Alternative To BookWhen

BookingNinja is a full venue, restaurant, bar, activity centre and soft play booking management platform with integrated CRM, marketing tools, website tools, powerful capacity management and more. BookWhen is more like a ticketing platform that can used to take regular bookings.

If all you need is to sell tickets, BookWhen are cool. Like BookingNinja, they are transparent with pricing and they are not taking a cut. We believe we're better of course, but we encourage you to check out the features of both. 

But online booking is more than just selling tickets for most businesses. Modern need to manage a busy, dynamic venue that can keep up with quick changes, walk ins, automatic party bookings, exclusive hire and more, and that's where we come in.

The "Simple" BookWhen Customer Experience

BookWhen's slogan is "The Online Booking System that keeps things simple."

But because BookWhen lacks a lot of features and settings, the actual booking experience for customers is often a mess of different buttons, unclear instructions, and rules they have to follow to compensate for this.

Things that should be shown in stages all get thrown onto a single, confusing page, leading to text like this:

An Adult Ticket Is A Requirement To Accompany A Child Ticket: Each attending adult must have a purchased adult ticket to reserve a seat. Ticket Availability Limitation: If an adult and child ticket cannot be selected during the booking process, it indicates insufficient tickets are available, and no table will be reserved" and "You MUST book an adult ticket before booking child places or entry will not be possible. If adult tickets are fully booked, please select a different time slot.

You don't want your customers reading riddles or doing maths homework to book.

Why do your customers need to learn how your booking software works? On BookingNinja, you simply select the guests. We'll tell a customer if something is wrong, but we won't give every single customer an instruction manual the minute they arrive on the booking page, it's a bad experience.

And you'll see this all the time. How does it feel to use BookWhen for this venue, where every single booking has to have multiple identical options because BookWhen can't really book anyone to a table, and you have to click endlessly down to see different days? Or for this one, where the page offers nearly 20 different types of booking, all at once, in a massive list?

Now visit some of our BookingNinja online booking forms, which you can find here. Which are more appealing, friendly and simple to use? 

Is BookWhen Cheaper Than BookingNinja?

The BookWhen Gold plan is £39.99, and is roughly comparable with our standard plan, which is £49.95. However, our prices are inclusive of VAT, so the real BookWhen price is actually closer to £47.99, around the same price as BookingNinja.

While our gold plan is more, it also offers way more features, including payment links for managing bookings, a vastly superior booking view and filtering options, hundreds more options and a more modern design with searchable options.

Both BookingNina and BookWhen don't charge you for payments beyond the regular bank fee. However, BookWhen limit team members, bookings and booking pages across all their plans, so as you grow, you will have to start paying them more. BookingNinja offers unlimited bookings, unlimited team members and unlimited booking pages, on all our paid plans, for life.

BookWhen has no table management

Because BookWhen is really a ticketed platform, it has no ability to manage customer capacity beyond just ticket numbers. You can book people to tables, but only if you sell tickets as tables, it's not really checking availability live.

BookingNinja has full, powerful table management that can used with regular bookings or to book people to events. Even if you don't use table management yet, will you introduce a café in the future, or want to book parties to tables one day? If so, you'll have to find new booking software later.

Free Demo vs. Free Plan

BookWhen and BookingNinja can be both used for free. Very few booking software actually does this - most hide behind sales teams before you pay them - so we encourage you to not take our word for anything and check us both out. 

However, keep in mind that while BookWhen offer a free trial for two weeks, we offer a full free plan that has all the features of our paid standard account but limits bookings. BookWhen also have a free plan that limits bookings, but it disables just about every major feature, so it's not really a viable options for most businesses.

Sign up to BookingNinja today!