A plain guide to the category, including the parts that make products in it fail, and the questions worth asking before you commit your contact details to one.
A digital business card is a version of your contact details that lives on a phone instead of on paper. You share it with a link, a QR code or a wallet pass; the other person saves you in one action; and because it is hosted rather than printed, you can change your number, job or company later and every copy already shared updates itself. No reprinting, and nothing to throw away.
All three end in the same place. They differ in how much the other person has to do.
The plainest version, and the most reliable. Your card has an address, such as cardr.co/yourname. Send it in a message, put it in your email signature, read it out loud. It works on every phone and every operating system, and there is nothing to scan or align.
The same address, encoded as a square. The other person points their camera at your screen and taps the notification. This is the one that works across a table or a counter, and it needs no contact between the phones. Every modern iPhone and Android camera reads QR codes natively, with no app.
The strongest version on iPhone. Your card is issued as a signed .pkpass file, the same format Apple uses for boarding passes, and it lives in the Apple Wallet app rather than in a browser tab. It opens with no signal, it does not get lost in a photo roll, and it can update itself when your details change. This is the part the Apple Wallet page covers in detail.
You can also buy a physical card or tag with a chip in it that opens your address when tapped. It is a genuinely nice object. It is also entirely optional, and it is the same digital card underneath. If you already own one, point it at your address and carry on.
Nobody loses a deal because their business card was ugly. They lose it because the follow-up never got sent. Every product in this category, including ours, will give you a good looking card in five minutes. Almost none of them help with the Thursday three days later, when you have nine names in your camera roll and no memory of which one said they were re-tendering in March.
In rough order of how much it will affect whether you keep using it.
Four products compared with their own published prices.
Explainer Apple Wallet business cardsWhat a signed pass is and why it updates itself.
Free tool vCard QR code generatorMake a scannable contact QR code. No signup, no email.
Pricing What Cardr costsFree forever for the card, £12 a month for the follow-up.
A digital business card is a shareable version of your contact details that lives on a phone rather than on paper. Instead of handing someone a printed card, you share a link, a QR code or a wallet pass. The person receiving it saves you to their contacts in one action, and because the card is hosted rather than printed, you can change your details later without reprinting anything.
For keeping details current, yes, clearly: a printed card is wrong the moment you change job, number or company, and a digital one can be corrected everywhere at once. For the moment of handover, paper still has one advantage, which is that it needs no phone, no signal and no explanation. The best digital cards are the ones that get as close to that as possible, which is why the ones that require the other person to install an app tend to fail.
No. NFC is one way to trigger a digital business card, but a QR code, a link sent in a message, or an Apple Wallet pass all work without any hardware at all. NFC cards are a nice object to own, and if you already have one you can point it at your card’s address, but nothing about a digital business card requires you to buy anything physical.
The good ones do. If your card is a web page, the other person just opens a link. If it is an Apple Wallet pass, it goes into an app Apple already installed on their phone and cannot be deleted. Cards that require the recipient to download the vendor’s app lose most people at exactly the moment they were paying attention.
Often, at least partly. Cardr is free forever for the full card. HiHello has a free Personal plan capped at five scans a month, and Blinq lists a free tier, both as published on 4 August 2026. Popl does not publish pricing we could verify. Watch for the cap rather than the headline: several free tiers limit the number of contacts you can collect, which is the part that matters.
Name, role, company, one phone number and one email, plus whichever links you actually want used, such as a booking link, WhatsApp, LinkedIn or a review link. Resist listing everything. The card is read in about four seconds while someone is standing up, so the fewer decisions it asks for, the more likely the one you care about gets tapped.
Free forever, about a minute to build, and nothing for the other person to install.