Room Flow, the
sovereign alternative to Joan
Joan approaches the meeting room through the door display: beautiful e-paper screens, billed per device. Room Flow approaches it through the calendar: bookings live in your Zimbra/CalDAV, with no dedicated hardware to buy, power or maintain.
What Joan does well
Understated, highly readable e-paper room displays, simple installation and understandable per-device pricing — a real hardware achievement for door-of-room signage.
The Joan pricing model, in figures
Figures from 22 July 2026: Essentials at 4,99 € per device per month, Professional at 9,99 €, Enterprise at 19,99 € — billed annually. Cost tracks the number of installed screens: equipping one more room means one more device and one more subscription. At the scale of a floor, the bill stays moderate; across an entire site, it mechanically follows every equipped door — regardless of how many people actually book.
A concrete example
Based on these figures, 10 equipped rooms cost at least 49,90 €/month on Essentials — for the display alone. With Room Flow, the number of rooms never enters the invoice: 5 users and 1 administrator pay 40 CHF (≈ 43 €) per month, whether there are 3 or 30 rooms behind them.
Calculate for your headcountFour criteria that matter.
| Criterion | Joan | Room Flow |
|---|---|---|
| Where your bookings live | On the vendor's servers (cloud SaaS). | In your Zimbra/CalDAV calendars and on your workstations — the vendor has no access to them. |
| Working without internet | Cloud service: a connection is required. | Yes: the licence is verified locally via a signed certificate; the app works offline. |
| Pricing unit | Per device: from €4.99 to €19.99 per display per month depending on the edition (billed annually). | Per person: €5 per user, €15 per administrator per month (excl. VAT) — unlimited rooms, equipment and resources. |
| GDPR compliance | Contractual: a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR), since your booking data is hosted by the vendor. | Architectural: booking data is not collected by the vendor — there is nothing to outsource. |
Positioning and public prices of Joan recorded on 22 July 2026; they change — check them on the vendor's site before any decision. A factual comparison with no intent to disparage, to be reviewed by a lawyer before publication.
The model's limits
- The business model is tied to hardware: every covered room implies a device, its subscription and its life cycle (battery, failure, replacement).
- Booking relies on the vendor's cloud, to which your calendars are connected.
- Annual per-device billing: the invoice tracks your fleet of screens, not your actual usage.
When Joan remains a good choice
If your primary need is an elegant, self-contained door display — seeing at a glance whether the room is free — Joan's e-paper screens remain a benchmark of the genre.
Migrating from Joan
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Step 1
Separate display from booking: Room Flow handles the latter in your calendars; it does not sell door screens and does not claim to.
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Step 2
Your rooms connected to Joan are already calendars: those same Zimbra/CalDAV calendars become the single source, with no cloud intermediary.
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Step 3
The “devices” budget drops out of the equation: the invoice depends only on the people who book.
Your bookings stay with you
Schedules, attendees and bookings live in your Zimbra/CalDAV calendars and on your workstations — not with the vendor, not in a foreign cloud subject to extraterritorial laws.
The network goes down, your bookings don't
The licence is a signed certificate verified locally: the app keeps working without a connection, network outage included.
A lean, auditable client
No trackers, no embedded analytics, no CDN: what the app does can be verified — nothing has to be taken on faith.