Both will take a party booking. The difference is what the rest of the product is built around — and what you end up paying for.
The short version: XEPOS is an EPOS company. Their soft play product sits inside a till system, alongside retail, hospitality and a long list of other trades. nuvelo is the other way round: bookings, parties, deposits and the day itself, and deliberately not a till. If you want one supplier for the register and the diary, that is a real argument for them. If your till is fine and your problem is the diary, you would be buying a lot of software you already own.
Because we do less — on purpose. A till is a big, expensive thing to build and support: cash drawers, receipt printers, card terminals, stock, staff clock-ins, retail. We build none of it, so we are cheaper than a system that does, and our cheapest plan is genuinely a starting point rather than a stripped one. That is the whole trade: if the missing till matters to you, we are the wrong choice and we would rather say so on this page than three weeks into an evaluation.
It is worth noticing how much of the soft play market is shaped this way. Most of the named options in the category lead with an EPOS and add bookings to it, which is why the booking half so often feels like a module rather than the product. We started at the other end.
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 you need the till too — a proper register on the front desk, a card terminal, a café or shop with stock to count, one supplier and one support line for all of it. That is a genuine advantage and we are not competing for it. We work alongside your till; we do not replace it.
They are also the safer pick if buying software as a package with hardware and on-site setup is how your centre prefers to buy. We are self-serve: you sign up, you set it up, we help by email.
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 around a till or around restaurants. 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 is shaped rather than quoting their figures — prices change, and a stale number on our site is no use to you. We have also deliberately made no claim about XEPOS's commission or hardware costs, because their soft play page states neither, and we are not going to guess at a rival's pricing. Check their current terms on their own site before you decide.