One is the front desk and the other is the chart
Vagaro is salon software for beauty, spa and hair businesses, and its own site names medical spas among them. In a med spa it is the desk: the appointment, the client, the form, the membership and the card. Aesthetic Record is EMR and practice management built for med spas. It is where Dana charts, where the consent is signed, where the photo is taken and where the patient record lives. Both hold a calendar, which is the one place the two overlap and the reason owners type this comparison.
That overlap hides the difference. The chart in Aesthetic Record is the legal record of care. Vagaro is built as a booking and point-of-sale platform, and the question of where your treatment notes and consents live is yours to answer before any comparison matters. NorthCore runs on Aesthetic Record today in a working practice and builds on Vagaro the same way; this page recommends neither. Pricing for either is on the vendor's pricing page.
What each holds, who it is for, and what gets built around it
| Row | Vagaro | Aesthetic Record |
|---|---|---|
| What it holds | Calendar, client list, forms, memberships and the point of sale | The charts, the consents, the before-and-after photos, the calendar and the patient record |
| Who it is built for | Salon, spa, medical spa and barber businesses, in the vendor's words | Med spas, in the vendor's words |
| Where the calendar lives | In Vagaro | In Aesthetic Record |
| Where the checkout lives | The Vagaro point of sale | Inside Aesthetic Record, with the record |
| What the growth system adds around it | The phone answered and booked into Vagaro; the comeback from the client list; the numbers on one page | The same jobs, reading visit dates from the record and writing nothing into a chart |
What your practice has to answer before the software does
- Does anyone in the building inject, prescribe or perform a treatment that needs a consent and a treatment note? If yes, where is that record today?
- Who is the medical director, and what does their agreement say about where the chart lives and who can read it? Confirm with counsel.
- Will the desk and the chart be one system or two, and who at the front desk would keep them in step?
- Which memberships and packages do you sell, and which system should the balance live in?
- Who signs the Business Associate Agreement and where does protected health information sit? Ask both vendors and confirm with counsel.
- How will the growth system read who is due: from a client list with last-visit dates, or from a record with last-treatment dates?
What a switch in either direction involves
Moving from Vagaro to Aesthetic Record adds a record system to a practice that ran the desk alone. The client list and the future appointments move, the memberships are rebuilt with each card re-authorized, and the chart starts fresh or is loaded from wherever the notes lived before. Moving the other way puts the chart question first, because the chart is the legal record of care and it has to go somewhere that counts as a record. Moving a chart is a project with its own rules on export, retention and who verifies the copy; confirm them with counsel and your medical director. Either way, the links on your site and profile change, and the front desk works two systems for an overlap period you set with the vendor.
Before any of that, look at what sent you to this page. Most of what an owner wants from a switch is the growth system around whichever platform they keep. The phone answered during a treatment, the comeback timed to the visit, the numbers in one place. NorthCore builds that on Vagaro or on Aesthetic Record without moving anything.
Two weeks to settle it without moving a record
- Day one: write down where every consent and treatment note from last month lives. If that place is a drawer or a paper form, the record question is open.
- Days two to four: in each vendor's demo, book a patient and check them out; in the Aesthetic Record demo, have Dana chart one visit.
- Days five to seven: ask both vendors for their export format, what the agreement says about protected health information, and who signs it; give it to counsel.
- Week two: pull the client export from whatever you run now and count how many patients have a last-visit date. That is the comeback list.
- Last day: decide desk and chart as one question, write the migration steps if there are any, and scope the growth system separately.
What to do next
NorthCore's Run the whole practice solution builds the growth system around Vagaro, around Aesthetic Record, or around both side by side: the answering, the comeback and the dashboard, chart untouched. Everything is scoped in writing first and held to the promise on this site: results in 90 days, or we keep working until you have them.
