Top Salon Scheduling Software Compared: Features, Pricing and Key Differences

Top Scheduling Software Compared: Head-to-Head Feature Breakdown

If you run a salon or a day spa and you are shopping for scheduling software right now, the hard part is not finding options. There are dozens, and most of them will take a booking, send a reminder, and hold a card. The hard part is that the platforms are priced on completely different logic, so two systems that look almost identical on a feature grid can be several thousand dollars apart over a year, depending on how many chairs you have and where your new clients come from. This is a large and growing trade, which is part of why the software market around it is so crowded. Federal labor projections have employment of barbers, hairstylists, and cosmetologists growing 7 percent between 2025 and 2035, off a base of roughly 670,800 jobs.

We compared eight platforms that salon and spa owners actually shortlist, and we have written every entry to the same template so the comparison is like-for-like.

How This Comparison Was Put Together

We started from the pages that currently rank for salon and spa scheduling queries and pulled out every vendor that appeared on more than one of them, then removed the tools that are general-purpose calendar apps with a beauty landing page attached. What was left is the eight platforms below.

For each one we did the same three things. We opened the vendor's own pricing page and recorded the published numbers, including per-user charges, per-location charges and card processing rates, because those are the figures that move the annual total. We recorded the current Capterra rating and the review count, as plain text, so you can see how much evidence sits behind each score. Then we identified one limitation for every platform, including the one we placed first.

We did not accept "contact us for pricing" as an answer, and no vendor paid for placement or for a particular position in the list. Ratings and prices were checked in September 2026 and they do change, so treat them as a starting point rather than a quote.

The Eight Platforms At A Glance

1. Bookeo

Best for: salons and spas that want a predictable flat monthly bill and industry-specific scheduling rather than a percentage of every booking.

If you are comparing these eight platforms on cost, this is the one where the pricing structure is the main argument. Bookeo prices on staff count and on monthly booking volume, so the bill does not move when you have a good month, and the software vendor does not take a commission out of a booking; card processing runs through Stripe, Square, or PayPal at those providers' own published rates. The appointments product is also one of three separate products (the other two are built for classes and for tours and activities), which is a different design decision from the single general-purpose system that most of this category ships.

Key features

• Real-time booking through a widget embedded in your existing site, or a standalone branded booking page if you do not have one
• Staff assigned to specific services with working hours set per staff member and per location, plus calendar sync with Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook and Office 365
• Deposits, full prepayment or a card held on file, with automatic email and text reminders and online rescheduling
• Client database with intake forms, prepaid packages, memberships and gift vouchers, and digital waivers as a paid add-on

Pricing: five tiers, quoted on the US pricing page as Solo at $14.95, Small at $29.95, Standard at $39.95, Large at $79.95, and X-Large at $119.95 a month. The tiers run from 1 consultant and 200 bookings a month up to 60 consultants and 3,000 bookings a month. Digital waivers are an add-on at $9 to $249 a month depending on volume, and text credits are $0.09 each. The free trial is 30 days with no credit card required.

Rating: 4.3 on Capterra from 103 reviews.

Where it falls short: multi-branch businesses are handled through a portal in which customers search for a branch or centre and then book with that individual branch, and each branch is a standalone account that controls its own schedule, staff, customer database, sales reports and statistics. Data is not shared between branches. Each branch has its own customers, its own members and its own gift vouchers, so a voucher bought at one branch can only be redeemed at that branch. The portal manager can go into each sub-account's backend and pull portal reports (booking summaries and a revenue summary) for each sub-account, but if you are expecting one combined customer list across five sites, that is not the model. The review base is also small next to the platforms further down this list, which is worth knowing when you are reading scores.

2. Mangomint

Best for: salons and spas with a front desk and a full-service menu that want one system running the floor rather than a calendar and a till kept separately.

Mangomint is built on the assumption that you have a front desk and somebody standing at it. Pricing is $120 a month as a base fee plus $10 per user, so the smallest realistic monthly bill is $130, and the bill rises with headcount rather than with bookings. What you get for that is a system intended to run the whole floor rather than only the calendar, which includes point of sale, retail and inventory, forms and charting, and staff management.

Key features

• Calendar, online booking, Express Booking and a virtual waiting room for walk-ins and gaps
• Point of sale with retail and inventory, gift cards, memberships and packages
• Forms and charting, client management and web chat
• Staff management, reporting and multi-location support in the base plan

Pricing: $120 a month base plus $10 per user, with additional locations at $120 a month each. Add-ons are priced separately, including phone at $70 a month per line, marketing from $30 a month, and payroll at $50 a month plus $8 per worker. Card processing is 2.45 percent plus 15 cents in person and 2.90 percent plus 30 cents for virtual transactions. A free trial account is available.

Rating: 5.0 on Capterra from 344 reviews.

Where it falls short: the cost floor. A three-stylist salon is at $150 a month before a single add-on, and a solo operator is paying for a front-desk system that will not be used. The reporting and inventory depth is real, but it is depth you have to be big enough to need.

3. Boulevard

Best for: multi-location salons, spas and medspas that need per-location control, per-location reporting and treatment-side depth.

Boulevard is priced and reported per location, and that is the design assumption underneath the whole product rather than an option that has been added on afterwards. The tiers escalate on the number of professionals and on the volume of texts and email blasts included. It appears on medspa shortlists about as often as it appears on salon shortlists, which is a reasonable signal about where the product depth actually sits.

Key features

• Per-location scheduling, reporting, and staff permissions
• Client messaging with included text and email allowances that scale by tier
• Forms as a paid add-on for intake and consent, which matters for treatment-led businesses
• Integrations including QuickBooks as a paid add-on

Pricing: Essentials is $176 a month per location, or $140 with annual billing, and covers up to 5 professionals with 100 texts, 500 email blasts, and 25 GB of storage. Premier is $293, or $234 annually, and lifts that to unlimited professionals, 250 texts, and 1,000 email blasts. Prestige is $410, or $328 annually, and adds the forms add-on with 2,500 texts and 10,000 email blasts. Enterprise pricing is quoted on request. Forms is $65 a month; QuickBooks is $45 a month.

Rating: 4.6 on Capterra from 389 reviews.

Where it falls short: the price. Two locations on Essentials is $280 a month at least, and the entry tier stops at 5 professionals, which many two-site salons will pass quickly. Card processing rates are not published on the pricing page, so you will have to ask for them before you can compare the real cost against the platforms that do publish.

4. GlossGenius

Best for: solo stylists and small teams that want one flat price with card processing included in it.

Solo stylists and small teams are the audience here, and the pricing reflects that. The Standard plan is $24 a month billed annually and includes the booking site, client notifications, email and text marketing, inventory and retail, and packages and memberships, with card processing at a flat 2.6 percent. For a one-chair business, that is a straightforward number to plan against.

Key features

• Custom booking website with unlimited client notifications
• Email and text marketing included from the entry plan
• Inventory, retail, packages and memberships
• Forms and waivers, Google booking, automated waitlist, and room and resource management from the Gold plan

Pricing: Standard is $24 a month, Gold is $48 a month, and Platinum is $148 a month, all billed annually. Medspa plans are separate at $148 and $248 a month. Card processing is a flat 2.6 percent with no extra charge for tap-to-pay or card on file; instant payouts cost 1.8 percent, and the payroll add-on is $40 a month plus $6 a seat. The free trial is 14 days with no credit card.

Rating: 4.8 on Capterra from 349 reviews.

Where it falls short: the features a spa needs are not on the cheap plan. Room and resource management, automated waitlist, and forms and waivers all start on Gold at $48 a month, which is double the headline price. If you are a hair salon, the Standard plan may well be enough; if you have treatment rooms, it probably is not.

5. Fresha

Best for: salons that want marketplace demand and are willing to pay a commission for the new clients that marketplace sends them.

With Fresha, the subscription price is not the figure that decides what you pay in a year. Fresha charges $19.95 a month for an independent professional and $14.95 per team member per month for a team, which is genuinely low, and it then takes a 20 percent one-time commission on every new client who books through the Fresha marketplace, with a minimum fee of $6 per client, while returning clients are free. That commission is a customer acquisition channel with a price attached to it, and our view is that it gets misread as free software more often than any other pricing arrangement in this category.

Key features

• Marketplace exposure to consumers searching for salons in your area
• Subscription priced per team member rather than per location
• Card processing built in, with buy now pay later available through Klarna
• Optional add-ons for loyalty, insights, review generation, and an AI concierge

Pricing: Independent is $19.95 a month, Team is $14.95 per team member a month, and enterprise pricing is quoted on request. The new-client marketplace commission is 20 percent with a $6 minimum per client. Online card payments are 2.79 percent plus $0.20; in-person payments are 2.29 percent plus $0.20 with an extra 10 cents for tap-to-pay, and manual card entry is 3.30 percent plus $0.20. Add-ons include client loyalty at $59.95 a month per location, insights at $9.95 per bookable team member, and an AI concierge at $99.95 a month per location.

Rating: 4.8 on Capterra from 1,447 reviews.

Where it falls short: the commission is charged on new clients, which means the cost of the platform rises exactly when the business is growing. If most of your new bookings already come from your own site, your own social accounts or word of mouth, you are paying a marketplace rate for demand you generated yourself, and you should model that before you switch.

6. Vagaro

Best for: mixed beauty and wellness businesses where several different kinds of providers share one roof and one booking system.

Vagaro has been in this market a long time, and it shows in the breadth of the feature list and in the size of the review base, which is over 3,600 on Capterra. The entry price is low and the platform scales by the number of bookable calendars rather than by location, which suits mixed businesses where hair, nails, massage and fitness share a roof.

Key features

• Booking, calendars and client records for beauty, wellness and fitness businesses in one system
• Website builder, marketing tools and a branded client app available in the subscription
• Merchant services with a card reader included on sign-up
• Pricing tiers selected by the number of bookable calendars, from one up to seven or more

Pricing: the published rate is $23.99 a month as an introductory price for the first six months, with a standard price of $30.00, and the plan cost rises as you add bookable calendars. The free trial is 30 days and covers all features except email marketing, text marketing and the branded app. Card processing rates are quoted through Vagaro merchant services rather than published on the pricing page.

Rating: 4.7 on Capterra from 3,651 reviews.

Where it falls short: the trial excludes email marketing, text marketing and the branded app, which are three of the things a salon is most likely to be evaluating. You can trial the calendar but not the growth tools, so the first real test of those happens after you are already paying.

7. Square Appointments

Best for: salons that already take payment on Square hardware and want the booking calendar attached to the till.

There is a free tier here, and for a solo stylist who already takes payments on Square hardware it is a reasonable place to start, because booking is attached to the till and the reporting is one system rather than two. The paid tiers are priced per location and they also buy down the card processing rate, which is unusual and worth doing the arithmetic on if your card volume is high.

Key features

• Online booking site, integrations, appointment reminders and unlimited staff calendars on the free plan
• Cancellation policy, no-show fees, multi-staff appointment booking and a waitlist on the Plus plan
• Future bookings report, service cost tracking and resource management on the Premium plan
• Booking, payments, and reporting in one account with Square point of sale

Pricing: Square Free is $0 a month, Square Plus is $49 a month per location, and Square Premium is $149 a month per location. In-person card processing is 2.6 percent plus 15 cents on Free, 2.5 percent plus 15 cents on Plus, and 2.4 percent plus 15 cents on Premium. Online payments are 3.3 percent plus 30 cents on Free and 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on the paid plans. Paid plans include a trial period.

Rating: 4.5 on Capterra from 260 reviews.

Where it falls short: the free plan is thin in the places where salons actually lose money. Cancellation policies, no-show fees, and the waitlist all require Plus at $49 a month per location. Payment processing is also Square-only, so if you have a processing rate you like elsewhere, you cannot bring it with you.

8. Acuity Scheduling

Best for: single-service providers, mobile therapists, and small studios that need a scheduler rather than a salon management system.

Acuity Scheduling is a scheduling tool that a lot of beauty professionals use, rather than a salon management system that happens to schedule. It is owned by Squarespace; the calendar and intake side is well built, and it is priced by the number of calendars you need rather than by staff or by location. For a single-service provider, a small studio or a mobile therapist, that is often the right shape.

Key features

• Client self-scheduling with unlimited services and appointments on every plan
• Payments through Stripe, Square, PayPal, and Venmo
• SMS reminders, packages, and gift certificates from the Standard plan
• HIPAA business associate agreement and custom API and CSS access on Premium

Pricing: Starter is $16 a month billed annually or $20 monthly and includes 1 calendar. Standard is $27 annually or $34 monthly and includes up to 6 calendars. Premium is $49 annually or $61 monthly and includes up to 36 calendars. The free trial is 7 days and does not require a credit card.

Rating: 4.8 on Capterra from 5,758 reviews.

Where it falls short: it is a scheduler, and the salon-specific layer is not the centre of the product. There is no retail-first design, and the trial is only 7 days, which is short if you intend to import a client list, build a service menu, and test a real week of bookings before you decide.

What to compare besides the booking calendar

Most feature grids in this category compare the same eight things, and most of those eight are now table stakes. These are the areas where the platforms above genuinely differ.

Online booking and per-staff calendars

Every platform here will publish availability and take a booking. What varies is whether the system understands that a service is tied to a specific person with specific hours, that some services can only be performed by some staff, and that two stylists cannot occupy the same station. If you have more than two people, ask to see double-booking prevention configured, not described.

Deposits, Cancellation Windows and No-Show Fees

This is the group of settings that has money directly attached to it, and it is the group where the detail is worth checking carefully. A workable configuration will let you require a deposit or full prepayment on selected services, hold a card on file for the rest, define a cancellation window, and then charge the fee automatically when somebody cancels inside that window. Note that once you store a card to charge a late-cancellation fee later, you are handling payment account data. The standards for that are set by the card industry's security council, which was founded in 2006 by the major payment brands, and compliance is a question you should be asking your software vendor rather than assuming.

Client Self-Service: Rescheduling, Cancelling And The Waitlist

Self-service is the feature that removes phone calls, and it has two halves. The first is that a client can move or cancel a booking from the confirmation email or a client area without calling the salon. The second is that when a slot is released, the system automatically offers it to a waitlist rather than leaving a hole in the day. Plenty of platforms do the first. Fewer do the second, and on some of them the automated waitlist sits on a higher tier, so check which plan it is on before you price the system.

Memberships, Packages And Gift Vouchers

If you sell a six-session package or a monthly membership, the software has to track the balance, the expiry and the recurring charge, and it has to do that at the point of booking rather than in a spreadsheet afterwards. Gift vouchers are a separate question again, particularly for multi-site businesses, because the rules about where a voucher can be redeemed differ by platform.

The Layer Beyond Booking: Point Of Sale, Retail And Staff Commission

For a hair salon with a retail shelf and a commission structure, the booking calendar is maybe half the job. Point of sale, inventory, and commission tracking on both services and product sales are the parts that decide whether you are running one system or three. Mangomint and Boulevard are built with that layer in mind; the lower-priced schedulers generally are not, and that is a fair reason for the price gap.

Client Apps And Staff Apps

These are two different things, and they get conflated. A client app is a booking app your customers install, and it is mostly a retention and rebooking tool. A staff app is what your team uses to see their own schedule, check a client note before a service, and take a payment on the floor. Some vendors charge for one or the other, and a branded client app is frequently an add-on rather than an inclusion.

Integrations

The list to check is short and specific: your calendar (Google, Outlook, iCal or Office 365), your payment processor, your accounting package, and your email marketing tool. If a platform forces its own payment processing, that is not automatically bad, but it does mean the card rate is part of the subscription decision rather than separate from it.

The Pricing Model, Which Is Where Most Of The Money Is

Three models are in use across the eight platforms above, and they behave very differently as a business grows. A flat tier priced on staff count and booking volume is predictable, and it does not cost you more in a month when trade is good. The second model, a base fee plus a per-user charge, is manageable at three people and gets expensive at twelve, because the per-user line is charged whether or not that person is generating bookings. The third model, a commission on new clients, is inexpensive while you are quiet and increasingly expensive while you are growing, which is the opposite of what most owners assume when they sign up. Salons are small businesses in the statistical sense as well as the everyday one, since by the federal government's own count 99.9 percent of businesses are small, and at that scale a $10 per-user line item is not a rounding error. Build the twelve-month total under each model with your real numbers before you compare feature lists.

Solo, Single-Site Or Multi-Location Changes The Answer

For a solo stylist or a single mobile therapist, the calendar is the product, and almost everything else is overhead. GlossGenius, Acuity Scheduling, and the free Square Appointments tier all make sense at that size, and paying $130 a month for inventory and payroll you do not use is a poor trade.

For a single location with three to ten staff, the decision usually comes down to whether you need the retail and commission layer. If you do, Mangomint and Boulevard are the serious candidates and the cost is justified. If you do not, a flat-tier platform such as Bookeo or a per-calendar platform such as Vagaro will cover the same booking workload for a fraction of the monthly cost.

For multi-location businesses, ask one blunt question early: what exactly is shared between sites, and what is not. Some platforms give you one account with several locations inside it and consolidated reporting. Others, including Bookeo with its portal model, run each branch as a separate account with its own customers, staff, reports and vouchers, and give the portal manager access to each sub-account plus per-sub-account portal reports rather than a merged view. Neither approach is wrong. A franchise where each branch is independently owned often prefers the separated model, while a three-site group under one owner usually wants the consolidated one. What causes trouble is buying the first when you assumed the second, so get the vendor to demonstrate it on your own structure before you sign anything.

Which One To Pick

Naming one overall winner here would be tidy, and it would also be wrong, because the eight platforms are aimed at businesses of quite different sizes. Mangomint and Boulevard are the strongest choices when the business is large enough to need the full operations layer and can carry the monthly cost of it. For solo operators and very small teams, GlossGenius, Acuity Scheduling and the free Square Appointments tier are all sensible starting points. Fresha is a good arrangement if the marketplace is genuinely bringing you clients you would not otherwise have had, and a poor one if it is not, so that is the number to check first. Vagaro sits in the middle and tends to suit mixed beauty and wellness businesses that have several kinds of providers under one roof.

If what you want is salon scheduling software with a predictable flat monthly cost, industry-specific booking rather than a general calendar tool, and no commission taken out of your bookings, Bookeo is built for that buyer, with the caveat about branch separation noted above. Whichever way you go, work out the twelve-month total under each pricing model using your own staff count and your own new-client numbers before you compare anything else. The feature lists across these eight platforms are fairly similar to one another. The annual invoices are not.