Filmbot alternatives for independent cinemas

Filmbot describes itself as "ticketing for the new era of independent cinemas". It bundles a customisable website, online ticketing with Apple Pay and Google Pay, an iPad box office for tickets and concessions, a showtimes scheduler, memberships, promotion campaigns based on visit history, gift cards, donations, festival extensions and sales reports. The mobile apps it lists are a ticket scanner app for iOS and Android. Customers named on its site include The Brattle, Nitehawk Cinema and Davis Theater, and it reports 7 million tickets sold.

Filmbot publishes its prices: a $1,250 one-time website setup fee, $1 per ticket sold online, $250 a month for the first box office station and $125 a month for each additional one, and 5% of annual membership sign-ups and renewals. Festival setup is $875.

An all-in-one system is simple on day one. The trade-off is that your website, your ticketing and your counter are all bound to one supplier, and the audience-facing part is only as ambitious as that supplier's roadmap. Filmgrail separates the two: you choose the box office that suits your counter, and Filmgrail owns everything your audience sees.

The biggest difference is the app. A native moviegoer app on the home screen is the one channel that reaches people who were not already planning to visit: a push when a saved film goes on sale, a reminder before a Q&A, a member offer on a quiet Tuesday. Filmgrail includes iOS and Android apps on the same CMS as your website. Around them sit film pages with trailers and structured data built to rank in your town, watchlists and ratings, loyalty, audience analytics, and a checkout built for completion on a phone. Across cinemas on Filmgrail, nine in ten end users create a profile, and the average yearly increase in digital ticket sales is 89%.

The Filmgrail vs Filmbot comparison goes feature by feature.

Filmgrail runs independents and circuits from single-screen town cinemas to Classic Cinemas, a Chicago-area circuit of around sixteen theatres, and festivals such as BIFF.

Pricing is published and scales by screens: from $200 a year for a single screen up to $20,000 a year for a large circuit, flat per screen with no per-ticket fees (see pricing). If we already integrate with your box office, such as Veezi or RTS, you can be live in a few weeks; a new box office integration takes about a month.

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