Both take bookings and payments online. The difference that shows up on your bank statement is how each one gets paid.
The short version: Baluu is a broad booking platform — classes, courses, events and sessions across a lot of different businesses. nuvelo does a narrower job for hospitality and soft play: sessions, parties, deposits and the day itself. The structural difference is the pricing model. Baluu's published plans charge a monthly fee plus a commission on every paid booking, with a minimum fee per booking, and card processing on top of that. nuvelo charges a flat monthly price and nothing per booking, on every plan.
A percentage is easy to wave through when you read it and expensive when you live with it, because it grows exactly when you are busiest. The monthly fee is the part you compare; the per-booking cut is the part you feel in August. Worth doing the arithmetic on your own numbers rather than ours: take your busiest month's bookings, apply their percentage and their minimum fee per booking, and add it to the monthly. That total is the honest comparison, and on a busy soft play it is usually not close.
There is a second-order effect too. A cut per booking quietly argues against the things you should be doing — a members' scheme, a school-holiday push, taking the party deposit online instead of over the phone. Anything that creates more bookings costs you more. We would rather not be in that position with you.
That is usually the real blocker, not the software. Your future bookings, your guest book and any gift vouchers still out there come across with you — we do it by hand, at no charge, and nothing switches until you have signed in and seen your own diary sitting in it. How switching works →
Pick them if your business is classes and courses rather than a venue — multi-week terms, recurring class registers, hybrid or online events, a timetable of instructors. That is what they are built around and we are not: we assume you have a room, a floor plan and a Saturday to fill.
Their free tier is also a genuinely reasonable place to start if you are taking a handful of bookings a month, where a percentage of very little is less than any monthly fee. The maths turns against it as you grow, but it is a fair way in.
nuvelo is early, and soft play is where we are focusing first — it is the part of the market we think is worst served by systems designed for restaurants or for classes. Our first ten venues get every feature at the Pro price, locked for as long as they stay, and we ask nothing in return.
The demo has a soft play centre in it — sessions running, age bands, a party already booked. Ten minutes will tell you more than we can here.
This is our own comparison, so read it as such. We have described how each product charges rather than quoting their figures — prices change, and a stale number on our site is no use to you. Baluu publish their plans and commission rates on their own site; check their current pricing there, do the sum on your own booking volume, and decide from that rather than from us.