Your clients are booking on their phones. Your software should be too.

Yes, particularly for AU, NZ, and UK salons looking to modernise. OpenChair is built natively for these markets — regional pricing, local payment processing, British English throughout. It's a modern alternative to Shortcuts with no hardware dependency, AI features built in, and included marketing tools that Shortcuts charges as add-ons. The main consideration is migration complexity — but OpenChair's onboarding is designed to make that straightforward.

Architecture and era. Shortcuts was built for desktop-first, hardware-dependent salon operations. OpenChair is browser-based and mobile-native — it works on any device your team already owns. Feature additions like cloud access, marketing tools, and SMS campaigns are add-ons on Shortcuts; on OpenChair Pro they're included. AI features (Concierge, predictive waitlist, Processing Gaps) don't exist in Shortcuts.

The disruption is real but finite — a day or two of setup versus years of a more modern platform. The practical question is: what's the ongoing cost of staying? If your team finds Shortcuts slow or difficult to learn (common feedback), there's a productivity cost every day. If you're paying separately for cloud access, marketing modules, and hardware maintenance, there's a financial cost every month. Most venues that switch report the migration being less painful than expected and regret not switching sooner.

Yes. Unlimited appointments, multi-staff scheduling, resource management (rooms and machines on Pro), Processing Gaps for parallel services, and configurable booking rules cover the scheduling complexity most salons and barbershops need. If there's a specific Shortcuts workflow you rely on, check with our team — we can tell you how OpenChair handles it.

Any device with a web browser — iPad, laptop, Android tablet. For payments, Stripe Terminal supports tap-to-pay with standard Stripe card readers. OpenChair doesn't require proprietary hardware or equipment. If you want to repurpose existing devices from your Shortcuts setup, the browser-based interface means any screen works as a staff terminal.