The best Fresha alternatives in 2026

Fresha is not free any more. Its pricing page now reads "Software that grows with your business. As you expand we charge for each bookable team member," and the cheapest plan, Independent, is $19.95 a month with a 7 day trial. Almost every article you will find still says otherwise, which makes most Fresha-alternative roundups out of date before their first paragraph. This one compares the five alternatives worth considering against what Fresha actually costs now, with every figure read off the vendor's own pricing page on the dates at the bottom.

Where this page stands: CNL Systems is our product, and at $29 a month it is more expensive than Fresha on the subscription line. We think it is still the right pick for a pro who has regulars, and the argument for that is about what the nine dollars buys, not about pretending the nine dollars away.

Is Fresha free?

No. Fresha lists three plans and none of them is free:

Independent gets a single calendar column, 100 free messages, 50 free marketing emails, and email and chat support. Team gets multiple calendar columns, and the message and email allowances become per team member. If you read a review saying Fresha costs nothing, check its date. The free-software model is what Fresha was known for, and the internet has not caught up.

The Fresha alternatives at a glance

Which alternative fits which business

One pro with regulars. CNL. If your clients already know your name, the marketplace you are paying to stand in has stopped working for you and started working on you. $29 a month flat buys your own website on your own domain, booking with deposits, payments, reminders, your client list and email campaigns, with no allowances to watch and no directory of competitors on the page where your clients rebook.

Starting from zero clients. Staying on Fresha is a defensible answer, and this page will not pretend otherwise; at $19.95 it is the cheapest marketplace in the category, and a marketplace is genuinely good at the cold-start problem. Booksy is the other marketplace, at $29.99 plus tax, with a bigger audience claim, more than 44 million clients, and a 30% Boost commission on first visits attached to it.

A small team. The per-person lines diverge fast. Fresha's Team plan is $14.95 per bookable team member, Booksy adds people at $20 a month each, and Vagaro adds about $10 a month per calendar up to $83.99 for seven or more. GlossGenius sells by tier rather than by seat. CNL is built for one pro running one book, so a growing team should price the per-seat platforms against each other.

A shop that is part retail, or more than one location. Square, the only per-location pricing in the table: Square Free at $0, Plus at $49 and Premium at $149 a month per location, with the money made on processing rather than subscriptions.

What leaving Fresha is actually about

The marketplace. Fresha's product includes one, and a marketplace works by listing professionals together so clients can browse them. That is the model, and it means the page a client lands on can sit inside Fresha's directory, alongside other salons and barbers near you, even if you have connected your own domain to it. The day you change software, the marketplace listing and the traffic it sent you both stay behind.

What counts as a bookable team member. Fresha's own headline is that it charges for each bookable team member as you expand. Independent covers a single calendar column; the moment a second person needs their own bookable calendar you are on Team at $14.95 each, and the message and email allowances are counted per member rather than pooled.

Allowances versus inclusion. Independent includes 100 messages and 50 marketing emails a month. Those are allowances, and allowances run out, usually in the week you most need to reach people. The alternatives below are graded against those three things: whether the booking page sits inside a shared marketplace or stands alone, what the per-person math does as you grow, and whether the features are included or metered.

CNL Systems: what the nine dollars over Fresha buys

$29 a month, flat, one plan, no percentage of your sales. For the nine dollars over Fresha Independent: a standalone site with no directory attached, registered on your own domain at cost, about $12 a year for a .com, or connected free, rather than a page inside somebody's marketplace next to other salons and barbers near you. Reminders and email campaigns included rather than metered, with no monthly counter to watch. Your site is built for you the moment you sign up, live in minutes rather than days, with a person still on the other end of it, and card processing runs at Stripe's standard rates with no CNL markup.

The exit stays unlocked, on purpose: leave whenever you like and take the full client list with you, history and notes included. On a marketplace, leaving means starting over, because the audience that found you through Fresha's own marketplace search does not follow you when you go.

The honest cons: CNL costs more than Fresha on the subscription line, it is built for one pro rather than a floor, and it has no marketplace, so it will not put you in front of strangers. That last one is the real fork in the road, and it gets its own section below.

Booksy: the other marketplace

If what you like about Fresha is the marketplace, Booksy is the direct comparison, not CNL. It costs more, $29.99 a month plus tax with each additional team member at $20 a month, and its audience pitch is bigger: more than 44 million clients searching for professionals nearby. The 14 day trial needs no card.

The commission is the difference to read closely. Boost, Booksy's promotion engine, takes a one-time 30% fee on a first-time Boost client's visit, with a $10 minimum and a $100 maximum, no-shows excluded. Under about $33 a ticket the $10 floor takes over and the effective rate climbs past 30%. Fresha meters your messages; Booksy takes a cut of your new faces. Card processing runs 2.69% + $0.30 keyed or mobile, 2.49% + $0.10 with the reader, and 2.49% + $0.20 for tap to pay, with fast payout at 1.5% and next-business-day free.

GlossGenius: no marketplace, but a ladder

GlossGenius drops the marketplace entirely, which fixes Fresha's structural problem and introduces its own: tiers. Standard is $28 a month, Gold is $56 and Platinum is $168, month to month, with the advertised $24, $48 and $148 requiring a year paid up front. The features a working book runs on, waitlist, forms, rebooking reminders, time tracking, live in Gold, the tier GlossGenius itself labels most popular. Payroll is a $40 a month add-on plus $6 per seat, and processing is a flat 2.6% with instant payout costing 1.8% more.

A different problem replaces it: GlossGenius's own help centre states that custom domains are not supported at this time, so every booking site lives on a glossgenius.com subdomain regardless of tier. The marketplace goes away; the subdomain does not.

Vagaro: the à la carte bill

Vagaro lists at $30 a month for one bookable calendar, promoted at $23.99, and sells the rest separately: MySite, the website, at $20 a month, text marketing at $20 for 1,000 credits, forms at $10, Drive storage from $10. Stacked from Vagaro's own published price list, the bill is $83.99 a month, or $93.99 with the online shopping cart, and the branded app is another $100 a month plus a $100 one-time fee.

Coming from Fresha's $19.95, that stack is the thing to see clearly: the subscription looks comparable, but the features Fresha meters and CNL includes are lines Vagaro sells. In its favor, everything is published, there is no marketplace commission, and the per-calendar model spreads fairly across a real team.

Square: free is real here, with a different catch

Square is the one platform in this comparison where a $0 plan genuinely exists: Square Free is $0 a month per location and includes an online booking site, appointment reminders and unlimited staff calendars, with Square Plus at $49 and Square Premium at $149 per location above it and 30 day free trials on the paid tiers. The money is made on processing, published by tier: 2.6% + 15 cents in person on Free, 2.5% + 15 cents on Plus, 2.4% + 15 cents on Premium, with online payments at 3.3% + 30 cents on Free and 2.9% + 30 cents above.

The catch is not the price. Square is a register company, the calendar exists to feed the checkout, and the booking page lives on a square.site address that looks like every other one. If you left Fresha's marketplace directory to get away from other salons on your page, Square Free trades it for a different shared address instead of a page of your own.

When CNL is not the right pick

If what you want is a marketplace that finds you new clients from its own audience, Fresha and Booksy do that and CNL does not. We made that trade deliberately: the machinery that puts you in front of strangers is the same machinery that later stands between you and your own regulars, and we chose not to build it. So if you are starting from nothing, with no regulars and no name in anyone's phone, Fresha at $19.95 is a reasonable first move and this is the wrong product for now. CNL is for the day the trade flips, when the people booking you already know you, and the question stops being "how do I get found" and becomes "why is my own client list renting someone else's address."

How this was researched

Every figure on this page was read off the vendor's own pricing page, not from reviews or roundups. Fresha's plan names, prices, trial lengths and allowances come from fresha.com/pricing, re-verified on August 26, 2026. Fresha's own domain policy, that a business can buy a new custom domain or connect one it already owns, was verified on Fresha's help centre on September 23, 2026. Booksy's prices and Boost terms come from biz.booksy.com and its help centre, GlossGenius's tiers and fees from glossgenius.com/pricing, and Square's tier prices and processing rates from Square's own appointments pricing page and help centre, all read the same day. Vagaro's figures come from Vagaro's own published price list, checked on August 21, 2026, and re-checked on August 24, 2026.

The short version

Fresha stopped being free. Independent is $19.95 a month, Team is $14.95 per bookable team member, and at those prices it remains the cheapest marketplace in the category, which is exactly what it is: a marketplace, with your booking page inside it and your messages on a meter. The alternatives split by what they do with that trade. Booksy is the same model with a bigger audience and a 30% first-visit commission, GlossGenius swaps the marketplace for a tier ladder on a subdomain, Vagaro unbundles everything into add-ons, and Square gives the software away per location to feed its register.

The case for CNL is not that Fresha is expensive. It is that $29 flat buys an address that belongs to you, no allowances, no directory of your competitors on the page where your clients rebook, and an exit door that stays unlocked. If price is the only axis, take Fresha. If the business is yours, put it at your own address.

Fresha's plan names, prices, trial length and included allowances were taken from fresha.com/pricing on August 24, 2026, and re-verified there on August 26, 2026. Booksy, GlossGenius and Square figures were read from those vendors' own pricing pages and help centres on August 26, 2026. Vagaro's figures come from Vagaro's own published price list, checked on August 21, 2026, and re-checked on August 24, 2026. Prices move, and this one moved recently; check before you sign anything, including ours.