Fresha vs Booksy (2026): Commission, Fees and the Honest Verdict

Fresha vs Booksy: What You're Actually Choosing Between

If you run a salon, barbershop, nail bar, spa or mobile beauty business in the UK, Fresha and Booksy are probably the first two names anyone recommends. Both do the same two jobs at once: they run your calendar, client records and payments, and they list you on a consumer marketplace where people search for a treatment and book it without ever finding your own website. Between them they cover a huge share of UK beauty bookings, which is exactly why the choice matters and why the marketing on both sides gets loud.

The two platforms are not priced the same way, and the difference is not just the headline number. Fresha charges every bookable team member a monthly seat fee and takes a mandatory 20% commission on a new client's first marketplace booking. Booksy charges one flat monthly fee for the whole team plus a small amount per extra person, and its marketplace commission, called Boost, is optional: switch it off and marketplace bookings cost nothing at all. That single structural difference, mandatory against opt-in commission, decides more of the true monthly bill than either homepage lets on.

At a Glance

Booksy vs Fresha Fees: The Commission Maths

Start with the number everyone actually wants. Fresha's marketplace commission is mandatory: any time a client who has never booked with you before finds you through the Fresha marketplace and books, Fresha takes 20% of that first appointment, with a minimum of around £4. It applies every time, on every new marketplace client. Booksy's equivalent, called Boost, is structured completely differently: standard marketplace bookings on Booksy carry no commission at all, and the 30% fee (minimum £5) only applies if you switch Boost on, and only on the clients Booksy attributes to it. That is a genuinely different bet, not just a different percentage.

Read plainly, Fresha's model is simpler to budget for: it always costs the same 20%, so you always know where you stand. Booksy's model rewards restraint. If your column is already full, you can leave Boost off and pay nothing at all for marketplace exposure, which is not an option Fresha or Treatwell give you. The trade is that Boost is also how Booksy pushes your profile higher in its own search results, so switching it off may mean fewer marketplace clients turn up in the first place, not just fewer commission charges.

What the Software Itself Costs

Subscription pricing is where the two companies look most different on paper. Fresha charges per bookable team member: about £14.95 a month for a single-person Independent plan, or about £9.95 per member a month on Team with no cap on headcount. Booksy does the opposite: one flat tier at £40 a month plus VAT covers the whole business regardless of features, and each additional team member beyond the first costs a comparatively small £5 a month plus VAT.

Work the maths through and a crossover point appears at around seven to eight bookable staff. A solo therapist pays roughly £15 a month on Fresha against £40 plus VAT on Booksy, so Fresha wins comfortably. A three-person salon is roughly £30 on Fresha against £50 plus VAT, about £60 gross, on Booksy, still in Fresha's favour on the subscription line alone. By seven or eight people the lines cross, and a ten-chair salon pays roughly £100 on Fresha against roughly £85 plus VAT on Booksy. None of that includes commission, which is where the picture changes, covered above.

Messaging tells its own story. Booksy includes 500 marketing texts a month before it charges 5p each, and reports appointment confirmations and reminders as free and unlimited separately. Fresha includes just 20 free texts a month before charging roughly 6p each, which a moderately busy salon clears in the first week. For a business that leans on SMS reminders, Booksy's allowance alone is worth real money every month that neither company's headline price reflects.

Which Is Cheaper: Booksy or Fresha?

There is no single honest answer to which is cheaper, because it depends on your team size and, for Booksy, a switch you control. Here is the same profile we use elsewhere on this site: a three-chair salon, an owner plus two stylists, taking around £9,000 a month across roughly 180 mostly in-person payments, picking up about eight new marketplace clients a month at an average first visit of £55, and sending around 400 confirmation and reminder texts.

Under Fresha

That is the Team plan for three staff, the mandatory 20% commission on those eight new clients, card processing at Fresha's published in-person rate, and texts beyond the 20 free. It excludes optional add-ons such as Insights or Rating Boost, covered in full in our Fresha pricing guide.

Under Booksy

Booksy has no add-on to switch on top of the flat fee, but it does have Boost. With Boost switched off, the same salon pays about £243 a month, cheaper than Fresha, on the assumption those eight new clients found the salon through Booksy's ordinary marketplace listing rather than paid promotion. Switch Boost on to actively chase that volume and the 30% commission adds roughly £132 a month, taking the total to around £375, dearer than Fresha. Booksy's own SMS allowance comfortably covers 400 texts a month at no extra charge either way.

Under Bizzly

Bizzly's flat Standard plan plus Stripe's own standard UK processing rate, with no commission taken by Bizzly on any of the takings. The catch is real and worth stating plainly: those eight new marketplace clients are not in this example, because Bizzly has no marketplace to find them on, and its SMS allowance, 50 a month on Standard and 200 on Pro, does not stretch to 400 texts, so a text-heavy salon would lean on Bizzly's unlimited email reminders instead or accept the cap.

Line the three up and the honest answer is: Bizzly is cheapest if you already have the clients and can live with lighter texting, Booksy is cheapest of the two marketplace platforms if you leave Boost off, and Fresha's lower commission rate, 20% against Booksy's 30%, wins back the gap the moment you switch Boost on for real volume. There is no version of this answer that fits on a homepage, which is exactly why so few comparison pages give it to you straight.

Where Each One Genuinely Wins

Fresha is stronger on depth, rate and reach

Fresha's feature set is the deepest of the two at every tier: point of sale and in-person card payments, proper retail stock with suppliers and purchase orders, gift cards, loyalty points and promotional deals are all included rather than gated behind extra spend. Its marketplace commission, at 20%, is lower than Booksy's 30% the moment Boost is switched on, and its published in-person card rate of around 1.19% + 20p is genuinely competitive, cheaper than Stripe's standard UK rate. Reach is broader too: Fresha reports operating in roughly 120 countries against Booksy's smaller international footprint, which matters if you operate outside the UK or plan to.

Booksy is stronger on predictability, team pricing and mobile-specific tools

Booksy's flat £40-plus-VAT fee means you know your software bill before you have hired anyone, and its £5 per extra member is gentler than Fresha's roughly £9.95 as a team grows, crossing over at around seven or eight bookable staff. Its marketplace commission being optional is a genuine structural advantage: a salon with a full diary can switch Boost off and pay nothing at all for marketplace exposure, which neither Fresha nor Treatwell allow. Booksy also publishes a configurable travel radius and travel fee for mobile services, deposits and card-on-file cancellation fees for no-show protection, and a generous 500 free marketing texts a month, several times Fresha's 20. Its UK barbering marketplace presence in particular is widely reckoned the strongest of any platform in the category.

The Gap Both Platforms Share

Their complaint patterns rhyme, which is usually a sign the issue is structural rather than incidental. Both draw criticism over commission attribution, disputes over which clients count as new rather than the salon's own marketing at work. Both give you a marketplace profile and a booking widget rather than a website: no dedicated pages, no control over layout, no search-optimised content beyond what the marketplace itself ranks for. Most Fresha and Booksy salons therefore pay separately for Wix, Squarespace or a developer, a second subscription that never appears in either company's pricing table.

Neither handles season or course-block billing with pro-rating either: a twelve-week skin programme, a training cohort, or a block sold whole or day by day with a late joiner who should pay a partial price. Both do memberships and prepaid packages well, which is a different problem. And neither ties booking access to payment status: nothing in either platform automatically stops a client whose card failed last month from booking again this month, so a lapsed payment becomes a manual conversation at the front desk rather than something the software catches on its own.

Where Bizzly Fits: The Flat-Fee Third Path

Bizzly is a different structure again: flat monthly software, no marketplace, no commission on any booking from any source, and no charge per team member. Payments land in your own Stripe account rather than a Fresha or Booksy payout.

Three things drive the comparison for a beauty business specifically.

1. A real website, not a profile page

A fully flexible drag-and-drop editor is included on every plan and edits every page of your public site block by block: 26 components including the booking calendar, plan pricing, store with cart, testimonials, forms and the entire customer portal, dropped onto the page rather than embedded from elsewhere. Styling goes down to individual elements with a raw CSS inspector, on top of a global theme and your own colours, with per-page SEO, page version snapshots, a media library and AI page create and refine. On Pro it runs on your own domain with branded email. Two bounds worth naming: the editor itself is a desktop tool, and there is no custom code injection.

2. Season and course-block billing alongside monthly plans

Monthly plans with booking quotas, session packs with expiry dates, and one-off season or course blocks where a late joiner is pro-rated automatically and a block can be sold whole or per day, all sit side by side. Season subscriptions bill natively through Stripe and auto-roll members into the next season under the cancellation policy you choose: billing-period end, a notice period, or the end of the season. Capacity is held while a client is at checkout, so a popular block cannot oversell. For an aesthetics clinic selling treatment courses or an academy running seasonal cohorts, that is the difference between the software doing the sums and you doing it by hand.

3. Payment-gated booking and a WhatsApp AI assistant in the plan

Booking quotas are payment-gated: a client can only book what their active plan, pack or credits cover, and a lapsed payment blocks new bookings automatically rather than becoming a front-desk conversation. From the Standard plan at £29 a month, a WhatsApp AI assistant checks live availability, books and cancels appointments, suggests alternatives, joins clients to a waitlist, answers questions about their account and invoices, and answers business questions from your own knowledge base, around the clock, with the client verified by a one-time code first. Allowances are 500 messages a month on Standard and 2,000 on Pro. Fresha's nearest equivalent, AI Concierge, is a paid add-on at around £79.95 per location; Booksy has no equivalent at all.

What Bizzly does not do

These are the exact things Fresha and Booksy are bought for. There is no consumer marketplace: Bizzly will not bring you a single client, whatever else it does well. There is no point of sale and no card terminal, so counter payments and tips are not covered. There are no gift cards and no loyalty scheme; discount codes work through Stripe promotion codes instead, which is also how a sibling or family discount is handled, though the client has to type the code in rather than have it detected automatically. There is no mobile-service travel radius or postcode restriction, a genuine limitation next to Booksy for a business that travels to clients. There is no native mobile app; it is a responsive web app, weaker at a busy front desk than either competitor's dedicated apps. There is no staff commission or payroll tracking. Clients reschedule by cancelling and rebooking inside the cancellation window rather than moving an appointment in one action. Payment methods follow your own Stripe Dashboard settings, cards and wallets by default, with UK businesses able to enable Bacs Direct Debit; nothing runs on offline or bank-transfer payment outside Stripe. The calendar is synced with Google Calendar, not an independent two-sided editor.

Which One to Pick

Choose Fresha if:

• You want the cheapest published entry point for a solo or small team
• You want point of sale, retail stock, gift cards and loyalty built in, in one place
• You would rather pay a lower, fixed 20% than manage an optional Boost fee
• You operate outside Europe, or plan to

Choose Booksy if:

• You run a team of eight or more and want the cheaper per-seat rate
• You want the option to pay zero marketplace commission by leaving Boost off
• Your business is mobile and you need a travel radius and travel fee built in
• UK barbering-style marketplace reach is what actually fills your diary
• Deposits and card-on-file cancellation fees are how you control no-shows

Choose Bizzly if:

• Your diary is already full and marketplace commission would be a tax on your own reputation
• You want your website, SEO and client list to be assets you own outright
• You sell memberships, treatment courses or seasonal blocks rather than only one-off appointments
• You want booking access tied automatically to what a client has actually paid for
• You want a flat bill, £19 to £49 a month, and do not need a till, card terminal, gift cards or a stockroom

Verdict

Between the two named platforms, there is no single winner, only a better fit for your team size and appetite for commission. Fresha is the cheaper, deeper product for a team under about seven or eight people and the safer bet if you would rather pay a known 20% than manage a Boost switch. Booksy wins on team pricing above that size and hands you a genuine choice Fresha does not: pay nothing for marketplace exposure at all if your diary does not need it, or pay more than Fresha's rate if you switch Boost on for real volume. Our worked three-chair example lands Fresha at around £284 a month, Booksy at around £243 with Boost off or around £375 with it on. Model your own numbers before you decide; the answer moves with your team size and your own commission choice, not just the headline price.

If the honest answer for your business is that neither company's marketplace would send you many clients, you are paying rent on a shopfront you are not using, and that is the case for the flat-fee route: £19 to £49 a month whatever your headcount, no commission on any booking, a fully flexible website builder on every plan, season and course-block billing alongside monthly plans, payment-gated booking quotas and a WhatsApp AI assistant already in the price. Just go in knowing nobody will hand you a client the way a marketplace can.

For the fuller Fresha breakdown with its own worked example, read our Fresha pricing guide. For the wider Booksy picture including Treatwell and other alternatives, see Booksy alternatives, and for Treatwell's significantly higher commission, our Fresha vs Treatwell comparison. See how Bizzly handles the sector on the beauty industry page, or current plans on the pricing page.