Animalo vs. Pet Manager: Which Platform is the Top Dog for Your Facility?
Choosing your pet care software is like picking a lead dog for your sled team. You need one that’s reliable, intelligent, and works in harmony with the rest of the pack (your staff and clients). In the world of kennel and cattery management, both Animalo and Pet Manager have earned their place as strong contenders. But which one is best suited to lead your business to success?
Let’s unleash these two platforms and see how they run side-by-side, comparing their core strengths in managing the wild and wonderful world of pet care.
The Foundation: Approach to Business Management
Every software has a personality. Understanding it is key to a good relationship.
Animalo is known for its clean, user-friendly interface and strong focus on core kennel and cattery operations. It’s designed to make the daily tasks of booking, billing, and tracking pets as smooth as possible. It’s a popular choice, especially in the European market, and is praised for its intuitive design.
Pet Manager adopts an all-encompassing approach. It’s built not just to manage, but to centralize every aspect of a diverse pet care business. Whether you’re exclusively a boarding facility or you’ve branched out into grooming, training, daycare, and retail, Pet Manager aims to be the single source of truth for your entire operation. It’s feature-rich by design, offering deep customisation to fit unique business models.
Scheduling and Pricing: The Engine Room
Your booking calendar is the heart of your business. Its efficiency directly impacts your revenue.
Animalo provides a clear and effective booking calendar that allows you to see availability at a glance and manage your reservations. It handles the fundamentals of scheduling with competence, making it easy to see who’s coming and going.
Pet Manager takes scheduling to a granular level with multiple, dedicated visual schedulers. Your boarding kennels have their own calendar, separate from your grooming appointments or your daycare roster. This visual separation is critical for preventing confusion in multi-service businesses. The booking process is powered by a formidable rules-based pricing engine. You can set up complex rules that automatically calculate charges based on:
• Seasons: Peak, off-peak, and holiday rates.
• Pet Attributes: Different prices for small, medium, and large dogs.
• Duration of Stay: Automatic discounts for longer bookings.
• Customer Type: Special rates for VIPs or staff pets.
• Late Check-outs: Automatically add a charge if a client picks up their pet after a certain time.
This automation drastically reduces manual calculations and ensures pricing consistency.
All About the Animals (and their Humans!)
Effective management of pet and client data is non-negotiable.
Animalo offers robust profiles for pets and customers, capturing essential details like medical needs, diet, and contact information, ensuring you have what you need to provide excellent care.
Pet Manager builds on this with a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. You can flag clients as ‘Not Welcome’, set internal staff alerts that pop up when a profile is opened, and track the customer’s entire financial history at a glance. For pets, you can record and graph their weight over time, upload unlimited photos to a gallery, and even send charming “Pet Postcards” with photo updates to clients during their pet’s stay. According to a Google Review, one user highlighted how “the ability to keep such detailed records on each pet has been invaluable for our staff and impresses our customers.”
A Furry Tale of Two Feedings
Picture this: Two Golden Retrievers from the same family, Max and Milo, are boarding with you. Max is on a special grain-free diet, but Milo will eat anything that doesn’t eat him first. It’s a simple enough instruction, but in a busy kennel, mistakes can happen. This is where detailed, easily accessible notes are vital. In Pet Manager, you can set a high-visibility ‘Diet’ note that appears in bold on the check-in screen, the daily feeding report, and the printable kennel card. It’s about creating multiple checkpoints to turn a potential problem into a non-issue, ensuring Max stays happy and his owner stays confident in your care.
The Digital Front Door: Client Portal and Online Bookings
A great online portal empowers your clients and frees up your phone line.
Both platforms provide online booking capabilities. Animalo’s portal is designed for ease of use, allowing clients to request bookings and manage their details.
Pet Manager’s portal is designed for seamless integration and customisation. You can embed it directly into your website so the client never leaves your digital home. You can change the theme colour to match your branding, force the digital signing of terms and conditions, and require vaccination uploads before a booking can be confirmed. This level of control helps automate your intake process and ensures compliance before the pet even arrives.
The Verdict
Your choice will ultimately depend on your business’s complexity and future ambitions.
Animalo is a fantastic choice for pet care businesses that want a beautifully designed, intuitive, and focused tool to manage their core operations effectively. Its strength lies in its user-friendliness and clean approach.
Pet Manager is the powerhouse for the business owner who wants it all in one place. If you’re running multiple services, have complex pricing, and want to integrate your operations with accounting and payment systems to create a highly automated and scalable business, Pet Manager’s extensive feature set is built to meet that demand.
The best way to know is to get behind the wheel.
Ready to build a more efficient, profitable, and client-friendly pet care business? Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Pet Manager and see the power of an all-in-one solution firsthand.
