HAkiosk vs Kiosk Pro for Event Booths: An Honest iPad Comparison
If you are choosing an iPad kiosk app for a booth, you will find these two quickly: Kiosk Pro, which has been the default answer on iOS for over a decade, and HAkiosk, which is newer, cheaper and does less.
I build HAkiosk, so read this with that in mind. I have tried to write the comparison I would want if I were the one buying — including the several cases where the honest answer is "buy Kiosk Pro". A booth display that fails at 10 a.m. on day one is a worse outcome for both of us than a sale I talked you into.
All Kiosk Pro prices and features below are from Kiosk Group's own pricing and feature pages, checked in August 2026. Confirm anything decision-critical with the vendor before you buy — pricing and tiers change, and mine is not the version of their product you should trust.
The one question that decides it
Does your booth display have to keep working when the network dies?
If yes, buy Kiosk Pro Basic or higher. It stores files locally on the iPad, so your content lives on the device and a dead hall network cannot take it down.
HAkiosk cannot do that. It fetches your URL live, every time. There is no cached copy, no bundled content and no local fallback page. If the network drops mid-show, the display shows a "Failed to load webpage" screen, and it does not retry on its own — you or Fleet Control have to trigger a reload.
That is the whole decision for a lot of exhibitors, and it is the first thing to settle. Everything below assumes your content is a live URL you can reach — a lead form, a hosted page, a demo dashboard, a product catalogue on your own site.
Price and licensing, side by side
| HAkiosk | Kiosk Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | iPadOS/iOS and Android, one workspace | iPadOS/iOS only |
| Licensing | One-time purchase, no subscription | Lite $5/month per device; Basic $24.99, Plus $49.99, Enterprise $99.99 — one-time per device |
| Remote management | Fleet Control, included | Remote Management Server, $149/year per device, Plus and Enterprise only |
| Store files offline | No | Basic and higher |
| Volume purchasing | App Store / Apple Business Manager | App Store / Apple Business Manager |
The App Store shows HAkiosk's current price — I have deliberately not printed a number here, because a price I quote in a blog post is a price that goes stale.
The structural difference is the recurring line. Ten booth iPads with remote management on Kiosk Pro is $1,490 a year, every year, on top of the licences. On HAkiosk the remote layer is part of the app.
What Kiosk Pro does that HAkiosk does not
This is the honest list, and it is not short.
Store content offline. Basic and up. The single biggest one for trade shows.
Refresh when idle. Lite and up: return to the home page after a set period of inactivity. HAkiosk has no idle reset and no timed refresh at all. If an attendee leaves your form half-filled and walks away, HAkiosk sits on that half-filled form until someone swipes in and refreshes, or you refresh it remotely. This is a real gap for an unattended booth, and it is on our list.
Capture visitor data to a local .csv via their JavaScript API, Basic and up — useful if you want lead capture that survives with no connection.
A media screensaver / attract loop built from images and video, Plus and up. HAkiosk's screensaver is a clock on a black screen, or a dimmed screen. It is designed for a quiet hallway at home, not for pulling people into a booth. For a booth you should turn it off entirely.
PDF display control, AirPrint printing, barcode scanners, external displays, iBeacon — Basic through Enterprise depending on which. HAkiosk has none of this.
Four tiers and a decade of edge cases. If your booth setup has a specific requirement, Kiosk Pro has probably met it before.
What HAkiosk does that Kiosk Pro does not
It runs on Android too, in the same workspace. Most booths run whatever hardware was available. iPads and Android tablets appear side by side in one Fleet Control dashboard. Kiosk Pro is iOS only.
Remote control is included, not a per-device annual fee. Sign in at hakiosk.com/control on your phone, pair the tablet once with a code or a QR scan, and from then on you can push a new URL, change zoom, toggle dark mode, trigger a refresh, wake the screen, or pull a live screenshot of what the booth display is showing right now.
That last one is the feature I would actually sell to an exhibitor: you can be across the hall in a meeting and check that the booth screen still shows what it is supposed to. You can also change the URL between show days without walking back to the stand.
Setup is one field. Install, swipe in from the left, type a URL, set a PIN, turn on the lock. There is no configuration profile, no developer account, no MDM enrolment and no tier to choose. For a booth being assembled the night before, that matters more than a feature list.
The lock re-arms itself. HAkiosk's PIN gates the settings swipe, and turning on "Lock this device" engages iOS Guided Access automatically. If iOS drops the Guided Access session while the iPad sits idle, HAkiosk requests it again when the app comes back to the foreground. Over a three-day show that is the difference between a locked display and an open iPad.
One setup order matters, and people get it wrong: turn Guided Access on with a passcode in iOS Settings → Accessibility → Guided Access first, then set the PIN in HAkiosk, then switch on "Lock this device". Without the Guided Access passcode set, the lock cannot engage — the app tells you and offers a shortcut to the right iOS screen.
The rest of HAkiosk's limits, in one place
I would rather you find these here than at your booth.
- No offline mode, no local files, no fallback page, as above.
- No timed auto-refresh and no idle reset. If your content updates on its own, the page has to refresh itself in its own JavaScript. A one-line meta refresh tag handles it.
- Thin black bars down the left and right edges on iPhone and iPad. The app applies a 10-point margin on both sides unconditionally. It is a bug, it is on the list, and you will notice it if your design is full-bleed. Everything else is genuinely full screen: no status bar, no browser chrome, no address bar.
- The Android build has features iOS does not — screen pinning, home-launcher mode, auto-start after a reboot and MQTT control. If those matter, that side of the fence is Android.
So which one should you buy?
Buy Kiosk Pro if your content must survive a dead network, if you need printing, scanners or local lead capture, or if you are running an unattended kiosk that has to reset itself between visitors. Basic at $24.99 covers most of that; the $149/year remote service is only worth it above a handful of devices.
Buy HAkiosk if your display is a live URL, you want the remote control included rather than rented, you have a mix of iPads and Android tablets, or you are setting this up tonight and want it working before you go to bed.
Use iOS Guided Access alone if you have one iPad, zero budget and one day to cover. It is free and already on the device. You just cannot change the URL without unlocking it, and Safari's chrome stays on screen unless you save the page to the home screen first.
If you go the HAkiosk route, the part that actually decides whether your booth display survives is the network, not the app — there is a full booth network plan, and a five-minute setup walkthrough, in Best iPad Kiosk App for Exhibitions and Trade Shows. Read the network section twice.
Search HAkiosk on the App Store — one word, no space. Questions, or something here that did not match what you saw? Write to me at hakiosk.com/support. I answer, including when the answer is "the other one is a better fit for you".