Kinoheld alternatives: your own site and app, not a slot in a portal

Kinoheld (kinoheld GmbH, Munich) sells online tickets for cinemas through a booking widget embedded in the cinema's own website, and runs a consumer film and cinema portal alongside it. Its operator page cites more than 600 cinemas, integrations with POS systems including Compeso, Ticket International, Cinetixx, Mars and Vista, concession and voucher sales, automatable newsletters, on-site POS terminals and scanners, and states that there are no setup fees and no monthly fees.

For a small German cinema that wants online sales with no fixed cost, that is an attractive offer. The reason cinemas go looking for a Kinoheld alternative is different: a widget and a portal are someone else's product with your programme in it. The moment an operator wants a direct relationship with its audience — its own app on the phone, logged-in customers, loyalty, push, data it controls — it needs channels that belong to the cinema. That is what Filmgrail builds.

A portal that lists many cinemas is built to help a moviegoer decide where to go. That is useful for reach, and structurally it is also a place where your customer can be shown the cinema down the road. A site and app that only sell your programme have the opposite job: every visit, every saved film and every customer record is yours.

That changes what you can do next. With Filmgrail, the moviegoer who saved a film gets a push when it goes on sale. The loyalty member sees their points in your app. You know who your regulars are before they buy, not just after. Across cinemas on Filmgrail, nine in ten end users create a profile, and the average yearly increase in digital ticket sales is 89%.

You also keep the POS you have. Filmgrail reads programme, sessions, seating and prices from the box office and writes each sale back, so your reporting stays whole. See the Filmgrail vs Kinoheld comparison for the side-by-side.

Because the cinemas that grow online are the ones that own the relationship with their audience. Filmgrail runs cinemas from single-screen town halls to Bergen Kino, Trondheim Kino, Ster-Kinekor and Classic Cinemas in the US, each on its own brand.

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). Where we already integrate with your box office you can be live in a few weeks; a box office we have not connected before takes about a month.

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.