Comparison of Top Salon Management Software in the US

Handling a salon business isn’t a cakewalk even if you are an experienced professional. With so much competition around in the industry, running a salon becomes a complicated as well as an overwhelming task. Every kind of salon, old or new, small or large, needs a significant edge to stay on top of the competition in the salon industry. This edge is achieved by multiple factors such as efficient expense management, appealing marketing, etc. One such lifesaver solution is embracing new technologies.

Imagine how hard it can be to keep up with various day-to-day activities in a salon all by yourself. Things such as managing the staff, tracking appointments, streamlining payments, etc, can get very overwhelming if you don’t have support from an automated system. Implementation of a salon management system can streamline almost all of the operational processes that are carried out in a salon.

In recent years, salon management solutions have become so popular and are adopted by many beauty salons and spas around the globe. With the rise of these technological advancements in automated systems, there has been a surge of many salon management software.

Salon software is a basket of tools and features that are designed to assist salons in running, automating, and growing their business. The software offer solutions that feature ranging from client and appointment management to business reporting, from finance tracking to email marketing; basically every little operation that is managed under the roof of a beauty salon.

An efficient and powerful salon management software enables service-based businesses like hair salons, beauty spas, healthcare, wellness, etc, to take care of their operations effectively and streamline their processes.

Over the years, a lot of salons and spas have integrated their systems and operations with suitable salon management software and that has resulted in nothing but mind-blowing performances. A salon business that automates its operations not only produces increased conversion rates but also is able to offer efficient services. 

Here are some benefits that have resulted in a huge rise in salon management solutions across many businesses.

●     Data Management

As they say, data is the king that rules in today’s digital world. With the software, businesses have an access to a lot of information about their customers that they can leverage to take smart business decisions. This has gradually become one of the most crucial and game-changing elements in all kinds of businesses. By analyzing the customer data, salon owners can identify their preferences, run creative advertising campaigns and offers and market their products and services.

●     Automation

Modern management software encourages business automation tools, helping the owners to eliminate the risks of trivial mistakes by the staff. Moreover, employing automation across the workplace eventually reduces human dependence and makes the process more streamlined and efficient.

●     Feedback

With the operations streamlined and automated, a salon business could focus along on other aspects of increasing the client base, such as feedback and marketing. Knowing what the customers prefer and like and what doesn’t excite them can be useful to strategize future marketing plans.

Throughout this article, we have tried to compare multiple parameters of all the popular and impactful salon management software. Following are some of the parameters and the value they bring to the table.

User Interface

The user interface is the first impression of any kind of website or software to the customer. The ease of navigating through the available features and tools of the software determines how user-friendly the interface is. Sometimes good software with multiple powerful functionalities fail to create an engaging user experience because of its less captivating and more complex UI.

Features

The underlying set of features for most of these salon management solutions are mostly the same. However, what makes software different from others is the advancement in a particular kind of solution or any additional set of features being available at a more affordable price. We have tried to showcase some special features for which software is popular in the market.

Tools Integration

Possessing effective features and solutions is just not enough. Software must make sure that all of its available tools and functionalities are operating together harmoniously or not. Easily accessible and manageable solutions and flawless tools integration helps businesses to carry out its operation smoothly, without any errors. At the same time, the solutions must meet security standards, adding a layer of portability, reliability, and safety to their functionalities.  

Help and Support

There are a couple of modes through which customer support of salon management software is available, such as call support, chat support, etc. Strong, reliable, and available customer support always makes things easier for the user to effortlessly work with.

Cost

At the end of the day, what matters is the value that you are getting from adopting a service for the money the amount of money you’re putting out. There’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ when it comes to opting for a suitable subscription plan. This is why, to make things simpler, sorted, and more insightful, we have covered the various pricing plans that salon management software offers. 

If you own a salon and do not have the time and resources to invest in figuring out the best salon management software, you are at the right place. We have crafted a list of 20 salon management software by comparing the parameters mentioned above so that you get to decide which one to opt for.

Vagaro

With over 20 million customers searching on the platform, and over 174 thousand professionals associated, Vagaro is one of the largest free marketplaces in the industry.

With its powerful features such as online bookings, easy scheduling, secure transactions, and 24/7 support, the software helps you to handle your business efficiently. Vagaro offers business solutions not only to just beauty and salon businesses but in other domains such as wellness and fitness business.

Just like its interactive UI, Vagaro has interesting pricing that fits every business. You get to enjoy 100+ features with Vagaro’s full business solution software starting from just $25 a month for a single bookable calendar. This pricing is at the most $85 if you wish to have 7 or more bookable calendars. Pretty simple, isn’t it?

Fresha

Fresha is one of the most trusted software in the beauty and wellness industry. Preferred by over 300,000+ stylists and professionals and partnered with 80,000+ businesses, Fresha is available in more than 120 countries.

The software has many tools and features that help beauty salons and spas boost sales and expand their services. Without restricting itself to only beauty salons and makeup businesses, Fresha also has its services available to other business types such as health and fitness, therapy, tattoo piercing, etc. The platform offers its services through two mobile applications; one for professionals and another for customers.

Fresha’s pricing pattern is quite intimidating as it is one of the only names in the world of the salon management industry that provides a bulk amount of features for free. Unlike other software, there is no membership or subscription model as most of the features are available for free. But here’s the catch; they do charge a small amount of fee, exclusive of tax, for some specific features such as new client fees, payment processing fees blast messaging fees, etc.

GlossGenius

If you feel like your business lags behind in the scheduling and management aspects, GlossGenius can be your one-stop solution. GlossGenius makes every little operation faster and more effective, building a flawless client experience.

The platform has been designed by blending the science of online booking with a creative approach to making beautiful client impressions of your salon. With GlossGenius’ ‘genius’ online booking solutions, and client management features, fine-tune the booking process and optimize your time.

The tool offers a 14-day free trial without any credit card or any involved financial risks. With simple pricing plans available, GlossGenius has two forms of monthly subscriptions that you can choose from. The $24/month plan lets you access all features with unlimited team members. However, the upgrade version of this priced plan charges a business $44/month and offers access to exclusive events, forums, and more; making it a perfect option for enterprise salon suite partners.

Booker

Ever thought of improving the existing functionalities and operations running in your salon and taking your business to the next level? If yes, then Booker might be the software your business is missing. Booker is a salon management software that takes care of operations such as booking, customer management, scheduling appointments, customer management, and even marketing.

With impactful technologies for salons and spas, Booker lets you run the business just how you like to. From organizing your appointment bookings to managing your staff, from streamlining the payrolls to orchestrating your salon with management tools, the software handles everything for you.

Booker doesn’t have a free plan but has a little diversity in the available priced plans. The most affordable, ‘Starter’ plan is priced at $129 per month whereas the most expensive plan ‘Ultimate Plus’ costs around $549 per month with all the advanced features and functionalities. The pricing, as compared to other software in the industry, is slightly on the expensive end. But the features act as a one-stop solution for all the salon needs.

Zenoti

With over 20,000 businesses established in more than 50 countries, Zentoti is another salon and spa management software loved in the industry. Aiming to elevate its customer experience Zenoti focuses on bringing multiple features and services under its umbrella offer. These features include easy scheduling, payroll, commission tracking, attendance tracking, inventory management, mobile POS, and a lot more.

Zenoti understands the requirement for high-tech and advanced tools for a full-fledged salon business to operate flawlessly. With its software, salons get to create an effective client experience and thus build an impact with their services. 

Salonized

Salonized takes care of everything that is required to run a salon smoothly so that the business owners can focus more on multiplying the clients and the revenue. With Salonized’s client management tools, you can send appointment reminders automatically and schedule them smartly with the online calendars designed specifically for salons. When daily tasks in a salon such as booking, scheduling, inventory management, payment, etc, are automated and managed by reliable names in the industry, business escalates.

Salonized’s management software has dynamic pricing for all three plans that are available. The most affordable priced plan, named ‘Appointments’ is designed for small-scale salons or freelancers, offering standard features like online bookings, automated reminders, client management, etc. The price starts from as low as $17.5 per month for a single user and gradually grows as you increase the team members count.

Similarly, the tier 2 plan, ironically named ‘Basic’, charges $32.5 per month if you wish to have the features for a single team member. The features include everything from the previous plan with additional features such as treatment reports, online payments, stock management, financial insights, and more. The perfect solution for a large salon business is offered by the ‘Pro’ plan which starts from $44 per team member per month. 

Booksy

With the use of optimized tools, advanced technologies, and reliable support, a salon business, or any business of that sort can flourish. And that’s what Booksy thrives to do. Booksy is salon and spa operations management software that provides advanced solutions to carry out activities like appointment booking, scheduling clients' calendars, processing payments, inventory management, and a lot more.

To build a business and spread it across the globe, there needs to be a community. Booksy understands this and tries to bridge the gap between a rich client experience and an interactive community platform with the help of its marketing tools such as client invitations, email templates, message blasts, customer reviews, etc.

Flexible pricing options help you figure out and access the solution that you need. Booksy offers a subscription-based model starting from 40 euros a month, along with a free trial. This subscription is priced for a single staff member and charges 10 euros for every staff member that you add to your subscription, only up to the first 9 staffers.

Squarespace Scheduling

Squarespace is an all-in-one appointment scheduling software that helps you automate all aspects of your business. Aiming to take the hassle out of online scheduling, booking, and payments, Squarespace assists the business in meeting the client's needs. Clients can easily view the availability and book their appointments using its scheduling features.

The pricing plans differ according to the available features such as SMS reminders, number of calendars for employees, custom APIs, and a lot more.

The ‘Emerging’ plan is the basic plan with a single calendar for each team member and employee, which starts from $14 per month. If you wish to enjoy features like SMS reminders and have more calendars, you can opt for the ‘Growing’ plan priced at $23 per month. Squarespace Scheduling's ‘Powerhouse’ plan costs around $45 per month and has additional features that would meet the needs of established large businesses.

Salonist

Simplifying different aspects of a beauty business, Salonist acts as a perfect management solution for business owners. The platform offers a feature-packed salon management program catering to the business requirements of a wide range of businesses, irrespective of their size or type. A set of powerful tools such as appointment management, marketing automation, online booking, inventory tracking, point of sale, and analytics services cover all the elements of a beauty salon business, making saily operations smooth and convenient. Trusted by over 10,000 customers across 60+ countries, Salonist gets the best out of your business with its game-changing management solutions.

Salonist offers its pricing plans in four segments, varying according to the business requirements. The plans are billed monthly and annually, where you can enjoy the services for free for 2 months.

The most affordable is the ‘Basic’ plan which is priced at $39 a month. What’s best about Salonist is that it offers a lot of standard and unlimited features in the basic plan itself, making it a best-buy for small salons or freelancers. The next priced plan, named as ‘Starter’ plan, at $59 a month has additional features such as product billing, SMS campaigns, coupons, and packages. However, the ‘Business’ plan, charging $99 a month appears to be more suitable for established businesses. The most premium level plan is the ‘Enterprise’ plan which is packed with all the features that any beauty salon business would ever need.

MioSalon

With MioSalon’s automated features that help you simplify your day-to-day salon operations, take your business to the next level. The most prominent and powerful feature of MioSalon is its Point-of-sale billing feature. The software enables quick, simple, and professional check-out with built-in point-of-sale software that helps in integrating with your appointment calendar. This enhanced functionality saves you a lot of time at checkout. Moreover, other standard features from the software’s total 125 features will serve all kinds of business requirements,

MioSalon has some of the best-priced plans in the industry, focusing on salons and spas at all scales. There’s a 14-day free trial available that you can try with all the plans before signing up. If your business doesn’t have much higher requirements, MioSalon has a free plan named ‘MioSalon Lite’ that gives access to a bunch of standard features such as appointment, invoicing, scheduling, staff and expense management, etc, with unlimited staff. All that for free!

The priced plans are designed with some additional features at every upgrade with ₹1000/ month for LitePlus, ₹2500/month for Standard, and ₹4000/month for the premium one. You can save up to 16% on all these plans by opting for the annual subscription.

Timely

Timely might be the right option for your business if you wish to have an interactive user experience while using salon management software. Timely is used and loved by over 55,000 users for their online booking and scheduling requirements. Backed by its friendliest customer support service, the software saves hours of a business every day, by making smart decisions with its features like staff management, stock, inventory, reports, and analytics.

Timely’s plans and pricing are formulated interestingly. The software’s available in three plans; Build, Elevate, and Innovate. These plans can be customized according to the number of bookable staff that your business has. The pricing starts from as low as $20/month, for a single-person staff, to as high as $250 for staff up to 20 employees. To have access to sophisticated tools and work among a large number of employees (20+), Timely crafts a package that suits your business.

DaySmart Salon

There are very few softwares in the industry that offer everything that’s needed to run a beauty salon business efficiently and DaySmart Salon is one of them. This simplified and centralized software saves a business plenty of time with its advanced features, making one fall in love with running a salon. With its easy-to-use database system, tracking, managing, and securing the detailed data of clients becomes a cakewalk.

DaySmart Salon offers extensive reports and an interactive dashboard that monitors your client metrics to keep you updated with your data. From features that are used in daily operations to features that give you a marketing edge and help you expand your brand, DaySmart Salon has got it all!

The salon management software is built with an aim to be suitable for all kinds of beauty salon owners and thus, the pricing plans have been formulated in four different types. If you own a small salon and work with a small team or are just starting in the salon industry and wish to enjoy salon management software features on small scale, the ‘Basic’ plan fits just right. The program, priced at $29 a month, offers single-user solutions with a limitation of 1000 texts and 5000 emails, including other basic features such as online booking, reports, dashboards, appointment scheduling, and reminders, with mobile application support.

As you move to slightly higher-priced plans you are offered the same features with extra advancements in all of them, along with the standard features. For instance, the ‘Deluxe’ plan, priced at $69 a month, allows the usage of a maximum of 3 users, with additional features such as phone support, payroll, employee reminders, resource management, and online forms. The ‘Premier’ plan costs around $129 a month and offers solutions for unlimited users, with a few additional features such as expense tracking, commission exceptions, and overtime rules. If you run an established beauty salon with many employees, you can opt for the most popular plan with all add-on features at a bundled rate of $249 per month. The additional features in this ‘Platinum’ plan such as 2500 marketing texts per month, and transaction syncing with Quickbooks Online, help to operate a beauty salon at a large scale.

Rosy

Rosy is another simple, powerful, and loved Salon software in the beauty and wellness industry. With Rosy, managing client appointments and scheduling becomes easy, even for a novice. This cloud-based salon and spa software offer various features like easy salon scheduling, 24/7 client booking, and inventory management, with simple dashboards and hassle-free mobile access.

Rosy has primarily got two types of pricing plans; Standard and Premium. These plans are priced differently as per the number of employees you need to have the membership for. The standard plan for a single employee is priced at $29 per month, increasing gradually as you increase the number of employees. The plan costs $99 per month for 21+ employees.

However, the premium subscription plan, which includes additional features such as automated email marketing, enhanced text messaging, an image library, and text confirmations, is priced from $37 per month per employee to $192 a month for more than 21 employees. This type of pricing plan helps clients choose the right kind of service that they require, and thus pay accordingly.

SimpleSpa

As per its name, SimpleSpa is one of the most simple, sorted, and portable management software out there. Trusted by thousands of businesses, the software caters to all kinds of daily appointment management needs of not just salon and spa experts but also medical professionals.

Working with all kinds of businesses and offering unparalleled client experience to users, SimpleSpa has been leveraging 15 years of continuous feedback to make the platform more powerful, fast, and intuitive. Over the years, with its features designed with a customer-centric vision, have been making tedious business tasks such as online booking, appointment scheduling, inventory management, and monitoring statistics and reports easy to work with.

From freelancers to large companies, SimpleSpa has various plans to offer for salon businesses at every stage. The best part about the pricing is that it is available in both forms; monthly as well as annually. Like every other software, all the plans include standard features. But SimpleSpa has a lot to offer even in their cheapest plans, creating a good value for customers’ money. All of the priced plans include features like unlimited appointments, recording appointment transactions, integrated credit card processing, unlimited users, appointment reminders, cloud backup, customer support, and export tools.

The ‘Basic’ plan is designed for a single professional or a sole operator and costs around $10 a month and $100 a year. The ‘Standard’ plan fits perfectly for small-sized teams and offers its features for 5 professionals, costing $20 a month and $200 a year. The ‘P ro’ allows around 10 professionals to use its available features and is priced at $40 per month, and $400 a year. The ‘Enterprise’ plan is priced at $80 a month and $800 a year and is the best option for large salons and spas as it allows to include more than 30 staff and professionals. Moreover, if these pricing plans do not suit your business requirements, SimpleSpa can work with your business to design a customized plan that is just right for your business needs.

Treatwell

Doesn’t matter how difficult you find it to operate with the modern-day management software because Treatwell’s seamless salon software makes management on the go. As one of the largest communities of beauty professionals worldwide, especially around Europe, Treatwell continues to create beautiful, rich, and effortless client experiences. Managing your day-to-day activities in the salon becomes so fast and fun with the software’s easy-to-use features.

There are two major priced plans that Treatwell comes with, ‘Advanced’ and ‘Premium’, with common features in both such as unlimited appointment confirmation emails and appointment reminder emails. The ‘Advanced’ plan is priced at 699 euros per year and the ‘Premium’ at 899 euros a year. With the upgraded plan, you get advanced stock statistics and can use their pre-established product list.

With the high-functionalities and interactive tools, beauty salon businesses get to engage and understand their clients better. If you are just starting out or wish to have a simplified booking and scheduling system for your salon, join hands with some of the most experienced professionals in the industry at Treatwell.

Meevo by Millennium

Meevo is an easy-to-use spa and salon software, powered by Millenium, built with years of expertise from professionals who understand the industry. The software offers to lead cloud-based business management solutions for the beauty and wellness industries. Salons and Spas find the software beneficial for operations such as attracting and retaining clients, boosting efficiency, improving the frequency of visits, POS payments, e-mail marketing, and a lot more.

The downside to Meevo is the value for money. The subscription plans are slightly on the expensive side making it a little difficult for small salon businesses to afford. The starting plan is priced at $149/month and offers support for up to 10 professionals and the plans get as high as $419/month with support available for unlimited professionals. All the available plans offer powerful tools such as booking, registering, marketing, security, navigation, inventory as well as reports. There’s an ‘Enterprise’ option available for businesses that wish to have a customized plan designed according to their specific requirements.

Salon Iris

Salon Iris offers smart solutions for business in the salon, spas, and the entire wellness industry. This award-winning salon software has a bunch of packaged solutions for various kinds of salon businesses, from self-employed professionals to large and established salon businesses. The platform helps a business discover its competitive advantage by making use of the tools like online booking, POS, email scheduling, etc. Moreover, Salon Iris has an excellent network of support that assists you in integrating the new business software with your business’s existing process seamlessly.

SimplyBook

SimplyBook offers online booking solutions for all service-based industries beauty and wellness, health and fitness, healthcare, etc. Offering over 60 custom features, the platform is completely oriented to assist your business to attract new clients and manage like a pro!

If your business is facing slow bookings, with SimplyBook, you can offer discounts and gift cards and eventually, increase revenue by selling your products on booking. Moreover, the software helps you manage some of the prominent aspects of a salon business such as daily sales, point of sales, personalized communication, online payments, etc.

The priced plans for SimplyBook come in four variants; Basic, Standard, Premium, and Premium Plus, with the prices starting from $8.25/month and going as high as $82.5/month. Compared to the pricing of other salon management software in the industry, Simplybook is priced at far cheaper levels. Moreover, the platform offers a free plan with minimal features and limitations on total users and included bookings. The software gives you a 14-day free trial without any requirement for credit cards.

StyleSeat

StyleSeat provides web-based solutions that help a salon business carry out its operations efficiently. With a bunch of tools and features like appointment reminders, instant payouts, calendar and scheduling, in-app client messaging, etc, a salon can develop an organized and effective way of working with automatized operations. The downside for StyleSeat is that it doesn’t offer all-around solutions for all kinds of business requirements such as attendance tracking, invoicing, etc. 

StyleSeat understands how large businesses cannot afford to lose time to technical issues, therefore it provides seamless support to help businesses make the most of the extensive features.

Phorest

Loved by over 155,000 hair and beauty salon professionals across the globe, Phorest is another popular salon management software that has been in the industry for a while now. Known worldwide for providing the most efficient and powerful salon marketing tools, Phorest is spread across 9000 and more businesses.

The software helps businesses to market, manage and thus, grow through the upcoming cutting-edge technologies by making use of their features and utilities. Phorest’s unmatched support acts as the strong pillar of their community. Trying to cover multiple aspects of the salon experience, the platform also offers features like stock control through e-commerce, video consultations, staff management, and payments from their custom applications. The best thing about them is that they plant a tree for every salon they onboard. Beautiful, right?

Their pricing plans come in a few types and all the plans include features like unlimited devices and staff. The plans are divided into 4 types named as ‘Starter’, ‘Grow’, ‘Complete Advantage’ and ‘Elite’. To get the exact pricing details about these individual plans, head over to Phorest’s official website and request a quote as per your business requirements.

Boulevard

Boulevard aims to empower appointment-based salon and spa businesses to offer services that their customers can depend upon. Launched in 2016, the software serves the needs of self-care businesses of all sizes. Striving to give its customers an incredible service, Boulevard is on a mission to design a modern, user-friendly platform catering to a broader self-care industry.   

Following are the pricing options available for Boulevard:

Essentials: This plan, charging $175/month, has all the foundational features for small businesses to operate with. Premier: With flexible tools suitable for small and medium businesses, the ‘Premier’ plan has some additional features from the former plan such as inventory support, custom reports, resource scheduling, etc. The plan costs $325 a month and is perfect for a salon that operates at a medium scale. Enterprise: Offering a custom pricing option, the ‘Enterprise’ plan gives a comprehensive platform for chains and franchises, distributed across various locations, working with complex operations.

Till now you came across a bunch of salon management solutions but there’s always something that’s missed from software from making it a perfect and complete alternative. Sometimes the UI isn’t much engaging or the platform is full of bugs and glitches. If everything seems to be alright, the pricing just might not be worth enjoying the software’s services. DINGG comes into the picture to tackle all these challenges and eradicate these concerns.

DINGG is a simple and intelligent cloud-based salon and spa management software built to create long-lasting and healthy client experiences for retailers. The software has got everything to manage a salon and spa. With its features helping to facilitate daily operations on the go, the platform thrives to be the one-stop solution for modern-day beauty salon needs.

DINGG is designed to allow users to manage their salon and spa operations at their fingertips. Acting as a platform providing an end-to-end online solution to empower salon businesses across the globe, DINGG has become one of the fastest-growing names in the beauty salon and spa management industry. If you are a salon or spa owner and wish to facilitate and manage your business flawlessly, feel free to check out DINGG.  

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In this detailed guide, we discussed around 20 salon management solutions that can benefit and elevate your business. But how to decide which one’s best for your salon? That question will ultimately be answered by the value the platform brings to the table for the money it charges and most importantly, the features and functionalities that suit your business.

So what are you waiting for? It’s time to bid farewell to the old-school methodologies of working. Embrace a little automation and say hello to salon management software that takes your business to the next level. We hope you liked this article and got some clarity to decide on the software for your requirements. Feel free to head over to DINGG to have more insights on how to enhance your salon business and get your customers coming back to you!