Vagaro vs Mindbody

Vagaro

B

Vagaro is booking, point-of-sale and marketing software for salons, spas, barbers, medical spas, gyms and studios, sold from Pleasanton, California since 2009 by founder and chief executive Fred Helou. Card processing is built in through Vagaro Merchant Services, a registered ISO of PNC Bank, N.A., and priced on two published plans: small merchants under $4,000 a month pay 2.6% + $0.10 for swiped, dipped and tapped cards with no monthly fee, and large merchants above that pay 2.29% + $0.19 for $10 a month. Every keyed, online, card-on-file and membership charge is 3.5% + $0.19 on either plan, card-brand FANF and Mastercard location fees pass through, buy-now-pay-later through Affirm costs 6% + $0.30, and surcharging is not allowed. Deposits arrive the next business day after a batch, with same-day and instant payouts at 1.75%. The software is $30 a month for one calendar (currently $23.99 for the first six months) plus $10 a calendar up to seven, month to month with no cancellation fee, and the US marketplace listing is free — Vagaro only takes a 20% cut when you opt into its Fill My Books promotions. The rate card is clear and competitive in person; the weak spots are the keyed rate, a BBB review score of 1.09 out of 5 with recurring complaints of duplicate charges and hardware warranty disputes, and the lack of any way to pass fees on to clients.

Mindbody

C+

Mindbody is booking, scheduling and point-of-sale software for fitness studios, gyms, salons and spas, founded in San Luis Obispo, California in 2001 and now the best-known brand in wellness software. Payment processing is sold as Mindbody Payments, built on Stripe Connect, and takes cards, ACH, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna and Tap to Pay in more than forty countries. The pricing picture is unusually lopsided: Mindbody's own support documentation publishes card-present and card-not-present rates for around twenty regions — Canada at 2.89% + $0.25 CAD online and 2.39% + $0.10 CAD in person, the UK at 2.19% + 20p and 1.99% + 10p, most of the EU at 2.4% + €0.25 — and for the United States and Australia prints an email address instead. Software runs from $79 a month per location on the Starter plan, with the Accelerate and Ultimate tiers quoted rather than listed. Bookings that come through the consumer Mindbody app via its marketing tools are charged 3.5% plus a 20% marketplace fee, capped at $30 and applied only to a new client's first purchase. The terms of service, updated 20 March 2026, make early exit expensive: fees are non-refundable, thirty days' notice is required, and a customer who leaves before the end of a subscription term remains liable for the rest of it. The corporate context changed twice recently — the brands were gathered under a parent called Playlist in June 2025, and that business completed a merger with the German connected-fitness company EGYM in March 2026 at a combined valuation of $7.5 billion.