KennelBooker alternative: Boardinn vs KennelBooker

Who each product is for

KennelBooker is a kennel system in the plainest sense, and it has been for a long time; its copyright line runs from 2010. It covers boarding and catteries, then daycare, grooming, training, board & train, dog walking, house sitting and more, with a point of sale, accounting add-ons and an API. Its pricing is public, tiered by room count and quoted in nine currencies. It also has a page written for the UK’s Animal Activities Licensing rules that treats GDPR as a real job rather than a footnote. If you run a UK or European kennel and have a licence inspection coming up, that page alone earns it a place on your shortlist.

Boardinn is narrower and younger. 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. And it runs as your own installation rather than an account on a shared platform.

What “your own domain” means here

This is where the two differ most, so it’s worth being precise. KennelBooker’s booking portal carries your branding, and its site is upfront about how you connect it: you add one link to your website and your Facebook page, and you can be set up in about thirty minutes. For many kennels that’s exactly right, with nothing to host. The site doesn’t say whether the portal can run on your own domain.

With Boardinn the whole booking site is yours. It runs on your own domain, with HTTPS set up and renewed automatically, in one of five designs using your colours and fonts. The only Boardinn mention is a small footer link, and you can switch it off. Reminder emails come from your name, invoices go out as a PDF under your brand, and links and reviews build up on your domain. Guests can use it in English or Georgian, with Russian partly translated so far. We’ve set out the reasoning for that separately.

Switching, and what setup looks like

If you’re moving from another system or a spreadsheet, KennelBooker has the more complete answer today. Its site describes a guided setup wizard (under five minutes, it says) and a migration service it doesn’t charge for: export your data as Excel or CSV, send it over and they should be able to import it, and they can extract data from some very old kennel databases directly. It doesn’t say how long a migration takes or what it can’t carry over. Help comes through a built-in chat to their support team, a knowledge base and recorded demos, and plans are monthly or annual with no contract: you can upgrade, downgrade or cancel whenever you like.

Boardinn starts differently. We set up each hotel with its owner, one at a time, covering your design, services, prices and capacity. If your records live in another provider’s system or a spreadsheet, we migrate them for you. There’s no self-serve import tool: every hotel’s data looks different, so we handle each migration individually and tell you up front what carries over. Expect a slower start and more conversation. If you already have clean spreadsheets and want to be live today, KennelBooker’s route is faster.

GDPR: two answers, both real

We’ve called this row a tie, and here’s why. KennelBooker’s compliance page covers what an inspector or a data-protection officer would expect: where the data is stored and how it’s protected, digital waivers, what the register holds and how long booking history is kept. It’s also clear that you remain the data controller. Boardinn’s answer is in how it’s built: each hotel is a separate installation with its own database, hosted in the EU, and we export or erase a customer’s data when the hotel asks. Both are legitimate. Which you prefer depends on whether you want a document to hand over or a system that can’t mix your customers’ data with anyone else’s.

Where Boardinn is behind

Boardinn is new. There’s no business app, no point of sale, no accounting integrations, no API, and no daycare or walking. KennelBooker has more than fifteen years and thousands of kennels behind those features. Boardinn has added things since our last check (photos and videos from the stay, a day-before pick-up reminder, owners changing their own bookings online), but it’s still the smaller product.

What you get instead is a booking site that’s genuinely yours, kennel management software shaped around a pet hotel’s day, and a small team that sets it up with you, services and prices included. Milo Pet Hotel’s story shows what that looks like.

How we checked

Every claim about KennelBooker on this page was checked against kennelbooker.com: the homepage and its pricing section, the online booking platform page, and the licensing and GDPR page on 12 October 2026, and the migration, setup, support and contract details on 23 October 2026. Where their site doesn’t say something, such as where the company is based, language options, the portal’s domain or export formats, 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.