Best booking platforms for beauty salons in 2026

Most "best booking system" lists for salons compare calendars. Calendars are the part every one of these products already does well. The things that actually decide what you pay, and what you are left with in three years, are further down the page: how the price scales with your team, what the platform takes out of a new client's first visit, and whether you end up with a website of your own or a profile on somebody else's.

So that is what this compares. Every figure below was read from each company's own published pricing page on 23 October 2026, in GBP. Where a company does not publish a price, we say so rather than guessing.

The quick answer

• Best if you are on your own and want to spend nothing: Square Appointments, free for one location.
• Best cheap paid software for a single site: Vagaro, £20 a month for one location.
• Best marketplace for finding brand new clients: Fresha, if you accept 20% of each new client's first visit.
• Best known consumer brand in the UK: Treatwell, but at 35% of a new client's first booking and no published subscription price.
• Best all-in-one with SMS included: Timely, from £4 a week, as long as you are comfortable with a bill that moves with your booking volume.
• Best deep feature set for a large salon or clinic: Phorest, if you are willing to go through a sales quote.
• Best if you want a real website and to keep 100% of every booking: Believe Websites, £49 a month flat for any team size.

The price, side by side

Two patterns jump out of that table. The first is that the cheap monthly prices are mostly per person: they are cheap while you are one or two people and they are not cheap at six. The second is that the platforms with a marketplace are the ones taking a cut of your new clients — 20% at Fresha, 30% at Booksy, 35% at Treatwell. That is the trade. They bring you someone you would not have found, and they keep part of the first visit.

Every platform, one at a time

Fresha

The one most UK salons have heard of. £14.95 a month for a single person, £9.95 per bookable team member on the Team plan, and a £12.95-a-month Smart Website add-on if you want a site. Online card payments are 1.40% + £0.25, in person 1.19% + £0.20. You get 20 free automated texts a month per person, then £0.06 each; automated email is free and unlimited. There is a 7-day trial and rates exclude 20% VAT.

The marketplace is the real draw and the real cost: 20% one-time commission, minimum £4, on brand new clients who find you through it. Returning clients are free, and so is anyone who books through your own link, Instagram or Facebook. Plenty of extras are priced separately — Insights at £7.95 per team member, Client Loyalty at £49.95 a location, an AI concierge from £23.95.

Booksy

£40 a month for everything, plus £5 a month per extra team member, excluding VAT. Appointment confirmations and reminders by text are free, which is unusual and genuinely useful, and you get 500 marketing texts a month before they cost 5p each. Card payments are 1.29% + 20p, or 0.99% + 20p on Tap to Pay, both plus VAT. Seven-day trial, no commitment.

Boost, its marketplace promotion, costs nothing monthly but takes 30% of a Boost client's first visit, minimum £5. You can leave Boost off. What you do not get is a website: Booksy gives you a Booksy profile and a booking widget you can drop onto a site you have built somewhere else.

Treatwell

The biggest consumer-facing beauty brand in the UK, and the one that is hardest to price. There are two plans, Freelancer and Advanced, and neither shows a figure: you sign up to find out. Commission on first bookings from new marketplace clients is 35%, subject to location, with 0% on repeat bookings. Card machine payments are 1.1% + 20p excluding VAT with a £199 one-off machine cost, and online prepayments are 2.5%.

If most of your new clients come from the Treatwell app, that 35% is the price of the shop window. It is the highest new-client rate on this list, and there is no website of your own at the end of it, so it is worth knowing how much of your book is genuinely coming from the marketplace before you commit.

Square Appointments

The only one here with a real free plan: £0 for a single location, with unlimited calendars, online booking, a booking website, text and email reminders and Tap to Pay. Plus is £29 a month per location and Premium £69, which add multi-location, waitlists, staff management, custom notifications and cancellation fees. Card rates are 1.75% in person on the free plan, 1.6% on paid, and 1.4% + 25p online for UK cards.

There is no marketplace and no commission, which is a genuine plus. The booking site is Square's own, and Square's pricing page does not say whether a custom domain is included, so check that before you count on it.

Vagaro

£20 a month for one location with one bookable calendar, with extra bookable calendars charged up to seven and free after that; Vagaro's UK page quotes that per-calendar figure in US dollars, which is worth clarifying with them. Thirty-day trial, unlimited appointment reminders, a free listing on the Vagaro marketplace with no commission mentioned, and a MySite website builder. Vagaro does not publish its UK card processing rates on the pricing page.

Timely

Three plans billed in GBP: Run from £4 a week, Boost from £7 and Thrive from £9, all with unlimited team members and a 14-day trial. SMS is included rather than metered, which is rare. Card payments are 1.59% + 5p in salon and 1.85% + 30p online. Timely says plainly that it charges no new client fees.

The catch is in the words "starting from": the price adjusts with how many bookings you take each week. That is fair, and it also means a good month costs more than a quiet one, so the £4 headline is a floor rather than a price.

Phorest

Aimed at salons and clinics with three or more staff, with four tiers — Starter, Grow, Ultimate and Elite — covering stock, point of sale, loyalty, consultation forms, reputation management, a branded client app on the upper tiers and a dedicated success manager. Unlimited staff and devices on every plan. No prices are published at all; every plan is a "request a quote" button.

If you are a multi-site salon that needs retail stock and clinical consultation records in one place, Phorest is a serious product and belongs on your shortlist. Expect a sales conversation rather than a price page.

Believe Websites

Ours. £49 a month flat, any team size, with the website designed and built for £0 upfront. That price covers a bespoke website on your own domain, hosting, SSL, maintenance, unlimited small changes we make for you, your own booking system with email confirmations and reminders, analytics, a monthly website report, and a new search-and-AI-friendly article about your town and treatments each month. Commission is 0% on every booking from everyone.

Where we are behind: text reminders and card payments are built but not switched on yet, so today confirmations and reminders go by email, and you take payment however you take it now. We also ask for a 12-month minimum term, because we build the site for nothing instead of charging a build fee — after that it is month to month, and you can take ownership of the site. And we have no marketplace, so we will not hand you a stream of browsing strangers.

What to actually look at before you choose

1. Work out your real cost at the team size you will be in a year, not today. Per-person pricing is the single biggest difference between these products, and hiring quietly raises your bill on most of them.
2. Add up the commission. Twenty new marketplace clients a month at a £40 first visit is £160 a month at 20%, £240 at 30%, £280 at 35%. For many salons that dwarfs the subscription.
3. Ask what happens to your clients if you leave. A marketplace profile stays with the marketplace. A website on your own domain does not.
4. Check whether you get a website or a booking page. Several of these give you a widget to put on a website you do not have yet.
5. Think about how people will find you in 2026. A growing share of local searches now get answered by ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI overview rather than a list of blue links. Those answers are built from what those systems can read on the open web — structured pages about your treatments, clear information about where you are, real reviews. A marketplace profile is not that.
6. Count the add-ons. Insights, loyalty, extra SMS, a branded app: several platforms price them separately, and the quoted headline does not include them.

Why we built ours the way we did

Every platform on this list is good at running a diary. Very few of them are trying to get your salon found in the first place, and the ones that are charge you a share of each new client for the privilege.

We build the website first — a real one, on your own domain, designed around your treatments, your photos and your reviews, structured so Google and AI assistants can understand exactly what you do and where you do it — and put the booking system inside it. One flat price, nothing taken from your till, and nothing for you to build. You can see the whole offer on our home page.