COMPESO alternatives: a better front end on the POS you trust

COMPESO is an owner-managed cinema software company founded in 1984 in Ismaning, rooted in Germany and in use across Europe. Its CineOrder generation covers the POS, a webshop, a cinema app and self-order kiosks, plus vouchers, a bonus programme, signage, a marketing hub, email automation, dashboards, film scheduling, in-seat ordering, stock control and multi-site management.

That is a complete operational suite, and in German-speaking exhibition it is often simply what the cinema runs. When a COMPESO cinema looks for an alternative, the question is rarely the till. It is whether the audience-facing side — the website, the app, the content, the data — should come from the POS supplier or from a product built only for that job.

For a POS supplier, the webshop and app sit alongside the till, the stock system and the film booking. For Filmgrail, they are the entire product. That shows in the parts a moviegoer judges you on: an editorial website with its own CMS, film pages built to rank for a film in your town, native apps with push and loyalty, a checkout measured on completion rate, and audience analytics that tell you who your moviegoers are. Across cinemas on Filmgrail, nine in ten end users create a profile, and the average yearly increase in digital ticket sales is 89%.

It also keeps your options open. Because Filmgrail sits above the box office, your website and apps do not have to change if your POS ever does. The COMPESO integration page shows exactly what moves between the two systems.

Because the online sale is now the biggest box office most cinemas have, and it deserves a product built for nothing else. Filmgrail runs cinemas and festivals from small town cinemas to Bergen Kino, Trondheim Kino and Ster-Kinekor.

Pricing is published and scales by screens: from $200 a year for a single screen to $20,000 a year for a large circuit, flat per screen with no per-ticket fees (see pricing). Because we already integrate with COMPESO, you can be live in a few weeks.

See it before you talk to anyone: the cinema website prototype tool builds a version of your own site from its current URL. Then book a demo against your real programme.