Comparison
A Vagaro alternative built for one chair
Vagaro is built for Salons of every size, from solo to multi-location. Vagaro acquired Schedulicity in January 2025, so Schedulicity customers were moved here.
Chairwarden is built for one person renting one chair. That narrower aim is the whole difference, and it cuts both ways — there is a list further down of what Vagaro does better.
Free to try, up to 15 bookings/month · calendar protection included on every plan
What each one takes from a booking
Vagaro
A new client who finds you through the Vagaro Marketplace carries a one-time 20% fee on their first booking.
support.vagaro.com, checked 2026-09-05
Chairwarden
$29 a month, or $23 paid yearly. No percentage and no per-booking fee. When a client pays a deposit it lands in your own Stripe account, and we take nothing out of it.
Stripe Connect Standard, direct charges
The part nobody else does
Chairwarden refuses the booking that would split your best slot.
You have a four-hour opening for a colour appointment. A 30-minute trim books into the middle of it, and the whole block is gone — two unusable stubs instead of $250 of work. Chairwarden simply never offers that slot to a short service. You can relax the rule if you want a quick cut to fit inside the processing time.
What Vagaro has instead
Vagaro has "Minimize Gaps", which groups online bookings together so the day has fewer holes, and "Gap Processing Time", which lets another client use the downtime inside one service — colour processing, for instance. Both are about filling time. Neither stops a 30-minute trim from landing in the middle of a four-hour balayage.
support.vagaro.com, checked 2026-09-05
Where Vagaro is genuinely better
- Payment terminal and full point of sale, which Chairwarden does not have at all
- Marketing campaigns over email and text
- Staff accounts and roles for a team — Chairwarden is one person per account
- A marketplace that can bring you clients who were not looking for you
Choose Vagaro if you want one system to run a team, take card payments in the chair, and market to your list.
What Chairwarden does not do
- No card terminal or point of sale — deposits online only
- No marketing campaigns
- No staff accounts; one stylist per account
- No marketplace, so it will not find clients for you
- No client-facing app — your clients book on the web
Try it on your own calendar
Free up to 15 bookings a month, no card. Calendar protection is on from the first booking.
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