- Bottom Line:
- Choice 1: Boulevard – Best for US-based barbershops that want a front desk option, scalability, and a fully integrated internal management system
- Choice 2: Mangomint – Best for hybrid teams and large barbershops with independent contractors
- Choice 3: GlossGenius – Best for solo barbers and contractors looking for a free calendar management option
- Choice 4: Fresha– Best for barbershops that want marketing support
- Choice 5: Mindbody – Best for barbershops that need multi-language support and sales support
- Final Recommendations
Last Updated on September 3, 2026 by Ewen Finser
Figuring out the right barbershop software can be frustrating. There are so many options out there, with features that feel similar enough that you don’t really notice the difference… at least not until you realize you’re missing something you need.
I’ve tried a lot of software, ranging from simple booking software to more comprehensive business software. I’ve decided which ones have the best features for barbershops based on things like services, priorities, and business growth.
Let’s compare Boulevard, Mangomint, Fresha, Mindbody, and GlossGenius.
Boulevard was built for real stylists, salon, and spa owners. It handles booking, checkout, and smart scheduling the way busy salons actually work. It even handles marketing, from rebooking reminders to targeted emails and texts, plus it fills open spots with waitlist requests, without the scrambling.
Bottom Line:
If you really just care about waitlist functions and managing walk-ins, choose GlossGenius. If you are focused on marketing options, particularly being able to market yourself through an existing customer-facing platform, Fresha is great. Managing sales and loyalty programs is easy with Mindbody, and those that want easy internal management with a more affordable monthly package can choose Mangomint.
But those barbershops that want an all-inclusive software to manage internal business operations, particularly with a front desk option, should pick Boulevard. It’s also a great choice if you want to automate more of that front–desk work with AI-assisted scheduling, marketing, and phone support.
Choice 1: Boulevard – Best for US-based barbershops that want a front desk option, scalability, and a fully integrated internal management system

Modern, sleek, and highly user-friendly, Boulevard offers an all-in-one solution built specifically for barbershops that want to scale and manage administrative tasks in one place.
Boulevard is one of my favorite options for barbershops, and I absolutely love it because it stands out with its front desk feature. The front desk feature is where you can manage everything in one place, not just seeing a calendar for all of your employees but seeing a front desk landing page that really pivots your focus toward your customers—who has appointments that day, who has checked in, who has already completed a service, and so forth.
Moreover, they have many more internal tools to help manage scaling barbershops, including their report generation and client management. Anywhere you see a client name, it is a hyperlink that leads you to the most comprehensive client or customer profile I’ve seen in all of the software I’ve used. This, again, really keeps your focus on your customers and helps to build your customer base.
Features
- POS
- E-commerce
- Inventory
- Email marketing
- Automations for campaigns
- Online customer profiles
- AI receptionist
- Precision Scheduling
- Buy Now, Pay Later
- Reporting and analytics

Availability
Only available in the U.S.
Price
Plans start at $195/month per location with monthly billing or $176/month with annual billing. Pricing varies by plan, and some features and add-ons cost extra.
I think it’s important to note here that some of the other options on this list have free or cheaper plans, but they all have hidden fees. As soon as you try to add extra features like payment processing, two-way text message communication, or other marketing features, you will see an increase in your monthly fees.
Boulevard isn’t like that.
They give you all of the marketing support and all of the other client management features in one place for one price, which is a huge plus in my book.
Automations
Boulevard has automated bookings, check-in, sales reminders, and marketing. Precision Scheduling uses AI to help optimize the calendar based on availability and booking patterns, while its marketing tools can automate rebooking reminders, reach lost clients, and help fill slow days or last-minute openings.
Boulevard also offers Beau, an AI Receptionist that can answer calls 24/7, handle common questions, help clients book, take messages, and hand calls off to staff when needed. For a busy barbershop, I think this is a natural extension of the front-desk functionality I already like about Boulevard: your team can stay focused on the clients in their chairs without every phone call becoming an interruption.
Its marketing tools also use AI to help create subject lines, email copy, and campaign imagery, so there are now more ways to automate the administrative side of keeping the books full.

User-Friendliness
They have the easiest interface I have found, with great onboarding processes that are almost superfluous given how simple the structure is. Everything from the colors, font size, and typeface, to the headers and borders make it very easy on the eyes and simple to navigate.
Boulevard has tiered plans and optional add-ons, but its core tools for booking, payments, client management, marketing, messaging, reporting, and operations all work together within the same platform. That keeps the experience more streamlined than piecing together separate systems for each part of the business.
It has a lot more features than you get with GlossGenius and a better array of internal management features than Mangomint.
Boulevard is one of the best in terms of calendar management. It offers a very easy-to-use grid layout where each of your employees are color coded. That color is associated with their respective profile pictures and runs the individual columns from top to bottom for all of their appointments.
Anyone can see when an appointment has been automatically added or when a chunk of time has been blocked off, and it’s all done in a very easy-to-use interface. When you add a new appointment, you just click on the time frame, and it lets you immediately add information. This gets synced with all the other calendars and all the other users.
Overall, I’d recommend Boulevard for growing or multi-location barbershops and any businesses that want ease of use with deep feature sets and increasingly robust automation for scheduling, marketing, reporting, and front-desk work.
Choice 2: Mangomint – Best for hybrid teams and large barbershops with independent contractors

Mangomint is a modern system meant to help manage lots of independent employees from a single location. It’s a great barbershop software that uses intelligent automations to help with booking, check-in, and payment processing, particularly as they apply to different employees. The thing I like best about it is the front-facing waitlist option, where you can have a tablet display in your barber shop that tells people where they are in the queue based on who has checked in and who has booked or canceled appointments.
Mangomint lets you filter by day or week only for their booking and calendar. While it functions very similarly to what Boulevard offers, the layout is different because they don’t assign separate colors to each employee, so it can be difficult at a quick glance to see which appointments are going with which employees.
Features
- Intelligent waitlists
- Payments routing
- Gamified UI

Availability
Only the U.S. and Canada.
Price
$120/month per location + $10/month per user
Mangomint simplified its pricing in 2026, so core features like memberships, the Virtual Waiting Room, forms, web chat, and integrations are now included. The main optional add-ons are Phone, Marketing, and Payroll.
Automations
Mangomint has automations that include a client-facing auto check-in process and a client-facing waiting room where clients can see where they are in the queue. This makes it a great option for any barber shop that has a lot of walk-ins and wants to manage the queue for those who have walked into the physical shop as well as those who have booked online and are heading over.
They also have automated features that make it easy to route payments directly to different employees, so if you have multiple independent Barbers who are working in your barbershop, you can charge deposits based on bookings or route payments to those chairs.

User-Friendliness
The layout is very simple, but it is gamified, so if that’s what you are looking for, this is a great option.
Recommended for: Barbershops that want a lot of intelligent automation tools, especially to help manage hybrid teams or a lot of independent barbers.
Choice 3: GlossGenius – Best for solo barbers and contractors looking for a free calendar management option

GlossGenius is simple and free for individuals, and the basic calendar functions help you manage your workflow, bookings, and payments. It’s very modern – designed to easily manage a single calendar, but if you end up building your business, you can add more calendar functions for an additional fee. They have a lot of the same options as the other barbershop software, like basic marketing features, but there are some limits, especially if you are working by yourself.
The best component is that it’s free for individuals, so if you are working in a barbershop and you just want to manage your personal calendar, you can do so for free and then pay more money per month based on the marketing components you want, like adding text message or email notifications to your clients.
Features
- Appointments
- Website builder
- Marketing options

Availability
GlossGenius can only be used in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
Price
Plans start at $28/month, or $24/month with annual billing. Gold starts at $56/month ($48 annually) and adds features like an automated waitlist, while Platinum is designed for larger teams.
Automations
GlossGenius offers email and text marketing, client notifications, and other automations depending on your plan. The automated waitlist is available on the Gold plan and above.

User-Friendliness
GlossGenius is pretty simple to use, with a similar layout to Fresha and Mangomint, and similar colors, but you will find that the simplicity also extends to the features to which you have access.
If you like waitlist management features, GlossGenius is a good option. It lets you add people to the waitlist, especially those who want last-minute availability. As soon as there is a cancellation or an opening, they get notified.
Other options have something similar, like Mangomint and Boulevard, but in my experience, GlossGenius is the best for waitlist management for barbershop walk-ins.
GlossGenius is limited in its calendar. They offer a grid layout which is very simple to use and of course, free for a single calendar, so if you work by yourself as an independent barber in a larger barbershop, this might be a great way to go.
However, if you are looking specifically for software for your entire barber shop that manages the calendars for several employees and one location, you’ll want to look elsewhere.
Even with usability, you will face some problems here, as you cannot just click in a box and immediately add the details; you have to add a new appointment on a side column.
Recommended for: Independent barbers renting a chair who need a simple booking and payment option for a low cost.
Choice 4: Fresha– Best for barbershops that want marketing support

Fresha: A basic tool that has a lot of templates and marketing support through their customer-facing marketplace.
Fresha is the middle-of-the-road option for me. While it is definitely one of the best barbershop software options for some situations, it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles you get with Boulevard or Mangomint. However, it offers more than the free version of GlossGenius.
Where it stands out for me is the marketplace. Most of the other barbershop software doesn’t have this, so if you are looking not just for a calendar function with booking Integrations and payment processing, but also software that helps you promote your barbershop, this is it.
Features
- Scheduling
- Marketplace for booking
- Client management
- Email marketing

Availability
Available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Portugal, UAE, parts of Europe.
Price
$19.95/month for independent professionals or $14.95/month per bookable team member. Enterprise pricing is available for businesses with more than 20 team members.
I will say that Fresha seems like a very comprehensive solution at first glance, but if you want to process payments, set up features like Instagram and Facebook bookings, Google reservations, client loyalty options, or Google ratings, these are all things you have to add. They come with separate prices, so while it might be free to sign up as an independent barber, if you want to actually process payments and not just manage your calendar, you will have to add that function at a cost of 20 cents per transaction and an additional 2.29% for each transaction.
If you want your customers to be able to not only find your business on Google, Facebook, or Instagram, but book an appointment, that also comes at an extra fee, unlike Boulevard, which includes all of these integrations as part of your membership.
Automations
Fresha has marketing automations, report generation, and client management.

User-Friendliness
The interface is very easy to work with, but I don’t like that instead of actual words to delineate things like “Calendar” or “Marketing”, they just have small icons. Not all of those icons are as intuitive as you might think!
Recommended for: Barbershops that want to be able to list themselves on a customer-facing Marketplace and manage simple bookings.
Choice 5: Mindbody – Best for barbershops that need multi-language support and sales support

Mindbody: An industry staple that is available around the world, with a lot of language support and booking support.
Mindbody is well known, with a very functional software that offers many more features than you would get with Fresha, and a front-facing marketplace where you can post last-minute availability, online classes, or discounts when customers book package deals. However, the limits here are that the front-facing Marketplace is generally considered better suitable for Fitness classes, as not many barber shops offer things like online classes.
Features
- Payments
- Recurring appointments
- Scheduling
- Sync

Availability
Mindbody has broad international availability and expanded its Branded Web tools in 2026 to support 22 languages. It’s also no longer limited to larger organizations; Mindbody now offers plans for independent practitioners and small businesses as well as larger and multi-location operations.
Price
Starts at $79/month per location in the U.S.
Automations
Mindbody offers a lot of automations for setting up recurring salon appointments, data syncing, scheduling reminders, and sending targeted messages.

User-Friendliness
It has a very easy layout with a lot of menu options, and the marketplace is very beneficial for those looking to boost visibility.
Recommended for: International barbershops or those serving diverse clientele where language support is key, as well as those who want sales support.
Final Recommendations
If your barber shop has a lot of walk-ins, managing that wait list is one area where GlossGenius stands out. For client management, Boulevard takes the cake, with its front desk tools and newer AI Receptionist helping take some of the administrative burden off your team. If you want better marketing and discovery options, Fresha has the front-facing marketplace. Mangomint is a strong choice for hybrid teams and independent barbers, while Mindbody is worth considering if you want a platform that can scale with a larger or more international business.
Overall, Boulevard remains my top pick for barbershops that want a polished, fully integrated system for managing clients and day-to-day operations.
