Altegio, Booksy or Fresha for a Salon

Three systems salons and small clinics in Europe most often choose. They solve one job, online booking, but they are built differently, and the difference shows up in month three rather than month one. Here is the substance, without any "best service of the year" verdicts.

The core difference: how they make money

This determines everything else.

• Altegio — subscription per workstation. You pay a fixed fee, the clients are yours, and the service stays out of your relationship with them.
• Booksy — subscription plus a marketplace. It has its own consumer app through which new customers can find you.
• Fresha — core features with no subscription, revenue taken from transactions: a fee on online payments and on customers arriving through its directory.

The practical consequence: if you already have a flow of clients, a subscription model is usually cheaper. If that flow has to come from somewhere, a marketplace can pay for its commission.

What to check before choosing

Who owns the client base. Contact export should be available to you without contacting support. Verify that before you upload 3,000 clients, not after.

Is there a usable data exchange. If you plan to link bookings with a CRM, telephony or end-to-end analytics, you need integration access. All three have it in some form, but the scope differs, so check it against your own scenario.

Languages and currency. For a salon serving both local and expat clients, the customer-facing interface needs to be in the customer's language, not only in yours.

How reminders are billed. SMS notifications are charged separately almost everywhere, and WhatsApp is not available everywhere. For beauty that matters: reminders are what cut no-shows.

What none of the three does

A booking system is a calendar, not a CRM. Neither Altegio nor Booksy nor Fresha will give you:

• one inbox for Instagram, WhatsApp and calls;
• a pipeline with stages before the booking — enquiry, consultation, objection;
• end-to-end analytics from ad spend through enquiry, booking and attendance to revenue;
• a way to work with people who wrote but did not book.

That is not a complaint about the products, it is where their scope ends. The calendar covers the moment of booking; everything before and after lives in another layer.

How the pieces usually fit together

The working arrangement looks like this: the booking calendar stays with the practitioners and does not change, a CRM sits on top of it, and enquiries from every channel arrive there. The appointment is created in the calendar, while the CRM shows where the person came from and what it cost to bring them.

That is how we build it: we do not touch the calendar, we add the layer above. Altegio implementation from €750; linking it to a CRM and channels is quoted separately.

The short answer

If you want a predictable bill and your own database, look at the subscription model. If you want a flow of new clients and are willing to share, look at the marketplace. And if you do not know how much you lose between channels, the booking system is not the first question at all: start by measuring where enquiries leak.

Moving between booking systems

Worth its own section, because migrating here hurts more than migrating a CRM: a salon has no pause, appointments are booked weeks ahead.

What transfers cleanly: the client directory, services, price list, practitioner list. That is an ordinary spreadsheet export and all three accept it.

What transfers badly or not at all:

• future appointments — some services do not import them at all, and a fortnight of calendar has to be re-entered by hand;
• visit history — not everywhere, and it is exactly what repeat sales run on;
• packages and deposits — almost always manual, because the services model them differently;
• reviews — always stay with the old service; they are its asset, not yours.

How it is usually done. Pick the quietest period, stop booking far ahead in the old system about ten days before the switch, and put new appointments straight into the new one. A few days of overlap are unavoidable, and during them the front desk keeps both calendars open.

Warn the practitioners separately. For them a change of booking system is a change of working tool, and resistance is stronger here than from the owner who is looking at the numbers.

Terms and pricing change; check the vendors' own sites for current details.