Zenoti vs Sesami

Zenoti and Sesami sit at opposite ends of the same problem. Zenoti wants to run your entire operation. Sesami wants to run the booking and let your existing commerce stack do the rest.

Zenoti is enterprise software for beauty and wellness groups: spas, salons, medical aesthetics, often across many locations. Booking is one module among many, alongside inventory, memberships, staff management, payroll-adjacent reporting and marketing.

Sesami is a modern booking platform for the same businesses. 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, so bookings and sales land in one place rather than two.

Side by side

	Sesami	Zenoti
Scope	Booking and the commerce around it	End-to-end business management
Where customers book	Your storefront, on your domain, in your branding	Zenoti-powered booking pages and apps
Checkout	Your own Shopify checkout, taxes and payment methods	Zenoti’s own payment and billing stack
Retail and services	One catalog, one basket, one order	Retail and inventory as their own modules
In person	Rung up through Shopify POS	Zenoti’s own point of sale
Multiple locations	Separate calendars, staff and hours per site, at any number of sites	Yes, with group-level management
Operations depth	Staff, rooms and equipment as bookable resources	Deeper: rotas, commissions, inventory, memberships
Marketing	Events into Klaviyo, webhooks, or your own tools	Built-in campaigns and CRM
Build on it	Public API, SDK, an app platform, and agent access	Enterprise integrations and a partner API
Typical shape	A brand that sells online and wants bookings in the same store	A group that wants one vendor for the whole operation

Where Zenoti is the better answer

The dividing line is scope, not size. Sesami handles multiple locations at any number of sites, with their own calendars, staff and hours. What Zenoti adds is everything around the booking: commission structures, stock across sites, membership billing, therapist utilisation and group-level operational reporting. Sesami does not attempt most of that, and expects your commerce platform and your existing tools to cover it.

So if the hard problem is running the operation rather than selling the service, Zenoti is built for exactly that. Buying one system that covers all of it is a legitimate strategy: one vendor, one training programme, one support contract.

Where Sesami is the better answer

If you already sell online and your services sit next to products, running two separate systems creates a seam that never quite closes. Two checkouts, two customer records, two sets of reporting, and a monthly reconciliation.

Sesami removes that seam by not being a second system. A booking is a product in the catalog you already maintain. It checks out through the payment methods, taxes, discount codes and gift cards you already have. A client can add a retail item to the same basket. A walk-in can be rung up at the counter and land in the same ledger as an online booking.

It also assumes you want to own the front end. The booking experience is on your domain, in your branding, and you can rebuild it entirely with the API and SDK if the default is not what you want.

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

Zenoti is the stronger choice if operations are your hard problem and you want a single vendor running rotas, stock, commissions and memberships as well as bookings.

Sesami is the stronger choice if you want to be taking bookings this week rather than after an implementation, and would rather keep the commerce, marketing and reporting stack you already have than replace it. That holds at one site or fifty: multi-location is a Premium feature and Enterprise is built for chains and franchises.

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.