Comparison
A Sesami alternative for venues that sell places, not appointments
Sesami is the most enterprise-leaning booking platform on the Shopify App Store, built around resources on an appointment calendar and strong on retail and POS. CapFlow Booking is built around one number instead: how many places are left in the session.
Sesami details checked againsttheir Shopify App Store listingon 19 August 2026. Pricing and features change, so check the listing before you decide.
Sesami asks who is available at 14:00. CapFlow Booking asks how many places are left at 14:00.
Those are two different jobs, not two grades of the same one. If the scarce thing in your business is a person's diary, you want Sesami. If the scarce thing is a count, 18 bench spaces, 12 seats, 24 mats, then everything below follows from that count being something you can divide: part promised to pass holders, part on public sale, the unclaimed part handed back before the session starts. Read the rest of this page with that split in mind rather than as a feature race, because on feature count Sesami wins and neither of us gains anything from pretending otherwise.
Pick CapFlow Booking if
Your product is a session with a fixed number of places, and the same session is sold to members on a pass and to walk-up customers at full price. You want a member pool that releases to the public before the session starts, clip cards that decrement, and flat pricing that does not jump when you turn group booking on.
Pick Sesami if
You book time with named people, you sell in-store through Shopify POS, or you need Google Calendar sync and customer self-rescheduling. Sesami has all three, has 259 reviews behind it, and offers an SDK and Hydrogen support that CapFlow does not.
Where CapFlow Booking is genuinely stronger
These all follow from treating a session as a count of places rather than a diary. Where a bullet cites a Sesami plan or price you can check it against their listing. Where it says something is not described there, that is exactly what it means: an absence from the listing, not proof of an absence in the product. The atomic hold is a claim about CapFlow, and the free plan is the cheapest way to test it.
- Several customers in one session on every plan, including the free one. Sesami lists Group appointment on the $129 Pro tier and above.
- A member pool inside the timeslot: reserve part of the capacity for pass holders, sell the rest publicly, and release the unclaimed member places to the public a set number of hours before the start. Not described on the Sesami listing.
- Annual passes, monthly passes and clip cards that decrement, recognised from Shopify customer tags. Not described on the Sesami listing.
- An atomic hold on the last place, so two customers who reach checkout at the same time cannot both take it.
- A free plan with no time limit, for a single resource and 50 bookings a month. Sesami has a 30-day trial and no free tier.
- A price that does not move when you turn group booking on. $39/month is the top of the CapFlow range whatever you sell; Sesami is $19, $129 and $299, priced by number of resources.
Side by side
| CapFlow Booking | Sesami | |
|---|---|---|
| What the model is built around | A resource with a capacity: a room, a boat, a wall, a cable. Places sell down from that number. | Multi-resource scheduling covering staff and rooms, on an appointment calendar. |
| Several customers in one session | The core model, on every plan including the free one. | Listed as Group appointment, gated to the Pro plan at $129/month and above. |
| Member pool with auto-release | Split each timeslot into a member pool and a public pool. Unclaimed member places release to the public a set number of hours before the start. On Pro, $39/month. | Not described on the App Store listing. |
| Passes and clip cards | Annual passes, monthly passes and clip cards, recognised from Shopify customer tags. On Pro, $39/month. | Not described on the App Store listing. |
| Entry price | Free plan with no time limit, then $19/month and $39/month. | From $19/month, no free plan, 30-day free trial. Tiers are $19, $129 and $299, priced by number of resources. |
| Customer rescheduling | No, and not from the admin either. There is no reschedule function at all: a booking has to be cancelled and rebooked. Customers can cancel themselves. | Yes, listed as Customer rescheduling and cancellation, on the $129 Pro plan and above. |
| Google Calendar sync | No. | Yes, listed on the $19 Small plan. |
| Shopify POS | No. | Yes. POS is a headline part of the listing. |
| Where the customer pays | The native Shopify checkout, always. | The native Shopify checkout by default, plus an Instant Booking mode, on all tiers, which lets customers book without going through the standard Shopify checkout flow. |
| Track record | Live since May 2026. No App Store reviews yet. | 4.6 stars from 259 reviews. |
Sesami can hold a count too
It is worth being exact about this, because it is the one place a comparison page would be tempted to cheat. Sesami schedules rooms as resources, not only staff, so it can absolutely cap a session at 18. What its listing does not describe is treating that 18 as something you divide and re-release. That is the distinction, and it is narrower than “appointments versus capacity” makes it sound.
Where Sesami is genuinely stronger
Sesami has been on the App Store for years, has 259 reviews behind it, and has built out in directions CapFlow has not touched. Its POS support means a booking taken at the till behaves like a booking taken online. It syncs to Google Calendar from the cheapest paid tier, which matters enormously if your staff live in their calendar. It has an SDK, an API and Hydrogen support, so a custom storefront is a real option. And on the $129 Pro plan it lets customers reschedule themselves, which is the single most common support request any booking business gets.
CapFlow has none of that. The full list of what is missing is further down this page.
Where the models actually diverge
The interesting case is the venue that sells one session to two different kinds of customer.
A public sauna sells the Thursday 18:00 löyly to locals on an annual pass and to visitors paying at the door. Both are booking the same 18 bench spaces. If you let the pass holders take all 18 in January, your walk-up revenue disappears. If you let the public take all 18, your pass holders start to feel the pass is worthless and they do not renew.
CapFlow’s answer is a capacity pool: hold 10 of the 18 for pass holders, put 8 on public sale, and release any unclaimed member places to the public four hours before the session. The session fills, the pass keeps its promise, and neither group crowds out the other. That mechanism is what the app is for, and it is not something the Sesami listing describes.
Pricing shape
Both apps start at $19. They diverge in what makes the price go up.
Sesami prices by resource count and puts group appointments and customer rescheduling behind the $129 Pro tier. So a small venue that needs several people in one slot, which is most venues of this type, is a $129 customer on day one rather than a $19 one.
CapFlow prices by feature depth: free for a single resource and 50 bookings a month, $19 for unlimited resources and bookings with analytics and check-in, $39 once you need capacity pools, memberships and events. Nothing scales with how much you sell.
Neither shape is inherently fairer. They just suit different businesses, and it is worth doing the arithmetic on your own numbers rather than on the headline price.
Check it yourself
Everything above about Sesami was read off their Shopify App Store listing on 19 August 2026, plus their own help documentation for the Instant Booking description. App Store pricing and features change without notice. If you find something here that is out of date, tell us and it will be corrected.
What CapFlow Booking does not do
If any of these is a hard requirement for you, Sesami is the better buy today, and we would rather you knew that now than after you installed.
- No Google Calendar or Outlook sync. Sesami syncs to Google from its cheapest paid tier.
- No rescheduling at all, by the customer or by your staff. A booking cannot be moved to another time; it has to be cancelled and rebooked. Customers can at least cancel themselves, from the link in the confirmation email, under whatever window you set.
- No Shopify POS integration, so a booking taken at the counter has to be entered in the admin.
- No waitlist for sold-out sessions.
- No SMS notifications. Email only, so a customer who does not read email does not hear from you.
- No deposits or partial payments. The full amount is taken at checkout. Passes and clip cards are the nearest thing CapFlow has: a pass holder has already paid before they book, which removes the reason for a deposit rather than supporting one.
- No custom booking questions, so intake data such as a waiver or a shoe size has to be collected somewhere else.
- No SDK, no Hydrogen support and no public API. The widget is a theme app extension for Liquid themes.
- No App Store reviews yet. Sesami has 259. If social proof is how you pick software, that gap is real and it is not one we can argue away.
Common questions
Sesami has group appointments. Is that not the same as capacity?
It is the same idea, but the two apps put the number in different places. A group appointment is one appointment that several people join. A CapFlow timeslot is a container of places that sells down: some reserved for members, some public, with an atomic hold on the last one so two customers at checkout cannot both take it. If you only need several people in one slot, Sesami covers it, at $129/month. If you need to split those places between a member pool and a public pool and release the leftovers before the session, that is what CapFlow is for.
Does CapFlow keep me in the Shopify checkout when Sesami does not?
Not quite, and it would be unfair to say so. Sesami runs through the native Shopify checkout by default. What it also offers, on every tier, is an Instant Booking mode that deliberately skips the standard Shopify checkout flow so customers can book faster. CapFlow has no equivalent mode: every booking goes into the Shopify cart and out through your checkout. That is a difference in philosophy, not a difference in capability.
Sesami costs $129 for group booking. Is CapFlow really cheaper?
For this specific shape of business, yes. Capacity pools, memberships and events sit on the $39/month Pro plan, and plain capacity-limited timeslots work on the free plan. But compare like with like: at $129 Sesami also gives you 20 resources, customer rescheduling, Klaviyo and branding removal. If you want that list, the price is doing real work.
Can I migrate my existing Sesami bookings?
There is no import tool. In practice venues switch at a season boundary: they stop selling new sessions in the old app, let the existing bookings run out, and open the next season in the new one. If you have thousands of bookings in flight, plan for that rather than a same-day cutover.
Which one should I pick if I run a spa with treatment rooms?
Sesami. A treatment room is booked by one customer at a time and the scarce thing is the therapist, which is exactly the model it is built for. CapFlow only makes sense when the same session holds many people at once.
Run both for a week
CapFlow Booking has a free plan with no time limit, so you can point one product page at it and see whether capacity-first booking fits how your venue actually sells.
Install free on Shopify