The Ultimate Booker Software Review (2025)

Big businesses trust Booker, and their software suite has all the major headline features of smaller and

Core features like appointment booking, reporting, inventory management, POS, and online booking are all there on the checklist.

Booker even has some standout extra benefits like its built-in email marketing suite and Mindbody Explore integration, giving you access to a huge, highly motivated audience of potential clients that trust the platform to find businesses that provide the services they want.

But that’s not the whole story.

Some issues are lurking beneath the surface – some significant flaws that we’ll cover that have driven away salon and spa owners in droves after discovering how they affected their businesses.

Today, we’ll look at every bit of Booker — the good, the bad, and the ugly — so that you can decide whether it is the right software for your business or a risk you’d rather not take.

So, Is Booker the Best Salon Software for Me?

Booker is my recommendation for new and growing salon and spa businesses with overhead to spare that need integrated marketing tools and must have a first-party online marketplace to drive new client acquisition.

Booker is just one of our many top salon software picks for this year. To see our full list of the Best Salon Software, check it out here.

Booker Features

The remainder of this article will walk you through a detailed look at the features and tools offered by Booker.

The intent of this review is to allow you to experience what it’s actually like for your business as a Booker customer and to better understand if the platform offers the tools and support you need to grow and succeed.

You can use the links below to navigate directly to the topics that are most relevant to you.

• POS & Payments
• Online Booking
• Appointment Calendar
• Client Data Management
• Email Marketing Tools
• Staff Management
• Business Reports
• Inventory Management
• Memberships & Gift Cards
• Mobile Booking App

As with all Booker features, the customer has differing options based on which “version” they are using.

Booker has both a “Version 1” and “Version 2” of the application. Version 1 is a legacy version of the software that lacks modern POS features that Version 2 offers, like the convenient “slide-out” side panel that allows you to complete a transaction without leaving the screen you are currently on.

Booker is compatible with a range of credit card processors, which means you can effectively shop around for the lowest price for a card reader and credit card processing fees – competition is on your side.

Compatible partners include First Data, Bank of America, Payroc, 3C Payments, Worldpay, Sublyme Payments, and more. PayPal can also be accepted online and in-store. A variety of card readers and terminals can be used with Booker to accept payments.

Booker’s tight integration with payment processors will automatically link payments to inventory and update the system inventory accordingly when items are sold.

The platform also offers industry-standard features like multi-merchant accounts and direct deposit.

For a closer look at the best salon POS and credit card processing options available right now, take a look at our list of the Best Spa and Salon POS Systems and check out the Best Credit Card Processors for Salons & Spas.

Booker by Mindbody also offers a first-party integrated payment processing service called Mindbody Payments (available only in the US & Canada).

This service collects payments through your Booker system and organizes payouts that are deposited into your bank account, similar to offerings from competitors such as Boulevard Payments or Mangomint Pay.

Credit card processing rates listed below are what customers can expect if they decide to sign up for Mindbody Payments:

Region	Online or on-file: Card-not-present (CNP)	In-person: Card-present (CP)	ACH/DD/SEPA/EFT	Chargeback fees
US	3.5% + .15 USD per transaction	Desktop terminal or mobile card reader: 2.75% per transaction	Not yet available (ACH can be added by contacting support)	$15
Canada	2.89% + .25 CAD per transaction	2.39% + .10 CAD per transaction. Interac: .15 CAD per transaction flat fee	Not yet available	$25

Mindbody Payments POS Hardware Compatibility

Which card reader can you use with Booker?

You can use some third-party POS & card reader devices such as the Clover Mini terminal relatively seamlessly with Booker as well.

All currently supported hardware at the time of writing is listed below:

Desktop/Laptop Hardware	Account version required
Star Receipt Printer	Version 1
Star LAN Printer	Version 1
STAR TSP 100 Eco Receipt Printer	Version 1
WisePOS E Reader	Version 2
Stripe Reader M2 Mobile card reader	Version 2
BBPOS Chipper 2x Mobile card reader	Version 2
Clover Mini	Version 2
APG Cash Drawer	Available to both
MagTek DynaMag Card Swiper	Available to both
MagTek iDynamo Mobile card reader	Available to both
Barcode Scanner	Available to both

As we touched on in the section above, if you want to have a custom booking experience on your own website, you can.

Booker’s API allows you to design custom booking sites for your business instead of using Booker’s standard online booking experience if you’re willing to shell out the extra $11 per month on top of your monthly subscription fee.

Otherwise, your online booking experience will take the form of a “Book Now” button that lives on your page and redirects to Booker’s online booking site (rather than on your own website).

While API access is not required to use online booking through Booker, the online booking experience without it is not quite on par with the robust online booking widgets that live on your website and offer a much more seamless client experience which most of its competitors now offer (often at a better price).

Mindbody Explore and the Mindbody App

Booker by Mindbody offers access to Mindbody Explore: an online marketplace and mobile app where potential clients can discover and book services with businesses in their area.

Owners can list their business and services in the Mindbody app, as well as share promotions and other details with users looking for related services.

To create a Mindbody Listing, business owners can navigate to the Marketing tab in their Booker account and select the Mindbody Listing submenu.

From there, you can edit your business information, confirm your location on Google Maps, upload a logo, and agree to opt-in to listing your business on Mindbody’s marketplace on the Mindbody Explore site and customer-facing Mindbody app.

Booker’s calendar is simple and utilitarian, if a little uninspiring.

In a way, that’s both a pro and a con.

Details of the calendar screen are easy enough to distinguish with grey and bright yellow appointments, and booking icons (for confirmed, checked-in, same-day appointments, etc.) are easily visible on the top right corner of the appointment itself.

By the default 15-minute-increment view, the calendar looks a little cramped and may easily obscure client names and appointment info for shorter appointments. In this case, hovering over the appointment with your mouse cursor allows you to see a bubble view of all the details.

Likewise, you can adjust the calendar time zoom level so that you can more easily see appointment details at a glance, however this will change the increments of time the schedule is broken down by, so keep that in mind when booking.

You can right-click (or Control-click on Mac) on an appointment to open a contextual dropdown menu with options to confirm, check-in, check-out, cancel, or edit the appointment. You can also move an appointment to the clipboard, view or print invoices, add to a group, and more from this menu.

The calendar features several view options in a dropdown menu at the top left of the schedule. You can filter by staff, by room, and by other more intricate custom view options such as by staff per week.

You also have the option to print appointments and staff itineraries in the upper left of the screen.

Booking a new appointment can be done by clicking on the time you wish to book or by creating a new order via the Orders tab – however, I discovered that the same quirk I first encountered back in 2016 still exists in Booker, just as it did back in my days of using it in the salon.

When attempting to add a new client into the system via the Order pane on the right side of the screen, any name you type into the Enter Customer field does not carry over once you press the New Customer button.

This means that even though you are required to type in a name to access the (add) New Customer button, that name will need to be immediately retyped in the New Customer window once you click that button.

Every time you add a new customer this way (for instance, by selling retail products to a walk-in customer), you will have to enter their name twice.

Not a deal-breaker by any means, but it is surprising to see that such obvious and ever-present bugs have not been fixed after several years.

Booker’s client management tools within the app look a little bit old-school but offer quite a bit of information that can be filtered and searched by almost any criteria.

On the Manage Customers screen, you can search by customer name, email, phone number, or member number, export client data via CSV, and browse your entire client list in column format.

You can also add or remove columns and customize the view to filter by any criteria you collect for your clients by clicking the wrench on the top right of the pane.

Inside a client record, you can view progress notes, recent appointments and transactions, product purchases, and active entries that the client currently has on the waitlist, as well as a total lifetime sales summary for that client.

Managing Client Reviews and Feedback

Let’s talk about client review management.

Booker offers some genuinely helpful tools for prompting, gathering, and sharing client reviews through its Marketing Suite.

With it, you can enable settings that automate the relationship management process by scheduling automatic ratings request emails or texts that get sent to clients shortly after their visit.

You can also configure settings to ask clients to post their feedback to social media sites after submitting their review, and you can configure Booker to auto-publish any review with 4.5 stars or higher to the review widget on your website.

Booker also offers the ability to automatically flag reviews with low scores so you can reach out to the client and attempt to recover the situation.

Booker Software Appointment Notifications & Alerts

In the Marketing tab, Booker customers can set up automated emails and SMS notifications to remind, confirm, and cancel appointments, send “thank you”s, notify clients on the waitlist when they’ve been booked, send birthday communications, and more.

While some email communications can be customized, you cannot currently edit the content of your SMS communications in Booker. This means that you are limited to the prewritten scripts created by Booker for all automated communications.

Likewise, text and email communication features are currently limited on some plans, so consult with your representative to verify messaging limitations for the plans you’re considering before committing to the mandatory 12-month contract.

At the time of this review, 2-way appointment confirmations and cancellations are not available on the Starter plan, and SMS appointment reminders are limited to 3000 SMS communications per month.

	Starter	Accelerate	Ultimate	Ultimate Plus
Customer Profile, Schedule, Visit and Purchase History, Account Balances	X	X	X	X
Customer Staff / Gender Preferences	X	X	X	X
SMS Appointment Reminders	3000 SMS per month	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Advanced Staff Notification via SMS		X	X	X
2-way SMS Appointment Confirmations		X	X	X
2-way SMS Appointment Cancellations		X	X	X

Booker 2-Way Client Communication

Booker also offers 2-way client communication through its Messenger and Messenger[ai] feature.

Messenger is available on Booker’s Ultimate software package and Messenger[ai] is available on the Ultimate Plus package.

Software package	Features available
Ultimate software packages include Messenger	What’s included: • The account owner has their own login • An assigned SMS number • Messages are in Live Chat status so all responses are made from the front desk Not included: • Messenger[ai] bot, web widget, or Call Forwarding.
Ultimate Plus software packages include Messenger[ai]	Ultimate Plus packages include all the basic features of Messenger and these additional features: • Messenger[ai] bot • Web widget • Assigned Call Forwarding and SMS numbers Set up for these features are covered during your onboarding training.
For Accelerate and Ultimate packages	• Messenger[ai] can be added to your package as an add-on.

Booker’s Marketing Suite includes a modular email builder – a very similar (if a bit less elegant) feature to the one we covered in our Boulevard Salon Software review.

Like that feature, Booker’s Marketing Suite features a simplified three-step creation process for email campaigns and communications.

Step 1 features a customizable template library where premade and previously-made email designs can be loaded for editing.

Step 2 is where you can access the built-in email editor, where you have the ability to drag and drop text, image, and formatting blocks to build out your communications easily, with no need for coding or HTML experience.

Step 3 allows you to name and schedule your email campaign and send it with just a couple of clicks.

Overall, Booker’s email marketing suite is a bit less robust than some of the other offerings from competing salon and spa software suites, but it is functional and allows you to create audiences and communicate with your opt-in marketing list with its tools.

Booker defines employee profiles by active and inactive statuses.

On Accelerate and higher-tier plans, there is no limit on the number of active employees, but the Starter plan is limited to 15 active employees at one time. All plans can have unlimited inactive employees.

Employee schedules can be created and managed in the Schedules tab.

Schedules can be specified by date range (by calendar week) and a regular weekly schedule can be set as well, however, the regular schedule is limited to a one-week interval, so more complicated work schedules that involve odd weeks off or monthly variations are not an option in Booker currently.

Payroll can also be managed in the system, and Booker offers the ability to run a mixed-compensation-model business across commission, booth rental, and hourly pay models.

Reporting is broken down into two primary categories in Booker’s system: the Business Intelligence Dashboard and the All Reports screen.

Booker’s Business Intelligence Dashboard gives at-a-glance metrics to help categorize sources of sales revenue, customers/clients, and appointment bookings.

The Business Intelligence Dashboard will automatically aggregate data based on appointment and order “Sources” entered when booking an appointment so that you can keep track of customer acquisition, attrition, and retention on weekly and monthly schedules.

The All Reports screen is your hub for detailed reporting. Everything from cash register- and deposit summaries to product and service sales, inventory, and accounting can be detailed in the reports centralized here.

Reports data can be run by the current or the previous day, week, month, or year. Custom date ranges can also be entered.

As with several other features we’ve covered in this review – not all reports are available on all plans.

The Business Intelligence Dashboard, Service Sales report, and nearly two dozen other reports from product sales to refunds and even daily tips are not included in the Starter plan. All other plan tiers have full reporting access.

Booker offers inventory support for products, purchase orders, and vendors.

While the interface looks rather plain, the amount of product detail available in the record is more than adequate, making running reports and pulling data based on specific criteria possible.

Products can also be sold online through third-party integrations that can be denoted in the Edit Inventory screen.

Standard reorder amount can be specified here, and alerts for low stock, reorder, and out-of-stock can be set up to notify you when specific stock quantities have been reached.

Booker also offers the ability to take inventory, either by using a barcode scanner and scanning barcodes and counts into an Excel spreadsheet or by entering quantities manually (with or without printable inventory forms).

Booker has support for gift cards, packages, and memberships in the software.

Memberships can be created in Booker on all pricing tiers and can be sold on your website and in-store.

You can choose whether you wish to accept loyalty points, allow memberships to be shared between clients, and assign benefits.

Payment plans can be set up with regular reoccurring payments (monthly, annually, etc.) and expiry dates can be specified to be immediate or a certain number of days after a membership ends. Payment plans can also be frozen for a period of time.

Memberships can be managed from the Membership tab of the corresponding customer’s profile once purchased and associated with their account.

Packages are available in Booker, but there are very strict limitations on how a package is defined and how it can be redeemed.

In Booker, a package is a “combination of products or services that can be booked back to back for the same day and purchased as a single item on that day.”

This means that the appointment must be booked with all services to be rendered at once on the same day, such as a Mani-pedi, cut and color, or hand and foot massage – essentially a combo service, rather than a more traditional package that can be redeemed over a set period of time.

However, Booker also offers what they refer to as “series” which more closely resemble how a traditional package functions in other software suites.

Booker does offer a mobile app.

The Booker Mobile app can be used to view and manage the calendar, book appointments, edit customer profiles, create services, add employees, and more.

The app is much more full-featured than some of the other, more stripped-back mobile apps we’ve seen from competitors, allowing users to do most things on mobile that they can on the desktop app when it works, that is…

Booker Mobile App Reviews

Booker Mobile is available on iOS and Android, but there appears to be quite a difference in its reception on the two platforms.

Booker Mobile has a user rating of 3.8/5 stars (with 755 reviews) on the Apple App Store and a rating of 1.6/5 stars on the Google Play Store (with 942 reviews) as of the writing of this review.

Many reviewers across both platforms cite the app as glitchy and unintuitive to navigate at a base level, with several reviews listing complaints about more complex tasks (such as canceling a single appointment in a series) being either far more complicated than the desktop version or simply impossible on mobile.

As with the majority of salon software mobile booking apps, negative feedback is far more prominent on Android, with users citing random logouts followed by the inability to log back in, inaccurate appointment schedules, crashes, long periods of app downtime, and more.

These same issues are reported several times over the course of many years of reviews, indicating that—unfortunately—these bugs and glitches appear to be long-time, known problems that have not received fixes for multiple years in some cases.

I can confirm that at least one of these reported issues is still a problem at the time of writing.

In my time testing Booker for this review, I was unable to log in to the Android app at all, despite using verified login information and attempting many times over the course of several days.

More than ever, service professionals rely heavily on their phones to conduct business and manage their schedules. The inability to manage appointments, check out clients, or even log in to the app is not an optional benefit for them.

In my conversations with friends and community members who use Booker as their salon and spa management system, many admit that they have chosen to forego the mobile app entirely after several poor experiences with it over the years – instead relying on the front desk staff to fill in the gaps.

For such a big player in the salon and spa software space in 2025, providing such a poor mobile app experience for business owners and service providers is simply unacceptable.

I would very much like to see Booker contribute considerable, dedicated effort to fixing bugs in their app and making meaningful upgrades to Booker Mobile’s functionality and stability.

Business owners that pay top dollar for Booker’s premium-priced booking and management system deserve a tool that makes their days in the salon easier, rather than adding more work to their already-busy schedule.