Boulevard vs Meevo: The Real Differences You Should Know About

Last Updated on March 13, 2026 by Ewen Finser

Choosing the right salon management software can feel a lot like picking a new stylist. There’s a lot of promise upfront, but the real difference is in the experience. If you’re a busy salon owner, spa manager, or stylist, you already know that not all platforms are created equal, which is why I want to compare two players, Boulevard and Meevo. 

Boulevard is built for businesses like spas, salons, and Med spas. The platform and its app can help you grow your business and improve the client experience with tools for client management, appointment scheduling, marketing, and other business operations. 

Meevo is a similar salon and spa software that offers marketing, reporting, scheduling, and POS features. Their costs are about the same, their intended business audiences are roughly the same, but there are some very important ways in which they differ. Let’s check it out. 

My Fav: Boulevard comes with a lower up-front cost, and I think it has a much better value and ROI compared to Meevo. I like some of what Meevo offers, but Boulevard is a better long-term solution. 

Boulevard vs Meevo: Core Features at a Glance

Boulevard Features

• Intended for: Salons, Spas, Barbers, and Med Spas
• Front Desk: Column-based layout of appointments, calendar tools, and booking shortcuts
• HIPAA Compliance: BAA, secure data handling, including features like two-factor authentication, role-based permissions, and IP restrictions
• Contactless Check-in: Boulevard Duo app on iPad lets customers check in, complete digital forms, make contactless payments, and send a notification to staff of their arrival
• Prepayments: Businesses can enable deposit requirements and prepayments 
• Cost: Essentials: $158 per month; Premier: $263 per month; Prestige: $369 per month; Aesthetics Bundle $421 per month

Meevo Features

• Intended for: Salons, Spas, Cosmetology Schools, and Med Spas
• Front Desk: Tiles-and icons-based interface
• HIPAA Compliance: Offers a press release your company can use to say you are HIPAA compliant, with off-premise restrictions, data protection, and access controls
• Contactless Check-In: Contactless check-in for appointments, payments, and booking with mobile devices
• Prepayments: Clients can prepay for services, and businesses can set up appointment deposit requirements, as well as cancellation and no-show requirements
• Cost: Lite: $169 per month; Essentials: $299 per month; MeevoMD: $449 per month; Premier: $529 per month

Key Differences between Boulevard and Meevo

While Boulevard and Meevo share many of the core features, there are some very important differences.

Front Desk

I will start with the front desk, because this is one of the first places where the difference becomes obvious.

Meevo has a front desk that doesn’t really look like anything meant for a professional or a receptionist, but rather the tile layout for a Windows 11 operating system. You can move the tiles, and they all have little icons or quick figures like your online rating.

I guess these can be considered an easy way to take a quick glance at how your overall operations are doing, but I would consider it a waste of a front desk feature. It does nothing to help you manage the actual front desk, which should be focused on clients, appointments, and calendars for the day, the next few days, and the week.

Boulevard has a much more professional-looking front desk, and one that I think actually serves a purpose. Instead of a bunch of images and the X (formerly Twitter) equivalent single sentence of info, it has a very clean layout that lets you know what is happening in the moment: who has confirmed their appointments for the day, who has checked in, who has paid, what staff members are currently working, and similar information that is actionable and useful, especially as a stylist. 

Onboarding

Let me back up and focus on the onboarding, meaning the good stuff that happens before you start managing the front desk. 

This is one of the areas where Boulevard really stands out. As a salon owner, I’m not really looking for a platform that gives me a long list of features and then leaves me to figures them out on their own. I am busy running the business and doing hair, so I need support that feels personalized and doesn’t keep me on hold while I’m trying to foil.

That’s where Boulevard takes the cake for me. There aren’t basic features that are upsold as something other than what they are, or unnecessary extras that I’m paying for but definitely never using.

I want to be able to use everything that’s in the platform for which I’m paying, and that brings me back to onboarding.

Boulevard starts with a pre-closed consultation where you work with their sales team to make sure that it’s a good fit. They offer a dedicated onboarding specialist too, someone who works with you over the course of several weeks to make sure that you are familiar with the platform, setting everything up, creating your staff accounts, setting up the services and putting them in the right order, and managing multiple locations.

You can work with a data migration specialist if you are trying to transfer data from other systems, get help configuring your account settings, and go through the on-demand and live sessions through the Boulevard Academy, which are designed to last you several weeks.

In effect, all of the features and functions in the platform serve a purpose, and you’ll know exactly what that purpose is because of the comprehensive onboarding process.

Meevo, by comparison, really short changes their customers as far as onboarding is concerned. 

You can see in the picture above, in the final line item, that Meevo cuts the number of onboarding hours you receive each time you drop to a more affordable tier. So, if you have the Lite program for up to five users because you are a small salon, you get 6 hours of assistance implementing the entire software to your needs and only 2 hours of onboarding training.

If you want more training than that, you will literally have to pay hundreds of dollars more each month. Am I the only one who thinks that that’s a really shady way to save money? The customer clearly doesn’t come first for Meevo. 

Notifications

With Boulevard, I really like the front desk. I’ve made that clear. However, one of the main reasons I like the front desk is because it has very discreet notifications. If anything happens, on the top header next to the printed words, you will see a small purple mark.

You can see in the image above that while I’m working on creating an automated campaign for our business marketing, I’ve received five messages.

This is discreet and not disruptive to what I’m doing. I notice it, but it doesn’t pop up and block my screen, make a sound, or otherwise disrupt my train of thought. Since my trains of thoughts are very short, this is important.

Meevo prides itself on offering a lot of notifications. 

• If someone makes a payment, you get notified.
• If someone makes an appointment online, you get notified. 
• If you have low inventory, you get notified. 

This seems like a lot of notifications, and while it’s nice to be able to check on that information, I prefer the fact that Boulevard will have that information popping up in the respective section of the software without disrupting my day. 

Messages

I want to make a quick note about the message center. 

This ties back to my love of the Boulevard front desk feature, and notifications by extension. Boulevard makes it easy to communicate in real time through the message center. From a single place, you can see all of the automated emails or text messages that have been sent to your customers for things like appointment reminders, as well as any other responses they generate.

If, for example, you send an appointment reminder three days before a haircut and your client asks if they can move the appointment from Wednesday to Thursday, that entire conversation appears in the same message center. That makes it much easier to manage communication and respond from one place.

Chairside Checkout

One of the things that stands out with Meevo is what they call “Chairside Checkout.” This feature lets staff use a mobile phone or tablet and bring it directly to clients at their chair. Once a service is finished, clients can use that device to save their preferences, book a future appointment, or add other products and services for an efficient checkout process without having to leave the chair.

This sounds really great at face value. However, it also means staff require need access to a mobile phone or tablet, whether that is provided by the business or supplied personally. This can add an extra cost, especially to independent employees who might feel pressured to use their personal devices. 

Marketing

Marketing is important for any business, and this is one of the areas where I found the fewest differences between Boulevard and Meevo. 

With Meevo, for example, when you click on the marketing section, you will see features like:

• Listings Management
• 5-Star Ratings
• Reporting
• Social Posting
• Reputation Management
• Segmented Customer Lists
• Automated Email Campaigns

Almost all of this is available with Boulevard too, if you know where to look. I would say reputation management and e-learning are the two categories where Meevo stands apart. 

Meevo offers an online presence management tool where you are able to not only post updates and manage your listings but also respond to reviews on places like Google Maps or Facebook, all from the same location. It also makes it easier for you to update key information about your company, like hours of operations, locations, and holiday changes to places like Yelp, Facebook, Amazon Alexa, Google, and other places where you know customers look for answers about your business.

While Boulevard certainly has a robust marketing platform, it does not have the same kind of centralized reputation management.

Conclusion

Boulevard comes with a slightly lower cost up front, plus I think it offers an overall better value and ROI compared to Meevo. Meevo does offer some nice features, especially if reputation management is high on your list, but I keep coming back to the fact that its pricing is tied so directly to the level of onboarding support you get. So if you are trying to save money with a lower-tier plan, you may also be giving up a lot of the help you need to actually get started.

Boulevard just feels like the best fit for actually running your business day to day. The front desk is cleaner, the notifications are less disruptive, and the onboarding gives you more support from the start. At the end of the day, Boulevard is the one I’d pick.

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• Boulevard Software Review
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