Last Updated on May 22, 2025 by Ewen Finser
Over the last several years, I have worked with a variety of booking platforms and client management software. Boulevard offered a more robust service where you didn’t have to worry about the nickel and dime game, but now GlossGenius offers a somewhat more gamified alternative.
In terms of what they offer, both services let you build a good client experience with online booking, client notifications, forms and waivers, and client management. They also both let you manage your business by handling payments, scheduling and calendar, generating reports, dealing with inventory, time tracking, and payroll, as well as using AI tools.
You can build your brand with both of them using online booking options with social media platforms as well as custom website builders, and grow your business with marketing campaigns and online packages. So where do they differ? And how do you know which one is best for you? Let’s review Boulevard vs. GlossGenius.
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Which is Better: Boulevard or GlossGenius?
Boulevard is better for massage studios, nail salons, med spas, barbers, spas, and traditional salons, particularly those located in the United States, who need management software that goes beyond scheduling and booking and includes access to automated marketing options, top-tier customer service, payroll, and analytics. GlossGenius is great for those who are soloists or in a small team, and like using their phones exclusively to manage a business, with icons and one-click buttons.
Boulevard vs. GlossGenius
Boulevard is an all-in-one option specifically for med spas, spas, barbers, and salons, one that has all of the key features you need to manage bookings, scheduling, inventory, and marketing without a bulk of unnecessary features you never use.
GlossGenius is a comprehensive platform as well designed for yoga studios, personal trainers, tanning artists, tattoo and piercing artists, massage therapists, makeup artists, Med spas, hairdressers, barbers, and estheticians.
Pricing
Let’s start with pricing. GlossGenius offers three main levels:
- Standard Plan: $24 per month for solo pros
- Gold Plan: $48 per month for up to 10 people
- Platinum Plan: $148 per month for teams bigger than 10
The standard plan has online booking, built-in payment processing, unlimited appointment reminders, free email marketing and transfers, client management, and inventory management.
If you upgrade, you get access to the waitlist features, which I’ll talk more about, online forms and waivers, premium website designs, booking options with Google integration, which I’ll also talk more about, auto-generated email marketing, and rebooking reminders.
When you get to the most expensive level, you also get premium customer support and Google marketing tracking, and analytics. They list a lot of stuff that all three of these plans will have at some unknown point in the future (all listed as “coming soon”), so at present, what you see is what you get.
Plan Add-Ons
Then you have the plan add ons. GlossGenius doesn’t charge anything extra for HIPAA coverage, but you still have to request it and sign up for it as an additional service, which seems odd.
The rest of the plan add-ons come with a price. Payroll, for example, is an option, but it costs $40 per month in addition to which it is $6 for every chair.
And just like the three pricing levels and their respective features, the plan add-ons also have a list of “coming soon” options like the MedSpa package, which doesn’t have any information on what it would cost, what it involves, or when it can be expected.
Now let’s look at Boulevard. They have four tiers for salons and spas, and two for medspas. Let’s compare the salon and spa options:
- Essentials: $158 per month for up to five professionals
- Premier: $263 per month for unlimited professionals.
- Prestige: $369 per month for more sophisticated businesses
- Enterprise: A bespoke plan for large, complex organizations.
Now, here’s the catch: Boulevard might cost more at face value, but it also includes everything. You don’t have to pay a minimum monthly plan and an additional amount based on how many stylists you have in your salon. There are two situations where you don’t get every single feature included if you only have the beginner, essentials plan: you don’t get the book now option through social media pages, nor do you get online forms and waivers. These come with all other tiers, though.
Booking
Booking is one of the most important client-facing aspects of a salon or spa management software. With GlossGenius, clients don’t have to download an app or sign up for anything to book an appointment. According to their website, businesses that use GlossGenius have a 75% rebooking rate and a 35% increase in bookings.
A big part of that is because they accept bookings through Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Yelp directly.
Boulevard has a similar setup where you can integrate a “Book Now” button to your business social media pages, including Google and Yelp, and it links directly to a self booking overlay but it’s only available to Premier and Enterprise subscriptions so if you are willing to pay for comprehensive, talk to your service, this is part of it. Clients who use bookings see 71% fewer no shows and late cancellations, with 16% more services booked.
Waitlist
Boulevard offers a waitlist feature where clients who are looking on the calendar and can’t find an available appointment can join the waitlist. As the stylist or esthetician, you can manually add someone to the waitlist from your calendar or in the other direction.
GlossGenius has an automated waitlist as well, which works very similarly and sends notifications to clients if an available appointment opens up or if someone else cancels. What I like about GlossGenius is that team members have management over their waitlists, and they can use a toggle feature to indicate whether they are available for booking and want to use the waitlist function.
Schedule
GlossGenius has some unique scheduling benefits:
- Gap Time: This is a feature where you can set a specific gap time in between clients so that as the stylist or professional, you have a break to use the restroom, grab a cup of coffee, clean your station, or just do some deep breathing.
- Auto-Fill: They also offer an auto-fill, which automatically fills in relevant details for any repeat booking. As the client I absolutely love this because it basically does a way with any excuse for an esthetician or stylist asking me as the client “Hey, so what color did you use last time you were here?” or my saying “Please cut it the same as last time” and being asked “What did you do before? Was I your stylist?”
- Processing Time: A built-in function lets you take advantage of processing time, so when a client has downtime like waiting 30 minutes for a root smudge to set, you can book another appointment, like a quick child haircut, during that time frame.
Boulevard is somewhat similar. When you click on a given appointment within the calendar, it pulls up key information for the client:
When you click on the client’s name, you have key details including notes, medications, allergies, as well as an appointment history where you can see every service they’ve had before, any accommodations that might be required, as well as private messages and membership details. GlossGenius might have auto-fill info on repeat bookings and a quick client profile, but you have access to a lot more information in one place on Boulevard.
However, one of the things that I really like about Boulevard, which GlossGenius doesn’t seem to have, is what’s called ”Smart Scheduling Order”. This is where companies can arrange the settings for the order of operations that would apply to any available services, after which, whenever a client books multiple services, the order is automatically updated based on those arrangements. For example:
- A platinum blonde client with 6 months of roots wants to dye her hair light brown with highlights and get a haircut. All of those services would be automatically scheduled in order: A haircut to remove unnecessary length, hair dye on the roots to bring the color down to a lighter blonde, hair dye on the rest of the hair to bring the color up to a darker brown to match, highlights, and then a root smudge to blend it all together.
- Note: If there were any issues like the client not booking a root smudge, this platform makes it easy to confirm the appointment, ask for pictures of where the hair is now versus where they want it to be in terms of color, and then make recommendations for any additional appointments like a root smudge that the stylist can add to the calendar.
- A client wants a massage and a facial. Their appointment would be automatically booked so that the massage came first, and delicate skin following a facial wouldn’t be damaged by being face down on a massage chair.
Notifications
Both GlossGenius and Boulevard send automated notifications to clients with a built-in communication function.
However, I will say that a major problem, one readily available on their website (as seen in the screenshot below), is that built-in appointment reminders and confirmations have grammatical errors (“you’re” really?). Pretty embarrassing coming from a professional.
By comparison, the same automated messages are sent in the Boulevard platform, and you have access to all of them, where you can have real-time communication via text or email, including auto confirmations, changes, and additional services. The best part? Boulevard can differentiate between “your/you’re.”
User Interface/Layout
For me, one of the first things I consider is the visual layout of the toolbars, whether they are headers, footers, or drop-down menus along either side.
Toolbars
GlossGenius relies a lot on icons, which are quite small; when you look at the menu, you don’t have any words to indicate what you’re clicking on, you just have images, and you have to know what they are associated with.
This isn’t inherently bad, but I prefer Boulevard, where the header has a few images like a bell, which we all know is a notification, and a phone, which we all know is to make calls, but the rest use actual words like:
- Calendar
- Front Desk
- Messages
- Sales
- Clients
- Reports
- Marketing
Calendar
The calendar layout between the two is very similar, where you can pick a specific day and you will see a grid format from morning until afternoon, and then from left to right, the appointments that each stylist or team member has.
Each team member is given a specific color, so the drop-down columns get listed side-by-side in different colors for different team members.
Below you can see the color calendar layout (and the small icons along the side bar) for Gloss Genius:
A minor but important difference is that Boulevard has the name and picture of each team member directly above their corresponding calendar column and that picture takes on the same tone as their schedule (i.e. Julia’s picture is yellow and so is her column of appointments while Eddie’s picture is tinted in bright blue and so is his column).
I also prefer the color scheme of Boulevard. I don’t personally understand the appeal of pastels, which seem to be heavily used by a lot of spa and salon management software. The pastels make me think of a kindergarten classroom or Easter, and I don’t need the color schemes I use in a professional capacity to be infantilized.
Payments
The way they handle internal payment processing is a little different.
Boulevard automatically batches all payments each business day and initiates deposits the next day into the corresponding bank accounts for individual team members. Each of the payments received throughout the day gets allocated to the team member and automatically processed.
GlossGenius offers similar instant payouts with unlimited transfers in under 1 minute, but each transfer is processed with a flat fee. So, individual team members will see the accumulation of the money they have earned, and it’s up to them to choose when they want to get a payout, knowing that each time is going to have a separate processing fee.
Loans
And on the note of money, one thing that is unique about GlossGenius compared to Boulevard is that, in addition to instant payouts and payroll options, they have loans. Eligibility for business loans to your spa, salon, or other facility is based on your payment history with the product, and there is a minimum repayment required, which is automatically taken from your sales, but if your sales are insufficient, you’re required to meet the minimum threshold out of pocket.
According to their website, there are no late fees or collateral obligations, and no compounding interest, just a flat loan amount and a repayment rate per transaction until that loan is repaid.
If you are looking to substantially grow your business and you don’t want to go to a bank like most adults, and you stick with GlossGenius for several years, that can be a great option to have in the back pocket although admittedly I would be concerned about the category of loan that comes from venture-capitalist-backed-businesses, and the longevity of the company itself, as it’s owned by Danielle Cohen-Shohet but wasn’t started until 2016.
Conclusion
Boulevard’s platform doesn’t contain irrelevant data in the reports it generates, nor does it have overly complex features that no one ends up using. It has exactly what you need, where you need it in an easy-to-digest fashion.
GlossGenius has a lot more, particularly the gamification of the experience for stylists and professionals just as much as customers who are booking services; the layout uses gamified sounds and buttons for things like income transfer as well as gamified icons within the platform, and makes things like business loans simpler than they probably should be.
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