BoothHQ is the software I built to run a convention end to end. Not one piece of it — the whole thing. Floor plans, booth and sponsorship sales, payments, conference sessions, the attendee experience, and the reporting that tells an organizer whether the show actually made money. It's one platform where trade show and expo teams do the work they used to spread across five disconnected tools. We describe it plainly on the site as an event operating system, and that's the honest version of what it is: the system a show runs on.
Why it exists
Running a large trade show is a logistics problem disguised as an event. Someone has to draw the floor, number every booth, sell those booths, take the money, chase the contracts, keep the exhibitor list straight, program the conference sessions, and then hand attendees something that helps them navigate the hall. For years the teams doing that job stitched it together — a CAD file for the floor plan, a spreadsheet for sales, a separate invoicing tool, another vendor for the mobile app, and email for everything in between.
That gap is the whole reason BoothHQ exists. When your floor plan lives in one place and your sales pipeline lives in another, they drift out of sync, and the person who pays for that is the organizer standing on the show floor trying to rebook next year's space in real time. I wanted a single product where selling a booth updates the floor, where taking a payment updates the report, and where nobody has to reconcile two systems at midnight. The pitch is simple: run your entire convention from one platform.
What's in it
The platform is a suite of modules that are built to work together rather than integrate after the fact. The ones organizers lean on most:
Floor Builder
Interactive floor plan software with no CAD required. It's drag-and-drop — you create, combine, split, and customize booths, and stands snap into place for alignment, with arrow keys or exact X/Y coordinates for fine-tuning. A few things I care about here:
Max Fit compliance. You can upload a Max Fit floor plan, and the system automatically compares your live layout against it to keep booth placement and numbering within the venue's standards.
An audit view. Instead of hunting for the one mislabeled booth, the built-in audit report flags sizing, placement, and numbering discrepancies instantly.
Real-time collaboration. Multiple team members work on the same floor at once, changes are visible to everyone immediately, and you can lock booths temporarily or permanently so nothing gets moved by accident or gets reserved for a key exhibitor.
Different views for different people. Attendees see wayfinding — restrooms, meeting rooms, food courts. Exhibitors see the strategic detail: columns, entrances, and utility locations. And you can export print-ready plans, or push DXF and PDF drawings straight to your general service contractor.
Booth & Sponsorship Sales
This is where the floor plan turns into revenue. Exhibitors can view available spaces by size, compare pricing, self-select a booth directly off the live floor plan, and complete the transaction themselves. Applications collect everything you need — space selections, competitor and partner lists, booth preferences. Sponsorships and on-platform advertising are sold the same way, from banner placements to product spotlights and package upgrades that extend an exhibitor's presence across the directory, the interactive floor plan, and the mobile app.
Payments happen on the platform through invoicing and credit card processing, with a wide range of payment processors supported. And because it's all one system, the reporting is live: you see the entire pipeline from application to signed contract to collected payment, pull sales reports, send invoices, and issue collection notices without leaving the tool. One of the features I'm most attached to is onsite rebooking — securing next year's commitments while the exhibitor is still standing in this year's booth.
Conference, attendees, and the rest
Beyond the show floor, BoothHQ handles conference management from call-for-papers through schedules and session promotion, an attendee planner for building agendas and connecting with exhibitors, an exhibitor resource center that gives exhibitors one portal for their listings, deadlines, and materials, a searchable exhibitor directory, and analytics with live dashboards, custom reports, and API access. There's a services layer too — on-platform advertising, onsite booth renewal, onboarding and training, and integrations.
How it's built to work
The design principle underneath all of it is that these aren't separate apps bolted together — they share one data model. Selling a booth updates the floor. Taking a payment updates the report. Segmenting exhibitors by company type, product category, booth size, or sales status lets you send targeted communications from inside the same platform that holds the sale. That's the difference between a bundle and an operating system, and it's the line I've tried to stay on the right side of the whole time.
We also lean on AI where it earns its place — exhibitor lead scoring, attendee personalization, and matching — rather than as a label. Some of that is shipping; some of it, like the Sales Accelerator lead-intelligence tool and the AI Engagement matching product, is on the roadmap for 2026 and running as pilots. I'd rather tell you what's live and what's coming than blur the two.
Where it stands
What I'm proudest of isn't any single number — it's that show directors describe it as operationally sound and easy to use, and that the hard, unglamorous parts (pulling a report, sending an invoice, adjusting a floor plan mid-show) come down to a few clicks. That's the job. A convention platform succeeds when the people running the event stop thinking about the software and get to think about the event. BoothHQ is a product of The Web Design Hub, and it's still growing in the same direction it started: one platform, everything a show needs, nothing an organizer has to reconcile by hand.