from the named vendor’s own published pages in August 2026. This category changes; if something has gone out of date, tell us and we’ll correct it.
The funeral.link Team