Fresha alternatives: the main salon software compared

The true cost of free

Fresha's core booking software genuinely costs nothing, but it monetises in two other ways that matter. It charges fees on new clients who find you through its marketplace, and it takes a cut of the card payments you process through it. So free describes the calendar, not the relationship.

Whether that works out cheaper than a paid tool depends entirely on your salon. If you barely use the marketplace and process payments elsewhere, free can genuinely be free. If a chunk of your new clients come via the marketplace and you run payments through Fresha, the combined fees can quietly exceed what a flat-fee competitor would charge. The honest move is to add up what Fresha actually costs you in fees over a few months, then compare that to a flat monthly alternative, rather than comparing free to paid in the abstract.

The marketplace concern

Beyond the fees, the thing that unsettles many salon owners is strategic, not financial. Fresha's marketplace, where clients browse and book across salons, can expose the clients you worked hard to win to competing salons at the very moment they are booking. A client who came to you can be shown alternatives.

Whether that bothers you is a genuine business judgement. Some owners value the new clients the marketplace brings enough to accept it; others feel it puts their hard-won client base in a shop window next to rivals. If it is the latter, that discomfort alone is a fair reason to prefer a tool that keeps your clients to yourself.

What the flat-fee alternatives trade off

The main alternatives swap free for predictable: a set monthly fee, no per-client commission, and no marketplace putting you beside competitors. Each has a slant:

• Timely, a popular flat monthly option with strong, salon-focused features.
• Kitomba, well established for larger salons and spas with deeper reporting.
• Booksy, favoured by barbers and solo operators.
• Square Appointments, simple and tightly tied to card payments.

Run the comparison properly

The mistake is comparing a flat fee to zero and concluding Fresha wins. The fair comparison is a flat monthly fee against what Fresha really costs you in marketplace and payment fees, plus the value you place on keeping your clients off a shared marketplace.

Tally your last few months of Fresha fees, decide how you feel about the marketplace, and weigh that against a flat-fee tool's predictable cost and the features you actually use. Trial one before switching, since migrating your client list and history is a real task you only want to do once.

The gap none of them fix

Whichever booking tool you land on, free or flat-fee, none of them solve the problem before the booking. Every one of these is great once a client is booking, but none capture the curious visitor on your own website who wants a price before they commit. That price-shopper bounces to whichever salon answers first.

An instant price estimator on your own site captures those visitors as named enquiries, which you then book in whichever software you choose. It sits in front of your booking tool, not instead of it, working upstream of the whole decision. You can see how it works, try the estimator below.