Booqable alternative: also suited beyond the rental industry

Booqable is cloud software built specifically for rental businesses: from event rentals to bikes, equipment, boats and more, with more than 8,000 customers worldwide. It's a solid choice if you only do rentals. But anyone wanting to look beyond rentals alone, or looking for an entry price that scales with the size of the business, should put Booqable side by side with ReserveBee.

Three key differences at a glance

What Booqable does well

For a rental business, Booqable is functionally deep. Inventory management supports both individual and bulk items, with barcode/QR scanning, bundles and temporarily sub-renting extra stock. Pricing is flexible per hour, day, week, month, season or weekend, with fixed or percentage-based deposit rules. There's a built-in website builder with 60+ rental themes, a native mobile POS app with barcode scanning, and document management with e-signatures for quotes and contracts. Payments support cards, PayPal, partial payments and Tap to Pay. For a pure rental business, that's a complete package. There are no setup fees and no commission on bookings, and educational and nonprofit organisations get a 20% discount on any plan.

Where ReserveBee makes the difference

That depth is exclusively about rentals: there's no evidence Booqable also supports appointments, classes or staff scheduling. ReserveBee covers both worlds with the same system: objects and bundles work just as well for renting a boat or bike as for scheduling an appointment or event. Cost differs too: Booqable starts at €29 to €35 a month regardless of your revenue, and important features like the website builder (+€19-24/month), mobile POS (+€9-12 per user/month) and extra locations (+€29-37/location/month) stack on top of that. With ReserveBee, all of that is included by default, and you pay from €0 at low volumes. iDEAL, the most widely used payment method in the Netherlands, also isn't explicitly listed as a payment option at Booqable, while ReserveBee offers it by default via Stripe.

A worked pricing example

Say you rent out kayaks and bikes at the coast, with 20 rentals a month during the off-season.

In a quiet month, Booqable still charges the full entry price regardless of how much you actually rent out. ReserveBee costs nothing in that same situation, and the bill only grows once bookings actually come in.

Grow to 120 rentals a month in high season? At Booqable you still pay the same flat amount as in a quiet month, unless you need features like API access and have to move to the Grow plan (roughly €69-87/month). At ReserveBee, that volume on the Professional plan costs €18 a month plus €0.10 per reservation above the first 100, so €20 in total, statistics included.

Switching from Booqable to ReserveBee

Rental businesses switching from Booqable typically bring an extensive stock list with them: items, rates per period and deposit rules. We help you migrate that to objects within ReserveBee for free, including bundles if you combine items into larger rental units. Customer data and ongoing reservations come along too, so nothing changes for your customers. Where Booqable appears to support only a single currency per account, ReserveBee always charges in euros, excluding VAT, with no surprises hidden in the fine print. Prefer to start yourself right away? You can: start a free trial and you're live within minutes.

Personal contact, not just a system

As a Dutch company, ReserveBee runs on European infrastructure, aiming for full GDPR compliance, and you talk directly to the small team that builds the system: questions, feature requests and bug reports go straight to the people actually building the next version. For a rental business that wants to offer more than just rentals, say a guided tour or a workshop alongside the bike rentals, that matters just as much as price: one system for everything, instead of a tool designed exclusively for rentals.

Who should choose ReserveBee?

Do you exclusively rent out items and need specific rental features like extensive barcode-scanning inventory management and e-signature quotes? Booqable is a focused, mature choice. Would you rather start without a fixed minimum cost, combine rentals with other kinds of bookings, or avoid paying separate add-ons for features already included with ReserveBee by default? Then ReserveBee is the broader, more affordable choice. A rental business that also offers guided tours or workshops doesn't need a second system for that part of its offer with ReserveBee. We help you migrate your rental items, rates and customers for free.

Also worth a look: ReserveBee vs Recras or ReserveBee vs SimplyBook.me.