Gingr alternative for pet hotels: Boardinn vs Gingr

Who each product is for

If you run a large pet-care business in the US, Gingr is probably already on your shortlist, and it should be. It has been around since 2014, says more than five thousand facilities use it, and covers the whole business: boarding, daycare, grooming, training, retail, report cards, webcams and an app that lets owners book, pay and message your team. If daycare and a shop sit alongside your boarding and you want one vendor with scale behind it, that’s a strong reason to choose Gingr.

Boardinn is narrower, on purpose. It’s built around the boarding stay: owners book online against your real kennel count, staff run the day from one board of arrivals, pets in care and departures, services get ticked off as they’re done, and the invoice adds itself up from what was delivered. If you run a pet hotel rather than a daycare with boarding on the side, that focus is what you’re paying for.

What “your own domain” means here

Both products let owners book online. The difference is where that happens and whose name they see.

With Gingr, owners use the Pet Parent Portal or download the Gingr app, enter your invite code, and the app switches to your logo and colours. For a platform serving thousands of businesses that’s a sensible design, and the app comes with every plan. Gingr’s site doesn’t say whether the portal can run on your own web address.

With Boardinn, each hotel gets its own site on its own domain, with HTTPS set up and renewed automatically, in one of five designs using the hotel’s colours and fonts. Guests book at your address, reminder emails come from your name, invoices go out as a PDF with your brand, and any links or reviews the site earns build up on your domain, not ours. We wrote up why that matters separately.

Boardinn also speaks your guests’ language. The booking site and the staff screens run in English and Georgian, with Russian partly translated so far. Each owner gets their emails in their own language, and the hotel writes its own homepage text for each language it offers.

Pricing

When we checked, Gingr’s boarding plan was $179 a month with its integrated payments switched on, or $209 without, falling to $154 a month on an annual contract. Two-way SMS, employee scheduling and a messaging bundle are sold as add-ons. Boardinn has one plan: $99 a month per hotel, or $85 a month billed annually, with unlimited staff accounts and no add-ons. The details are on the pricing page.

Where Boardinn is behind

Boardinn is new. There’s no mobile app, no daycare packages, no retail, no webcams, no written report cards and no built-in card payments. Gingr has all of those, with more than a decade of use behind them. Since our last check Boardinn has added photo and video updates during a stay, a day-before pick-up reminder, and the option to let owners change their own booking online, but it’s still the smaller product.

What you get instead is a system built around one hotel rather than an account on a shared platform: its own database, its own domain, hosting in the EU, customer data export and erasure the way GDPR expects, and a small team that sets it up with you, services and prices included. Milo Pet Hotel’s story shows what that looks like in practice.

How we checked

Every claim about Gingr on this page was checked on 12 October 2026 against gingrapp.com: the homepage, the pricing page and the pet-parent app page. The Togetherwork relationship comes from Togetherwork’s own brand list. Where Gingr’s site doesn’t say something, such as its GDPR position, data residency, language options, a staff app or the portal’s domain, we say so rather than guess. We re-check the page whenever we update the date. If we’ve got something wrong, email hello@boardinn.pet and we’ll fix it.