A Booksy alternative for hair salons
Booksy is well-known in the salon industry and does a solid job of what it was built for: online booking, client discovery, and review management for appointment-based stylists. The friction shows up when a hair salon also serves walk-in clients and wants to manage both from one tool. Walk-in queue management is not part of Booksy's core product, and the per-booking fee structure means your costs scale with volume in a way that can bite at your busiest times. Here is how the two tools compare.
How Booksy's pricing model works
Booksy charges a flat monthly fee ($29.99 for a solo stylist, higher for teams) plus a per-booking fee when clients book through the Booksy marketplace. The marketplace fee is how Booksy monetizes the client discovery component — new clients who find you through the Booksy app or website. For stylists who rely on Booksy as a primary discovery channel, this is a reasonable trade. For established salons where most clients come through repeat visits, referrals, or walk-in traffic, the per-booking fee adds cost without much corresponding value.
More directly: Booksy is not a walk-in queue tool. It does not have a TV display mode, a door kiosk for non-smartphone customers, or a real-time waitlist that updates as stylists call their next client. If walk-in traffic is a meaningful share of your week — even two or three clients a day — Booksy does not have a clean solution for managing that flow.
Stylists call the next walk-in client from the staff screen with one tap — no interruptions, no paper list, no "how much longer" questions.
Running a waitlist alongside your booked appointments
Many hair salons run a hybrid model: some clients book ahead, and some walk in on the day. The scheduling challenge is fitting walk-ins around the booked appointments without double-booking stylists or making walk-in clients wait without any information about how long it will actually be.
NextUp handles the walk-in side of this. When a stylist finishes a booked appointment and has a gap, or has availability between appointments, walk-in clients are already queued and ready to be called. The staff screen shows who is waiting and what service they need, so the stylist can call the next person and fill the gap without interrupting anyone or checking a paper list. The TV in the waiting area shows who is up next — walk-ins see their name move up the list in real time.
Flat pricing, regardless of visit volume
NextUp charges $29 per month for the first location and $19 for each additional one. There is no per-visit fee and no per-booking fee. A salon doing 20 walk-ins a day pays the same as a salon doing 5. As your walk-in volume grows — which it tends to do as customers learn they can check in remotely and stop leaving because the wait looked long — your monthly cost does not change.
Included in every plan: the walk-in queue, staff screen, TV display mode, door kiosk mode, QR code and shareable link, service and stylist selection at check-in, loyalty stamp program, and 1,000 SMS notifications per month per location. Overages are $0.05 per text. Most single-location salons stay within the included allowance.
If you want to keep Booksy for appointments
You do not have to choose one or the other. Some salons use Booksy — or any appointment tool — for booked clients and NextUp for walk-in queue management. The door QR code captures walk-in traffic independently of the booking flow. Booked clients arrive knowing their time; walk-in clients join the queue and get a text when their stylist is free. Both operate in parallel without interfering.
If you are evaluating whether to simplify to one tool, NextUp includes appointment booking in every plan. Clients can book ahead from a link you share, and booked visits appear in the staff queue alongside walk-ins. For salons that do not need Booksy's marketplace discovery, that covers the full picture at $29 a month. Start a 14-day free trial at nextupwalkin.com.