GroomSpark vs Gingr: grooming-first software or a kennel system

Buy Gingr if you board

If any meaningful part of your revenue comes from overnight stays or daycare, stop reading comparisons and buy Gingr. Their kennel product is real: multi-night reservations with proper check-in and check-out, a live occupancy grid that auto-assigns runs, feeding and medication tracking for dogs staying a week, and capacity rules built on staff-to-pet ratios. We do not have any of that. We are not building any of that. A grooming salon that also boards twenty dogs a night is not our customer, and pretending otherwise would waste a month of your time and ours.

Same answer if you need a retail POS, sell packages and memberships, or have a developer waiting to hit a public API. Those are all things Gingr ships and we do not.

Still here? Then grooming is the business, boarding is occasional or nonexistent, and the question is whether you want to run a grooming shop inside software that was designed around kennels.

The one-line difference

Gingr's product is organized around occupancy. Ours is organized around the appointment book and the website that fills it.

Gingr sells a grooming tier, called Spa, and it is not a token gesture. It does groomer-to-breed assignment, which is a genuinely grooming-shaped feature. But the platform underneath was built for a facility that houses animals, and you feel that in the shape of it.

The sharper difference is what neither tier includes. Gingr has no website product. What you get is a Customer Portal, and online booking runs through that portal. That is a booking surface, not a marketing site. If a stranger in your town searches for a groomer on a Tuesday night, a customer portal is not the thing that shows up. We include a real multi-page site on your own domain, with the booking built into it, in the $99.

Side by side

Prices checked 2026-09-01, from gingrapp.com/pricing.

	GroomSpark	Gingr
Multi-page website on your own domain	Included	No website product
Online booking lives	On your own site	In the Customer Portal
Designed around	The grooming appointment book	Facility occupancy
Text messaging	Unmetered, included	Two add-ons, prices not published
Automated reminders	Included, SMS and email	Included, channel not stated
Payment processing	Stripe, no software surcharge	Add-on, and declining it costs $30/mo more
Staff seats	Unlimited	No published cap
Locations	$49.99/mo per extra storefront	No published cap, included
Boarding, daycare, kennel grid	No	Yes
Feeding and medication tracking	No	Yes
Packages, memberships, retail POS	No	Yes
Public API	No	Yes
Entry price for a grooming shop	$99/mo	$109/mo, $100 billed annually

Where Gingr is genuinely better

Boarding and daycare operations. Multi-night reservations, check-in and check-out, the live kennel grid with smart auto-assignment. It is their core product and it is good. Feeding schedules and medication tracking matter enormously to the owner of a dog staying nine nights, and nothing about a grooming-only tool covers that.

Capacity rules based on staff-to-pet ratios are a better model than ours for a facility. We do capacity per groomer per day, which is the right unit for a salon and the wrong unit for a play yard.

Gingr PreCheck is a real thing and worth naming. So is multi-location reporting and business analytics, which they include on every tier rather than gating behind an upgrade. And on Spa specifically, groomer-to-breed assignment is the kind of detail you only build if someone on the team has actually worked a grooming floor.

They also do not ration seats. No published cap on staff, locations, or volume, and every plan includes the full platform. That is more generous than MoeGo's tiering and it is more generous than ours on the multi-location axis. Credit where it is due.

Where we are better

You get an actual website. Your domain, your photos, your services, real pages with real headings, and the SEO wired up correctly on day one: structured data, per-page metadata, a sitemap. Most grooming sites get that wrong. It is the easiest thing in this category to be better at, and almost nobody is. Gingr does not sell one at all, so the choice there is not "theirs or ours," it is "ours or a separate vendor and a second invoice."

Texting is unmetered and it is in the base price. We do not sell it as an add-on and we do not publish an allowance, because there is no allowance. Gingr sells texting as two add-ons, 2-Way SMS and a Messaging Bundle, and does not publish a price for either.

The software is grooming-shaped rather than kennel-shaped with grooming attached. Coat condition, size and breed-based pricing, before-and-after galleries, groomer-to-dog matching, the rebook prompt at checkout. If you have ever used a boarding system for a salon you know the tell: half the screens ask a question about a dog who is going home in ninety minutes.

And the price is on a page. $99/mo, one number, no sales call to find out what texting costs.

The price math

This is closer than the rest of the comparison, so work it honestly.

Gingr's Spa plan, the grooming and training tier, is $109/mo, or $100/mo billed annually. We are $99/mo. On sticker price that is a $10 monthly gap, and if you pay Gingr annually they come out a dollar cheaper than us. Nobody should switch software over a dollar. Play is $169/mo, $142 annual. Stay is $179/mo, $154 annual. Enterprise is not published.

So the interesting question is not the sticker. It is what each number actually buys.

The processor surcharge is the biggest hidden line. Gingr's own footnote on the pricing page says the advertised prices assume active Integrated Payments. If you decline their processor, the software costs $30/mo more. The example they give is Stay going from $179 to $209. Apply the same logic to Spa and a grooming shop that wants to keep the processor it already has is looking at roughly $139/mo, not $109. That is a real cost and it is underdiscussed, because the number that gets quoted in every roundup is the one that assumes you switched processors.

Texting is the other one, and it is unpriced. Two add-ons, no published figures. "Automated Notifications" is included on every plan with no channel and no quantity stated, which means you cannot tell from the page whether your appointment reminders go out by text or only by email. If they go by email only, the reminder that stops a no-show is the one you have to buy. Integrated Payment Processing and Employee Scheduling are price-gated too. Four add-ons on that page, zero published numbers.

Our side: $99/mo, and the things above are either included or absent. Website included. Unmetered texting included. Unlimited staff included. Payments run through Stripe and there is no software surcharge for how you take money. Additional storefronts are $49.99/mo. Fourteen-day trial with no card.

Where Gingr wins the money argument outright: seats and locations. If you run three sites, we charge you $99 plus $99.98, call it $199, and Gingr charges $109. If you have twelve staff, we are the same $99 and so are they, but they will still be $109 whether you have twelve or forty. There is no head tax on either side, and no location tax on theirs.

The comparison in one line: for a single grooming location, $99 with the website and texting in the box against $109 that assumes you moved your payment processing and does not tell you what texting costs. For a multi-location boarding operation, Gingr, and it is not close.

If you want the full field rather than a head-to-head, we keep a pricing breakdown of every grooming platform with the same sourcing rules, and a buyer's guide to the category that lists us as one option among several.

What the website gap is worth in dollars

The website line in that table looks like a feature row. It is a revenue row, so price it out rather than taking my word for it.

Say a full groom averages $95 in your shop and you do six a day. One new client a week who found you by searching, stayed because the site did not look like a 2011 template, and came back every eight weeks is worth somewhere around $600 a year on their own. Land one a week for a year and the arithmetic gets silly fast, which is why I would rather you did the sum for your own numbers than trusted mine.

Now price the other path. If you buy Gingr and you still want a site, you are hiring someone or subscribing to a builder. A grooming-specific site built by an agency runs into four figures once, or you pay a builder monthly and do the words and the photos and the schema markup yourself. Either way it is a second vendor, a second invoice, and a second thing that breaks when your hours change and only one of the two places knows about it.

That is the whole wedge, and it is worth being precise about its edges. Gingr is not bad at websites. Gingr does not do websites. The Customer Portal they include is a booking and account surface for people who already know your name. It is not the page that makes a stranger pick you over the shop four minutes further down the road, and it was never trying to be.

Switching, practically

Two things people ask before they move.

Client and pet data comes across from a spreadsheet. Export from Gingr, map the columns, import. Appointment history does not come across cleanly from any of these systems and you should not plan around it; what matters is the client list, the pets, the breeds, and the notes.

Payments run through Stripe on our side. If you are currently on Gingr's Integrated Payments, you are changing processors either way, which is worth knowing because it removes the $30/mo penalty from your Gingr math only if you were going to stay.

How to decide

The decision splits on one question, and it is not a feature question.

Does a dog ever sleep at your building? If yes, buy Gingr. Kennel software is a category and they are good at it, and a grooming tool with a boarding page bolted on would be worse than what they already ship.

If no, then the next question is where your next ten clients come from. If they come from your existing book and word of mouth, either tool runs your day and the $10 is noise. If they come from someone typing "dog groomer near me" into a phone, you need a website on your own domain, and that is the one thing on this page that Gingr does not sell at any price.

There is a longer version of that reasoning in our guide to choosing grooming software, and if the website half is the part you care about, the anatomy of a grooming site that actually takes bookings covers what the page has to do.

Ours is $99/mo, the trial is fourteen days, and it does not ask for a card. Gingr's Spa tier is $109/mo, $100 annually, plus $30/mo if you keep your own processor, plus whatever texting costs. Prices checked 2026-09-01.

Common questions

We groom and we board. Which one should we buy?

Gingr, almost certainly. If any real share of your revenue comes from overnight stays or daycare, you need kennel software, and Gingr's is the deep one. We do not build boarding at all and we are not planning to. Buy Gingr and do not feel bad about it.

Does Gingr include a website?

No. Gingr includes a Customer Portal, and online booking runs through that portal. There is no website product on the pricing page, so the marketing site that gets you found on Google is still something you buy, build, or go without. That is the main thing we sell that they do not.

How much does texting cost on Gingr?

Gingr does not publish it. Texting sells as two separate add-ons, 2-Way SMS and a Messaging Bundle, and neither one has a price listed. Automated Notifications is included on every plan, but the page does not say which channel it uses or how many messages you get. You will have to ask their sales team for a number.

Why does Gingr cost more if I keep my own card processor?

Gingr's own pricing footnote says the advertised prices assume active Integrated Payments. Turn their processor off and the software costs $30/mo more. Their worked example is the Stay plan going from $179 to $209. Budget the same $30 on Spa if you plan to keep the processor you already have.

Does Gingr limit staff seats or locations?

No, and this is genuinely better than most of the category. There is no published seat cap, location cap, or appointment volume cap on any tier, and every plan includes the full platform. A twelve-person shop pays the same as a solo groomer.

Does GroomSpark do memberships, packages, or retail?

Not today. If you sell ten grooms up front as a package, or you run a retail shelf with barcode scanning, Gingr has that and we do not.

What does GroomSpark cost, and is there a trial?

$99/mo flat, with the website, unmetered texting, and unlimited staff included. The trial is 14 days and does not ask for a card. Additional storefronts are $49.99/mo.