Last Updated on May 11, 2025 by Ewen Finser
Boulevard is a US-based software for spas and salons that are scaling and want a fully integrated POS. It has a modern, user-friendly interface with built-in marketing, ecommerce, and inventory.
Zenoti is an enterprise-level tool that is ideal for privacy-focused, HIPAA-compliant med spas. Some of the best features it has are smart automations and an AI-powered phone system.
But which one is best for large organizations or small enterprises? How should you choose?
Boulevard vs. Zenoti: Which is Better?
Up front, I think Zenoti is better for large-scale, enterprise-level med spas that need features such as availability across multiple countries, Zoom recordings, and report generation to be sent across multiple locations or departments.
For everyone else, especially those businesses that are trying to scale without having to deal with rising costs for each new employee, Boulevard is absolutely the best. The prices are almost exactly the same, but you get so much more with Boulevard and a much, much better platform to work with.
Quick Note:
While the pricing is almost exactly the same ($420 vs $425 per month average), availability is not. Zenoti is available in over 50 countries worldwide, but Boulevard is only available in the United States, and the platform is only available in English.
So, right off the bat, if that is a key feature for your business, availability in other countries, there isn’t much else to compare.
But if that doesn’t stop you, then let’s see some more about how they compare side-by-side.
User Interface
Let’s start with the first thing you see, literally.
When you open the software, especially when you first start your day, it should be a gentle transition, not something that, when you open it, visually punches you in the face.
So, to that end, I really appreciate that Zenoti doesn’t try to gamify their platform like so many comparative software options today. Instead, everything is set with a 1990s era blue for the menus and headers, a white background, and a combination of dull orange and gray colored font.
They use words for things like appointments, reports, inventory, and sales along the top header, much the same as Boulevard does, and along the left-hand drop-down menu, so it’s not just a series of icons. You can see how it looks here:
What I don’t like, though, is that all of the text is in CAPS. All of the menu options along the sides and top are in CAPS, and it seems like the software is screaming at me.
Even when you get deep into the nitty-gritty of the software, like adding a new employee, it still screams at you (WHAT SERVICES DO THEY OFFER? WHAT IS THEIR COMMISSION?):
Boulevard’s software is not screaming at me. It’s talking to me in a gentle, cubicle-appropriate decibel level that does not violate OSHA standards.
Can you see all that regular font along the top and the side? You can just hear it talking so much softer, right?
In addition to the tone (and perceived volume) of Boulevard, I prefer the gentleness of the font juxtaposed by the lighter backdrop. Boulevard clearly spent a lot of time and money not just crowdsourcing the brightest most eye-catching colors but making sure that any bright colors were used in as judicious a way as possible, like simple toggles or the notification icons above “Messages” or the most important buttons you might need when visiting a respective page like booking a new service or adding a new client.
Onboarding
On a related note, the onboarding processes can be a bit of a nightmare with Zenoti because of how user-unfriendly (we should make that a term just for Zenoti) the layout is. I’ve sat through a lot of their onboarding, and it is several hours of individually recorded online training sessions for things like booking a new customer, processing a payment for a customer, applying a gift card, and so on.
It’s incredibly dull and mind-numbing.
You can’t even really take in that much information staring at a screen all day.
Boulevard offers dedicated onboarding specialists to all of their customers.
Yes. All of them.
Instead of giving you a link to a YouTube playlist, these specialists work with you over the span of three to four weeks, providing about 15 full hours of help with your transition and onboarding process so that you know all the ins and outs of the software and everything you are paying for.
Booking
From an internal perspective, as the stylist, esthetician, or business owner trying to book a service, Zenoti gets really messy and has chunky menus and graphics that remind me of the AOL/MySpace era:
I don’t really need to say more.
Booking on Boulevard doesn’t cause nearly the same headache:
Again, this platform only uses bright colors where absolutely appropriate to draw the eye, like booking a new appointment in the top right corner. Beyond that, colors are simple and dignified in a way that doesn’t overwhelm. Booking a new appointment, by clicking on that purple box, opens the pop-up menu you see in the bottom right-hand corne,r making it very simple to add a new client or book an appointment for an existing client without having to leave the current window.
Reports
Zenoti offers a lot of internal reports, like:
- Sales reports for specific time frames, categories, or employees
- Individual employee sales performance reports
- Appointment reports
- Attendance summary reports
- Turnaways reports where guests didn’t show up
- Booking productivity reports
- Employee sales metrics
- Zoom meeting metrics
This all sounds great, especially when you need to analyze key information dealing with employee activity, sales and revenue, or operations. However, the dashboard is an overwhelming array of Excel spreadsheet copycats that make my eyeballs melt like this one on employee management:
Or this one on inventory:
With Boulevard, you have the option to customize reports based on the type of data, and how you want the rows to be grouped and what columns you want to see so as the business owner I can actually modify the columns to look at more detailed information to see how many appointments in a given week were pre booked vs. self-booked and what the total service vs. tip sales were:
This layout looks less like PowerPoint and Excel had a baby out of wedlock and more like a quick summary of how my employees are doing that week.
Equally important though, is that small businesses or even medium-sized businesses with a dozen or so employees don’t necessarily need all of those features, nor do they need all of those potential reports.
What makes Boulevard stand out is that it was designed by industry professionals who knew some of the same frustrations we all share when it comes to things like booking platforms, and got rid of extraneous reports that have information no one actually needs and did away with unnecessary management tools that were just there to show off.
Customer Features
While all of the internal components are important it’s equally important to see how these two platforms compare in terms of customer related features.
Gift Cards/Loyalty Packages
So, when it comes to payments, Boulevard makes it easy to process payments immediately or to schedule automated fees for cancellations or no shows. However, Zenoti lets you create packages and incorporate gift cards with relative ease (though, remember that each of these steps has a nearly two hour long training video associated with them).
Invoices
With Boulevard, you take payment when an appointment happens, and then you can automatically send invoices after the fact to the client’s email address.
With Zenoti, their interface does have a drag and drop option so you can change certain settings, how your business sees fit, and send things like electronic invoices.
As they are designed more for HIPAA-compliant med spas, you do have access to certain features that Boulevard doesn’t offer, like prescription capture for those who need prescription medications as part of their services.
AI-Phone
One of the things I really like about Zenoti is the AI-powered phone. This is one of their internal automations that’s designed to make things a lot easier; instead of keeping someone full-time at the front desk to answer phones, the AI tool can handle basic phone needs like messages, appointments, and company information.
Boulevard does have a phone function built into the platform, so when people call to request information or book appointments, it gets routed through the platfor,m and you can answer it directly or call customers directly from that platform as well. So this is a little different and it’s less proactive, but it also keeps everything in one plac,e including your phone calls.
Client Info
Boulevard makes it easy to click on client information as the esthetician or stylist who has the appointment. So, if I show up for work and I have an 8:30 appointment, I can click on the name in the calendar function and it will pull up all the client data that we have on my appointment so I can see when their last appointment was, what type of appointment they had, how long they’ve been with us, how much money they’ve spent, and so forth.
Zenoti has minimal reporting in this regard. You can only look back on scheduled appointments up to 1 month in the past so, if you have an appointment for a laser peel or a chemical peel, chances are your customer didn’t get one last week so if they got one a few months ago, you won’t be able to see that information when you click on the appointment in the calendar.
Marketing
Zenoti has a marketing subsection, but what’s it all about?
They offer automated marketing with things like loyalty rewards, upsells, and cross-sells as well as email and text automations, web store integration for those that sell products on their website, and multi-location campaign management. So, if you sell products on your website and you have an enterprise-level organization with multiple locations, this can be great because it has the same types of marketing options, segmentation, and automations as Boulevard, but you can link them across different locations.
Now, I really like how easy Boulevard makes their automations, particularly proactive automations that include things like lost customer marketing attempts, birthday promotions, and email blasts that get automatically triggered when an individual esthetician or stylist has 30% or more of their schedule available for a given day or a given week. They also have a lot of customized templates for your marketing efforts, so you don’t even need to employ a marketing team to make something that’s eye-catching but sophisticated.
Now let’s look at some bad news:
Zenoti is not built for batch marketing efforts. So, remember that with Boulevard, you can send a blast via email or text to all of your customers or specific customer segments when there is a lot of unexpected availability or a high number of cancellations in one day, or simply when you want to promote something. Zenoti doesn’t have that option, and you actually have to send each text or email blast individually, and that can eat up an absurd amount of time.
Summing Up
Side by side, this Boulevard vs. Zenoti comparison has found that Zenoti is really best for large-scale enterprises, those organizations that have multiple if not dozens of locations in separate countries and need to be able to link all of that data and generate internal reports while also keeping costs down through things like AI-phone services for appointment booking.
However, for smaller organizations (salons or med spas with more than 3 locations, growing staff) that are US-based and want support in a single platform that does away with extraneous software or add-on pricing, Boulevard is a great option. Having worked with it side by side, I cannot stress enough how much easier it is to use the Boulevard software, how much calmer I feel navigating all of the internal component,s and how visually appealing it all is, not to mention the fact that you get so much bang for your buck.