Last Updated on August 7, 2025 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.
The quick breakdown: Boulevard is a platform designed for businesses like spas, salons, and Med spas. The platform and its corresponding app can help you grow your business and improve the client experience with things like client management, appointment scheduling, marketing, and other business operations.
Meevo is a comparative salon and spa software that offers marketing, reporting, scheduling, and POS. 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 slightly lower up-front cost, and it also 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 Features
- Intended for: Salons, Spas, Barbers, and Med Spas
- Front Desk: Designed with a columnar breakdown of appointments, calendar, and booking phone icon
- HIPAA Compliance: BAA, secure data handling, including features like two-factor authentication, role-based permissions, and IP restrictions
- Contactless Check-in: Boulevard Duo app running on an 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, Cosmetology Schools, and Med Spas
- Front Desk: Designed with tiles and icons
- 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
Boulevard vs. Meevo
As I said, while there are a lot of similarities in terms of things like HIPAA compliance and having a front desk feature, there are some very important differences.
Front Desk
I will start with the front desk; this difference is more aesthetic than anything. 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
Now, let me back up and focus on the onboarding; the good stuff that happens before you start managing the front desk.
One of the areas where Boulevard really stands out is its onboarding. As a salon owner, I’m not really an operational person. I am busy running the business and doing hair, so I need support that is personalized and doesn’t keep me on hold while I’m trying to foil.
I also want a platform that doesn’t have overly complex features but instead gives me exactly what I’m looking for, and that’s where I have found Boulevard takes the cake.
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 is unique; You can start 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 themselves 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 and not disrupting my day.
Messages
I’m going to make a quick note about the messages.
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 with 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 3 days before a haircut and your client asks if it can be rescheduled from Wednesday to Thursday, all of that pops up in the same message center, making it easy to facilitate and then respond from one place.
Chairside Checkout
One of the things that stands out with Meevo is what they call the “Chairside Checkout.” This is where you can use a mobile phone or tablet and bring it directly to your clients at their chair. When customers or clients are done with their service, they can use that tablet or mobile phone 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 that all staff require the use of a mobile phone or tablet provided by the company or that they provide themselves. This can add an extra cost, especially to independent employees who might feel pressured to use their personal device.
Marketing
Marketing is very important for any business, and this is where I have found the fewest differences in terms of what is offered.
With Meevo, for example, when you click on the marketing section, you will see a list of things like:
- Listings Management
- 5-Star Ratings
- Reporting
- Social Posting
- Reputation Management
- Segmented Customer Lists
- Automated Email Campaigns
Almost all of this is offered with Boulevard if you know where to look. I will say that reputation management and e-learning are the two categories where Meevo stands apart.
This platform 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. This 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 reputation management option where you can choose to respond to reviews, flag them, or otherwise manage your reputation across multiple platforms like Tripadvisor, Yelp, or Facebook in one place.
Conclusion
Boulevard comes with a slightly lower cost up front, plus it also has a much better value and ROI compared to Meevo. If you want to actually get your money’s worth, just remember that Meevo’s software pricing directly correlates to the level of onboarding support you get, so if you are trying to save money with a less expensive subscription plan, you only get 2 hours of onboarding training access. That seems like a pretty unfair way to cut costs as a company.
If you are desperate for reputation management components as part of your booking software, then Meevo might make the cut, but if you want your management software to just manage and do so effectively, stick with Boulevard.