Fresha alternatives in the UK (2026): honest comparison for salons

Fresha is powerful, but its marketplace model has a price: new clients arriving through the marketplace cost you a percentage of their first visit, and card processing is where the 'subscription-free' money is made. If your clients mostly come from Instagram and word of mouth, you may be paying for a channel you don't need.

What to compare

• Commission: does the platform take a cut of new-client bookings?
• Card fees: what do you pay per transaction?
• Feature gates: are gift cards, group classes or team features locked behind higher tiers?
• Data ownership: can you export your client list freely?
• Lock-in: how hard is switching away?

The quick landscape

Booksy charges a monthly subscription plus a paid Boost programme for discovery. Treatwell leans on its marketplace with commission on new clients. Timely and Ovatu are subscription-first with strong features and no marketplace. Square Appointments is free for solo users but ties you to Square payments.

Where Slotora fits

Slotora is free, and there is 0% commission on anything — forever. You get the core feature set of the big systems (team schedules, group classes, gift cards, passes, waitlists, reminders, CRM, reports, embedding) without the marketplace trade-off. Migration takes a day: export your clients as CSV and import them directly.

The honest caveat: Slotora is young. If you need a consumer marketplace to feed you walk-in demand today, a marketplace platform may still make sense — just do the maths on what that channel actually costs per client.