The quality of the client experience inside your spa or salon is on point – unparalleled even. You’ve got a knack for beauty, wellness, and relaxation. And the steady stream of happy customers leaving your establishment is an empathic reflection of this trait.

However, your spa or salon’s long-term success goes beyond haircutting, styling, nails, and makeovers that happen during in-person appointments. You need to maximize the lifetime value of your current clients and continue attracting new clients to maintain growth and success.

Doing so means keeping people engaged when they aren’t there for an appointment. Fortunately, salon software helps you do just that, streamlining the following processes:

• Organize bookings and appointments
• Payment processing
• Customer service and follow-ups
• Promoting future bookings

In this article, we’re comparing two spa software options: Vagaro vs Booksy. We’ll offer an in-depth analysis to help you determine which software is better suited to helping your spa or salon increase its client base and grow at scale. Let’s get into it.

Vagaro vs Booksy: An Overview

Vagaro and Booksy are two highly effective spa software platforms with pluses, minuses, and unique characteristics that set them apart. For instance, Booksy focuses more succinctly on beauty and aesthetics, while Vagaro has broader functionality.

By the end of this reading, you might find both options unviable for your business, in which case other highly effective alternatives exist, and we’ll happily point you in the right direction.

Top Features Comparison: Booksy vs Vagaro

In this section, we’ll take a look at Booksy's and Vagaro's main features to compare the platforms and determine which suits your spa and salon better.

Booksy: What Is It And What Does It Do?

As a leading software for businesses in the wellness and beauty sector, Booksy offers advanced solutions to spa and salon professionals seeking a competitive edge. Booksy boasts the following features for spa and salon owners:

• Customer management
• Calendar management
• Automated invoicing
• Marketing tools
• Employee performance reviews
• Appointment reminders
• Ecommerce tools to sell further products

Booksy’s features

Here’s a bullet-point breakdown of Booksy’s main features:

Marketing And Loyalty Tools:

• Booksy enables spa and salon owners to email or text clients while engaging them on social media.
• Send out message blasts and promotions with Booksy. Fine-tune your marketing collateral with email and social media templates to draw more clients.
• Leverage your positive customer reviews by sharing them with Booksy.

Manage Your Business:

• Booksy’s spa/salon management features include business report generation (e.g., commissions and stock inventory).
• The software also streamlines repetitive administrative tasks to keep your productivity soaring.
• Employee management tools will help with organizing working hours.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools:

• Booksy’s CRM capabilities include booking history and other such client data, all in one place, making it easily accessible in real-time whenever you need it.
• Reduce no-shows with automatic appointment reminders.

Calendar Management:

• Enjoy effortless schedule modification and management with Booksy’s seamless design.
• Booksy offers mobile device-accessible calendars so you can check your daily schedule wherever you are.
• Using Booksy, both spa and salon owners can run their businesses no matter where they might be.

Processing Payments:

• Booksy allows your customers to pay online or in person.
• It also streamlines the checkout process, making it seamless.
• Encourage contactless payments with the Booksy mobile app by keeping client cards on file.

Self-Service Booking:

• Booksy offers customers 24/7 booking calendar availability, so they can always schedule with your spa or salon. This feature can dramatically increase bookings.

Increase Your Offerings:

• Booksy helps spas and salons increase their offerings beyond their traditional services. 
• The platform supports diversified revenue streams for your business, such as retail products, loyalty memberships, packages, and advanced gift cards.

Protecting Your Bottom Line:

• Booksy adds flexible bottom-line protection for its Pro customers with various premium features.
• These features include taking prepayments, setting cancellation policies, offering on-the-go or online services, and attracting clients via boost.

POS Upgrades:

• Automatically and maintain your cash register with Booksy’s Cash Register feature.
• This tool links your register and cash payments, reducing human error risks.
• You can still make manual adjustments and generate record reports if you need to pay a courier cash or add money to your till.

Vagaro: What Is It And What Does It Do?

As another flexible scheduling and management solution in the spa and salon industry, Vagaro offers a plethora of features, including:

• Calendar scheduling
• Automatic notifications
• Marketing tools
• Online booking
• Online invoicing
• Mobile app
• Payment processing
• Membership subscription
• Customer tracking
• Online store
• Website builder
• Reporting

Vagaro offers customers seamless appointment canceling and rescheduling features. It also improves productivity with its comprehensive tool stack while giving spa and salon owners more schedule and calendar control.

Vagaro’s Features

Here is our bullet-point breakdown of Vagaro’s primary features:

Business Reporting:

• Gain unique insights into your spa and salon with Vagaro’s concise reporting.
• Vagaro’s reporting capabilities include payroll, client retention, inventory, and appointment booking – and we’re only scratching the surface.
• These reporting features integrate with Xero and Quickbooks to maintain updated tax, inventory, and payroll data.
• You can convert your data to CSV files or export it to Excel.

Marketing Capabilities:

• Vagaro’s marketplace enables you to promote your spa/salon business with its Daily Deal Feature. This feature allows you to offer discounts, specials, and sales.
• Leverage the automated tools for SMS marketing and email.
• The drag-and-drop email editor adds a professional sheen to your emails.
• Boost branding and increase appointments with the Vagaro mobile app.

Online Booking Via Multiple Channels:

• Vagaro offers your clients multi-channel online booking capabilities, including on its proprietary app, Yelp, Facebook, or Google.
• Vagaro enables immediate booking to customers after they discover you via a Google search.
• Clients can also set an appointment immediately upon reading Yelp customer reviews.
• With Vagaro, spa and salon owners can allow clients to reschedule appointments online. You can also set booking criteria.

Calendar Integration:

• You can view and manage multiple employee schedules with Vagaro’s integrated calendar.
• Every employee’s schedule is viewable on one screen. They can stack next to each other, side-by-side.
• It’s possible to filter the calendar into one service or group. Extract more details by zooming in.
• Vagaro’s drag-and-drop capabilities allow you to seamlessly reschedule appointments before notifying clients with the click of your mouse or phone. With Vagaro, you can automate recurring appointments, manage double bookings, write/view calendar notes, and visibly block off personal time.

Manage And Track Your Customer Relationships:

• Vagaro’s customer tracking capabilities enable spa and salon owners to personalize their services to specific customers' preferences and needs.
• This tool lets you save data such as allergies, hairstyle preferences, and other details.
• Upload and manage client files to and from an easy-to-navigate dashboard.
• Spa owners who are more wellness-based can attack SOAP notes on client profiles. This way, they can record progress. (Note: Vagaro is HIPAA-compliant).
• Vagaro also bolsters customer relationships through its loyalty program-building capabilities, including features like data collection.

Website Building Capabilities:

• An available upgrade on Vagaro allows users to make eye-catching websites with Vagaro software integrations.
• Premade templates are available – ideal if one aligns with your brand’s visual themes. You can access them quickly and make on-the-go adjustments to make them more harmonious with your company motifs.
• Custom websites are also available. Vagaro has designers who will personalize a theme for your spa or salon.

Notifications:

• Vagaro’s app, email, and text notifications reduce appointment no-shows.
• Your clients have opt-out capabilities with text reminders so they won’t feel invaded or irritated by notifications.
• Clients can check their appointment statuses through email CTAs.
• Also, Vagaro allows you to send post-appointment emails to thank customers for their business.

Paydesk POS:

• An upgrade lets you accept payments (and book appointments) from the Vagaro pay desk.
• The pay desk comes with a dual-screen POS that’s safe, secure, and transparent for your customers.
• One screen is for your spa or salon, and the other is for your customer. You don’t need to turn anything around for your customers to sign or tip, respecting your clientele’s privacy and making them feel comfortable.

Seeking An Alternative To Both?

Do the features of Booksy and Vagaro fail to speak to the needs of your business? Or do you desire another option to explore for further market research?

Look no further than GlossGenius for its gorgeous designs, lightning-quick client booking, automated reminders, and many other spa/salon business-boosting tools. In fact, the GlossGenius platform’s features have proven so effective that they’ll generate $1,500 more in bookings and a 90%-plus rebooking rate.

Booksy Vs. Vagaro: Use Cases

Let’s now examine the ideal use cases for Booksy and Vagaro.

Booksy Use Cases

You’ll find five business categories on the Booksy software in the beauty services department (massage, barber, nails, brows/lashes, and hair). Booksy places businesses on its marketplace website under these categories. You can leverage these features for all business ventures connected to any of the five categories.

You’ll often find makeup artists, tattoo shops, and even pet service companies on Booksy. In addition, you aren’t limited to only one category on the Booksy platform. You can, for instance, add barbers and nails or brows/lashes and hair.

Vagaro Use Cases

While Booksy offers five relatively specific business types, Vagaro offers three broader business-based solutions. The three “macro” categories are beauty, fitness, and wellness.

We understand if these seem limiting at first. However, with the broad definitions comes freedom. You must merely exist under these umbrellas to benefit from Vagaro’s software.

Here are a few examples of businesses falling under these umbrellas:

• Hair Stylists
• Spas
• Nail salons
• Acupuncturists
• Tanning shops
• Dance studios
• Personal trainers
• Nutritionists

Booksy Vs. Vagaro Use Cases: Main Takeaways

Vagaro is broader in scope than Booksy in terms of business categories. A broad scope is not necessarily better or worse than a narrow one. Booksy is far more honed into beauty and aesthetics, while Vagaro veers off into health and wellness while still making room for beauty.

Booksy’s narrower scope might simplify things for spa and salon owners who wish to streamline their focus on hair, nails, makeup, etc. Conversely, spa and salon owners who want to branch out further and expand into wellness-oriented products and services might serve themselves well with Vagaro.

Booksy Vs. Vagaro: Pros And Cons Comparison

Below is a breakdown of the pros and cons of the Booksy and Vagaro platforms.

Booksy: The Pros

Here are some of the pros of using Booksy:

• Booksy’s calendar feature successfully streamlines appointment bookings and rebookings because of its drag-and-drop capabilities.
• The Booksy Boost feature is a triumph. It increases visibility on the Booksy platform while bolstering general search rankings.
• Clients can book an appointment online whenever they want, from wherever they are. We’re talking 24/7 booking capabilities.
• Supporting online and mobile payments gives you more chances to earn money.
• You can specifically target marketing campaigns through Booksy because of its many platform tools. Furthermore, it offers free flyers, stickers, and other complementary promotional materials.
• Booksy creates reports on performance metrics based on booking and appointments to help you bolster your marketing campaigns.

Booksy Cons

Here are some of the cons of using Booksy:

• You’ll find user reviews complaining about the $20 each it costs for new staff members, leading to higher subscription bills than expected.
• Another complaint we’ve found is the inability to hide negative reviews.
• Also, text message reminders get sent with the Booksy name first, confusing clients about where the notifications come from.

Vagaro Pros

Here are some of the pros of using Vagaro:

• Businesses using Vagaro can easily connect with potential customers with coupons, packages, and gift certificates.
• Vagaro’s customer behavior tracking provides crucial insights about customers (e.g., the services they book and how often they book them). You can leverage these insights as you see fit.
• The clock-in/clock-out feature on Vagaro makes tracking staff activity a breeze.
• You can access the Vagaro app on Androids and iPhones, meaning your business is always at your fingertips.

Vagaro Cons

Here are some of the cons of using Vagaro:

• Frustrated Vagaro users describe payment processing issues, downtime, glitches, and an overly complicated checkout process.
• Further reports discuss the need for feature refinement, including more customization with SMS messaging and loyalty program solutions.
• New businesses might find Vagaro’s prices attractive, but the single-calendar model and scalable pricing options often prove costly when team members get added.
• Add-ons like text messaging cost an additional $20 per month. Other add-ons (e.g., website builders, branded mobile capabilities, and customer forms) have their costs, too.

Booksy Vs. Vagaro: Customer Support Comparison

On GetApp, Booksy has a 4.5-star customer support rating (out of 5). Customer support reviews for Vagaro’s customer support are equally – if not more – impressive.

Customer support is a tricky topic because all businesses have different needs. However, both of these businesses stack up in this regard. It will come down to whose customer support team meshes better with your spa or salon.

Booksy Vs. Vagaro: User Reviews And Testimonials

Remember to take user reviews online with a grain of salt. Some companies incentivize their users to leave positive reviews so make just to test them out for yourself before coming to any strong conclusions.

Booksy has a 4.7 rating on G2 and a 4.4 rating on Capterra. (out of 5 stars). Vagaro has a 4.4 rating on G2 and 4.7 on Capterra (out of 5 stars).

Booksy Vs. Vagaro: Pricing

Booksy is $29.99 (plus tax) monthly and $20 for each additional staff member. Vagaro is $30 monthly (plus tax). If you’re looking for a platform that offers many of the same features (and more), and is cheaper than both Vagaro and Booksy, you should definitely consider trying out GlossGenius.

Conclusion

Booksy and Vagaro are highly dynamic spa/salon business software platforms that can enhance your inner workings/employee management while attracting more clients. They’re both great with their own strengths and weaknesses.

If, however, you still aren’t sold on either one, or you’re trying to be more price conscious, GlossGenius is a highly effective alternative to both platforms – with proven results that drive revenues and overall business growth for spas and salons like yours. GlossGenius also has a free trial (no credit card required) that you can sign up for at any time!