Chobble Tickets vs Whizzly

Open source & flat fee Whizzly alternative

Whizzly and Chobble Tickets earn their money the same way: a subscription paid by the business, with no commission on sales. Whizzly charges 0% platform commission on every plan. Chobble Tickets takes no per-ticket fee, and buyers pay the organiser's own Stripe, Square or SumUp account.

The subscriptions differ in shape. Whizzly splits its tools across two plans and around thirty powerup add-ons costing £1.49 to £9.99 a month, with metered AI tokens and WhatsApp message credits. Chobble Tickets includes every current feature in one prepaid price, with no add-on charges and no metered usage.

Chobble Tickets is open source: the complete product is published under the AGPL-3.0-only licence, and the same code can be run on the organiser's own infrastructure with no Chobble software fee. Whizzly is proprietary software, and its terms reserve all platform intellectual property for Whizzly Ltd.

A booking diary or a ticketed event

Whizzly's booking tools are built around a salon-style diary. Each service has a duration, and Whizzly inserts cleanup buffers of 10 to 30 minutes between appointments. The diary syncs two ways with Google, Apple and Outlook calendars, so personal blocks and lunch breaks close bookable slots. One client books one slot, pays a deposit, and receives reminders by WhatsApp and email.

Chobble Tickets is built for listings with a date and a capacity, from workshops and gigs to classes and hire bookings. Attendees buy tickets, receive a QR code and are scanned in at the door, and a booking uses capacity only when its payment is confirmed.

The platforms overlap for organisers selling places in sessions. A studio running group classes could sell them on either platform, and so could a tutor or a club. The diary tools suit one-to-one work, and the ticket tools suit anything with a door and a headcount.

Pricing comparison

Whizzly's pricing page and terms list the following prices, checked on 24 October 2026. Fees are billed in pounds and include VAT.

Both plans include unlimited products, services and menu items, 0% commission, Stripe payouts, a whizzly.co.uk subdomain, white-label storefronts, promo codes, embeddable widgets and automated booking reminders. Pro adds all 30+ powerups, 1,000 monthly AI tokens, 1,000 WhatsApp message credits and priority support from the UK team.

On Starter, the booking tools that Pro includes cost extra each month: deposit protection at £9.99, two-way calendar sync at £4.99, client intake forms at £2.99 and digital loyalty stamp cards at £2.99. Extra store locations cost £9.99 a month each on Pro, and AI token top-ups start at £2.99 per 1,000.

A 14-day free trial of Pro needs no card. Subscriptions renew automatically each billing cycle until cancelled, and fees are non-refundable for partial or unused periods.

Managed hosting costs £50 a year or £5 a month. Charities, community groups, artists and musicians pay £25/year on the annual plan.

On annual billing, Whizzly Starter costs £45.88 more than a year of Chobble's managed hosting, and Pro costs £189.88 more. On monthly billing, a Starter subscription with the deposit add-on comes to £19.98 a month, or £239.76 a year, which is 12 pence below Pro's annual price.

Interactive cost calculator

Drag the sliders to see how costs compare at different volumes:

Payment processing

Whizzly takes no commission and does not hold the money. Card payments run through Stripe Connect into the merchant's own Stripe account, paid out on Stripe's normal schedule. Stripe charges its processing fee directly, at 1.5% + 20p for standard UK cards according to Whizzly's pricing FAQ, with more for premium and international cards. Cash on collection and bank transfer are also supported.

Refunds are the merchant's job. The terms make each merchant responsible for customer service, returns, refunds, cancellations and disputes, in line with the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

On Chobble Tickets, buyers pay the organiser's own Stripe, Square or SumUp account, and that provider's normal rates apply on top of the hosting price. Refunds are issued from the admin panel against the original payment.

Deposits and no-shows

Whizzly's headline booking feature is the upfront deposit. A fixed amount or a percentage is set per service, and the client pays it through Apple Pay or Google Pay when booking. The deposit is deducted from the final bill, and the remaining balance is collected in the chair through a QR code payment. Whizzly's pricing page names the feature "Upfront Non-Refundable Deposit Protection".

Chobble Tickets takes deposits in three forms: a percentage of the order, a flat amount per order, or an amount per item. A booking uses capacity only when the deposit payment is confirmed. The outstanding balance is tracked in a ledger, and the customer receives a secure link to pay it online.

Feature comparison

Whizzly is built for independent service, retail and food businesses that sell through one storefront. Chobble Tickets is built for organisers who sell tickets to their own audience. The lists below cover what each platform's own pages document.

Both platforms share some features

• Online booking with card payments
• Unlimited services, products or events
• Upfront deposits with the balance collected later
• Discount codes and promotional pricing
• Custom questions on the booking form
• Email confirmations after booking
• White-label pages with no platform branding
• An embeddable booking widget for an existing website
• Exports of customer and order data
• 0% commission, with card payments going into your own account

Whizzly has features Chobble Tickets doesn't

• Two-way calendar sync: Google, Apple and Outlook calendars block bookable slots in real time. Chobble Tickets publishes an ICS feed of its events for attendees but does not read the organiser's calendar
• WhatsApp messaging: booking alerts, automated client reminders, cart recovery and marketing campaigns to customers who opted in. Chobble sends email through the organiser's chosen provider and text messages from an Android phone, and has no WhatsApp integration
• AI tools: a photo price-list scanner, a description writer, a 24/7 storefront chatbot and win-back drafting, all metered by tokens, with 1,000 a month on Pro and paid top-ups on Starter
• Per-staff schedules: clients pick a named team member or first available, each with their own working hours. Chobble has team logins and scanner permissions but no per-person booking calendars
• Digital loyalty stamp cards: stamps collected in the customer's phone browser
• In-person payments: counter mode and a QR payment terminal running on a phone or tablet. Chobble Tickets processes payments through the organiser's own provider and has no built-in terminal
• Retail and food ordering: product variants with stock levels, postage rules, click and collect, delivery radius gates, table QR ordering and kitchen dockets
• Advertising integrations: Google Analytics, Meta and TikTok pixels, Mailchimp sync and an automated Google review collector

Chobble Tickets has features Whizzly doesn't

• Event capacity and QR check-in: listings with a date and a capacity, QR tickets scanned at the door, per-place check-in counting and scanner logins for volunteers. Whizzly books one client per time slot and documents no door check-in
• Apple and Google Wallet passes
• Your own domain: the ticketing site runs at an address the organiser chooses. Whizzly storefronts sit at a whizzly.co.uk subdomain
• A public website: content pages, news posts and a contact form beside the booking pages. Whizzly provides the storefront
• Encrypted attendee data: names, emails and free-text answers are encrypted with the organiser's key, so a copy of the database alone does not reveal them. Whizzly encrypts its databases at rest with AES-256, and as processor it can read the customer data it stores
• Admin API and webhooks: other software can create, edit and delete events and read attendee records. Whizzly names APIs in its terms but publishes no API documentation
• A complete database backup and catalogue export: the full database downloads on demand, and event setup exports as versioned JSON another Chobble Tickets host can import
• Open source and self-hosting: the source is published and the same product can be run by the organiser

Data ownership

Whizzly's privacy policy makes each merchant the data controller for their storefront customers and Whizzly a data processor acting on the merchant's instructions. It records customer names, email addresses, WhatsApp numbers, delivery addresses, allergy instructions, order and appointment details, loyalty balances and marketing opt-ins.

The same policy lists the sub-processors involved: Google Firebase and Cloud Firestore, Stripe, PayPal, Meta's WhatsApp Cloud API, Google Cloud and its Gemini AI, Google Analytics, Meta and TikTok advertising pixels, and Resend for email. Several process data in the United States under Standard Contractual Clauses.

Storefront customer data is retained for the lifetime of the merchant's active account unless anonymisation is requested. Merchant account data is kept for 30 days after cancellation, and financial records for seven years to meet HMRC requirements. Merchants can download a complete JSON archive of their account and store data from the dashboard, and customers can ask a store for a copy of their data or its deletion.

With Chobble Tickets, attendee data is encrypted at rest. The organiser downloads a complete database backup, exports attendee records as CSV and moves event setup between hosts as versioned JSON. Chobble's income comes from the hosting fee organisers pay, and attendees receive no marketing from the platform.

Ending a paid term

Whizzly subscriptions renew automatically each billing cycle until cancelled. Cancellation takes one click in the dashboard or the Stripe customer portal, and the storefront stays live until the end of the period already paid for. Subscription fees and one-off booster purchases are non-refundable.

After cancellation, or when a trial ends without a paid plan, the storefront is deactivated. Catalogue and customer data is kept for 30 days to allow renewal or CSV export, after which Whizzly may delete it permanently.

Chobble Tickets is prepaid: a term is paid for in advance, no card is stored, and nothing renews on its own. When a term ends without renewal, the site switches to read-only mode for 24 months, during which every record and export stays available while new bookings stop. Paying again during that window restarts the site without charge for the read-only months, and after the 24 months the site and its database are deleted.

When Whizzly might be the better choice

• You run a diary-based service business where clients book one slot at a time
• You want two-way calendar sync, automated WhatsApp reminders and deposit protection built around appointments
• You sell products or takeaway food alongside your services and want one storefront for all three
• You want AI tools that build a service list from a photo of a price list
• You want in-person QR payments without renting a card terminal

When Chobble Tickets might be the better choice

• You sell tickets to events with a date and a capacity, and check people in at the door
• You want the booking site at your own web address, with information pages and news
• You want attendee names and contact details encrypted with your own key
• You need an API and webhooks to connect your own systems
• You want a price that does not renew automatically, and 24 months to retrieve data after a term ends
• You want to read the source code, or run the platform yourself

How the software is built

The marks on Whizzly's public pages point to software built quickly with AI assistance. Its blog posts carry bylines such as "Whizzly Product & Commerce Team", the terms had reached version 4.3 and the privacy policy version 3.3 by October 2026, and the accept-bookings page's live demo buttons link to http://lashes-by-leona.localhost:3000, a local development address left on the published page (checked 24 October 2026). No status page, changelog or engineering documentation appears in the site's sitemap.

Whizzly's pages ship Firebase code to the browser, which connects directly to the platform's Cloud Firestore database, and the privacy policy says tenant data is isolated by Firestore security rules keyed to each merchant's Firebase account.

None of this shows a defect. It shows how the software was made and how new it is, which is worth weighing when a platform takes deposits and holds a booking calendar. The guide to non-vibe-coded ticket sales systems sets out the risks unreviewed code brings to payment and availability logic, and how to check for them.

Who runs Whizzly?

Whizzly is provided by Whizzly Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales on 4 August 2026 under company number 17380895. Its registered office is Starkie Chambers, Lancaster Road, Preston, Lancashire. The company's blog describes the product as engineered in Preston by Brian Revie, founder of the software company Expressive Media, alongside Brian Smith and John King, and says the project began during the 2020 lockdown.

The company registered in 2026, and this review found no independent record of the product operating before then.

Chobble Tickets is run by Chobble, a community interest company registered in the United Kingdom. That structure keeps the company's assets for community benefit and bars payments to shareholders.

Sources

All Whizzly pages were checked on 24 October 2026. Prices and features change, so read the linked pages before choosing a service.

• Whizzly accept-bookings page - deposits, buffers, calendar sync and WhatsApp alerts
• Whizzly pricing - plans, add-on prices, AI tokens and the Stripe card rate
• Whizzly features - the feature directory
• Whizzly terms of service - company details, commission policy, billing, cancellation and data retention
• Whizzly privacy policy - controller and processor roles, sub-processors, retention and exports
• Whizzly homepage - subdomains, white label and marketplace positioning
• Whizzly founding blog post - the Preston and Expressive Media background
• Whizzly sitemap - the full page list, checked for status and documentation pages
• Whizzly Ltd on Companies House
• Chobble Tickets pricing and limits
• Chobble Tickets features