Boulevard vs Sesami

Boulevard and Sesami both care a lot about how booking feels to the customer. They differ on what the booking is connected to underneath.

Boulevard is a platform for salons, spas and medical aesthetics, known for a polished self-booking experience and for scheduling that understands how those businesses actually run. It covers the front desk as well: check-out, client records, staff and reporting.

Sesami is a modern booking platform for the same businesses: salons, spas, studios, clinics and retailers. The difference is how you get started and what happens once a booking exists. You install it yourself and take bookings the same day, and when you charge for one it settles through the checkout and the counter you already use.

Side by side

	Sesami	Boulevard
Scope	Booking and the commerce around it	Front desk, scheduling and client management
Where customers book	Your storefront, on your domain, in your branding	Boulevard’s booking experience, embedded on your site
Checkout	Your own Shopify checkout, taxes and payment methods	Boulevard’s own payments and front desk
Retail and services	One catalog, one basket, one order	Retail handled inside the platform
In person	Rung up through Shopify POS	Boulevard’s own point of sale
Resources	Staff, rooms and equipment, several per service	Staff and rooms, tuned to salon and spa workflows
Marketing	Events into Klaviyo, webhooks, or your own tools	Built-in client messaging and campaigns
Build on it	Public API, SDK, an app platform, and agent access	API access for integrations
Getting started	Install it yourself and take bookings the same day	Sales conversation, then onboarding

Where Boulevard is the better answer

Boulevard is built for a specific kind of business and it shows. The scheduling logic understands the awkward realities of that work: processing time in the middle of a service, one provider covering two chairs, the difference between a consultation and the treatment it leads to. Generic booking tools tend to handle those badly, and Sesami is a generic booking engine by comparison.

The front desk matters too. If your problem is running a busy reception well, Boulevard covers that ground directly, and Sesami expects your commerce platform to handle it.

Where Sesami is the better answer

If retail is a real part of your revenue, the seam between bookings and products is the thing worth removing. In Sesami they are the same catalog. A client can book a treatment and add the product their stylist recommended to the same basket, pay once, and appear once in your reporting.

Owning the front end is the other difference. The booking experience runs on your domain in your own branding rather than inside a vendor’s embed, and the API and SDK are there if you want to build something entirely your own.

That combination suits brands where the booking is part of a wider relationship: a haircare brand whose salon drives product sales, a skincare label with treatment rooms, a retailer adding services to an existing store.

There is also a difference in kind, not just in scope. The others are software you run your business on, and their APIs exist so other systems can talk to them. Sesami is a platform you build on: the same booking engine the app runs on is public, with an SDK, an app platform, and access for AI agents that can book, reschedule and answer on a customer’s behalf. If you want a booking experience nobody else has, or you expect agents to be doing the booking before long, that is the difference that matters most.

Modern software, and the difference it makes

The clearest difference is one nobody puts on a comparison table. Most of these were built for a world of sales calls, onboarding fees and multi-week implementations, and they still work that way: you book a demo, you get quoted, someone configures it for you.

Sesami installs from the app store. You set up your services and take your first booking the same day, without speaking to anyone. If you outgrow the defaults there is a public API and an SDK underneath, but nothing about getting started requires a developer.

A fair summary

Boulevard is the stronger choice if a full front desk system is what you are shopping for, and you want scheduling logic tuned to that workflow in detail.

Sesami is the stronger choice if you want the same polish for your clients without replacing how you already sell, and would rather set it up yourself than book a call to get started.

Sesami runs deepest on Shopify, where a booking becomes a product in your catalog. It is not limited to it: the Sesami Booking Button embeds in WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow, Framer or plain HTML, and a hosted Sesami page takes bookings and payments on its own. Those are rolling out through early access now.