When you compare audio tour software for museums, you quickly arrive at the same question: which choices determine how much work the tour will require later? Seven areas make the difference. Languages and translation management, branding, GPS, statistics, rights management, payments and who can update the tour later. Go through them before requesting a demo, and you will know exactly what to ask in every conversation.
How many languages can you support, and who manages the translations?
For museums, multilingual support is rarely an optional extra. German day visitors, a school class with students who speak other languages, an English-speaking group: they may all arrive in the same week. The first question is therefore how many languages a platform supports. The second question is more interesting: who manages the translation afterwards?
Automatic translation gets you up and running quickly. But museums have their own terminology. A gallery name, a donor, the title of a work. If you cannot adjust that translation yourself, you are stuck with the machine’s choice. So ask every provider about two points: can you still edit a translated text manually, and does that change remain when you later edit the source text?
Wandrz automatically translates tours into more than 30 languages and lets you edit those translations. The voice follows too: text-to-speech with AI voices in all selected languages, so you do not need to arrange a voice actor for each language.
Does the tour stay in your own branding?
Visitors enter the tour from your entrance. If an unfamiliar logo and an unknown colour then appear on the screen, the experience is disrupted. When comparing options, look at what you can actually set yourself: colours, logo and typography. Also check whether this applies throughout the tour or only on the start screen.
With Wandrz, the tour fully matches your organisation’s own branding. The story remains that of the museum, not the supplier.
Does the tour play itself at the location?
GPS triggers start a fragment automatically as soon as someone reaches the right spot. For a city walk or outdoor route, this saves visitors from searching for numbers. Inside a museum, the situation is different, as the building and the layout of your galleries determine what works.
Ask each provider how fragments can be started and whether you can place and move the triggers yourself. With Wandrz, GPS triggers play fragments automatically at the location.
Which statistics do you get back?
A tour that is live tells you something. How many people started, where do they stop, which language is chosen most often? Those figures help you with the next version: shorten a fragment, give a gallery a better introduction or add a language.
So look at what you can see in the management environment and whether you can export those figures for an annual report or grant application. Wandrz includes management and statistics in the platform.
What about rights, and the rights to your materials?
A tour contains plenty of material from other people. A photographer’s image, an excerpt from an archive, music under an introduction. Two questions belong in every comparison conversation.
First: can you record where each item came from and which rights apply to it, so you can later check what you may use and from whom? Then there is the question that often gets overlooked: who owns the tour if you switch to another supplier? Ask about the texts, audio files and translations.
Can you sell a tour?
Some museums offer the tour free of charge as part of the admission ticket. Others sell it separately or offer a free sample followed by paid content. If payment needs to be an option, include it in your selection criteria: which payment methods does the platform support, can you offer individual tours or bundles, and how does the money reach you?
Wandrz includes payments as part of the platform.
Who can update the tour next year?
This criterion is overlooked most often, yet it can create the most work or the most convenience over time. A tour is never finished. A new gallery is added, a text turns out to be too long or an exhibition changes.
Ask yourself who will make that change. If the answer is “the supplier”, every update joins the queue and appears on the invoice. If the answer is “a colleague from the public engagement department”, you can fix something in an afternoon. So ask who can log in, whether you can give access to multiple people and whether someone without a technical background can replace a fragment.
Wandrz is an online platform for creating your own tours: galleries, objects, text, images and video. Without technical hassle and without depending on someone else for every change.
How to put the comparison on paper
Create a table with these seven areas in the left-hand column and your providers across the top. Fill it in during the demo, not afterwards. Two things help: have an employee who will manage the tour later join the conversation, and ask for an existing tour from a similar organisation instead of only a presentation.
One final tip about the order. First set the criteria that are non-negotiable for your museum, usually languages and management, and only then compare the rest. Otherwise, you may choose based on a feature you never use.
Want to know how Wandrz performs on these seven points for your museum? Request a demo and bring your own gallery list.
