These two are aimed at the same job. Two differences show up in practice: what a booking costs you, and whose name is on it.
The short version: BookingNinja is an established booking platform for soft play and activity venues, and a fair comparison — it is aimed squarely at the job we are aimed at, unlike a repurposed class booker or an EPOS till. The differences that matter are structural rather than featural: their published paid tiers take a percentage of every booking on top of the monthly fee, and removing their branding from the flow your guests see is a higher-tier feature. nuvelo charges a flat monthly price, takes nothing per booking on any plan, and never puts our name in front of your customers.
A transaction fee 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 cut is the part you feel in August. Do the arithmetic on your own numbers rather than ours: take your busiest month's bookings, apply their percentage, and add it to the monthly. That total is the honest comparison, and on a busy soft play it is usually not close — the card processor's own fee sits on top of it either way.
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.
This is the one people notice after they have signed up. On their entry tier, their branding stays on the guest-facing flow — removing it means moving up a tier. We think that has it backwards: the parent booking a birthday party is your customer, and the booking page is part of your shopfront. Your venue's name, your colours and your logo are on every nuvelo page and every email, on every plan, and there is no tier where that changes. The only trace of us is a small "powered by nuvelo" line, and your guests are not asked to make an account with us.
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 →
They do things we do not. Staff rota and scheduling is the clearest one — if you want your team's shifts in the same system as your diary, they have it and we do not. If that is on your list, it is a good reason to pick them.
They also have years of venues and bookings behind them, and we do not. That is worth something real: a longer track record, a support team, and published performance figures from actual trading. We are early, and if you would rather buy from an established supplier than an early one, that is a completely reasonable way to choose.
nuvelo is early, and soft play is where we are focusing first. 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 and what each tier includes, rather than quoting their figures — prices and tiers change, and a stale number on our site is no use to you. Check their current pricing and plan features on their own site, do the sum on your own booking volume, and decide from that rather than from us.