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 to use, with 0% commission on anything — no marketplace cut, ever. 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 is about size, not features. Slotora has a client-facing directory — every business on the platform is listed at slotora.io/directory, clients search it by treatment and town and book straight from it, and a booking that arrives that way still carries 0% commission. But it is young, so it will not match an established marketplace's footfall yet. Weigh that against what a marketplace charges per new client: the listing here costs nothing either way. Slotora next to the platform you use · What Slotora costs
