Wix Bookings or Fresha? The best booking system for a small UK service business
A plain comparison of Fresha and Wix Bookings for salons, therapists, clinics and trades, with what each costs, who each suits and the mistakes that make either one fail.
I set up one of two booking systems for every site I build: Fresha or Wix Bookings. I do not build booking systems from scratch, because these two are better than anything a small business should pay to have written, and your clients already trust them. This is how I choose between them, and what I switch on so they actually fill a diary.
The one-line answer
If you are a salon, barber, nail or lash tech, or a massage or beauty therapist: Fresha. If you are anything else that books by the hour, a physio, a tutor, a dog groomer, a personal trainer, a studio, a consultant: Wix Bookings. There are exceptions, and I cover them below, but that rule gets it right nine times in ten.
Fresha
Fresha is a booking platform built for hair and beauty. Your services, prices and availability sit on Fresha, clients book through the Fresha app or a link on your site, and payments, deposits and reminders are handled for you.
What it costs. Free for the business to use. Fresha makes its money from card processing fees and from a fee on new clients who find you through its marketplace rather than through your own link. Bookings that come through your own website link carry no marketplace fee.
Why it wins for hair and beauty. Clients already have the app, so booking feels familiar. Deposits and no-show protection are built in and work well. The marketplace listing brings people in who have never heard of you. Reviews live on your Fresha profile and show up in Google. And it runs off Google's infrastructure, so it is quick and rarely goes down on a Saturday morning.
Where it falls short. It is not your website. The design is Fresha's, the URL is Fresha's, and if you ever leave, the profile goes. That is why I still build a proper site around it: the site ranks for your town and tells your story, and every button on it goes to your Fresha diary. HairBiba, the case study on this site, works exactly that way.
Wix Bookings
Wix Bookings is the booking system built into Wix. It lives inside your own website, syncs to Google Calendar, takes payment through Wix Payments, sends reminders and handles one-to-one sessions, classes and courses.
What it costs. Included in a Wix Business plan, which you pay to Wix directly. That plan is also your hosting, so for most businesses it is one bill of £15 to £25 a month for the site and the bookings together.
Why it wins for everyone else. The booking never leaves your site, so the client stays with you and your brand from search to confirmation. It handles group sessions and courses, which Fresha does not. It plugs into your own calendar and your own email. And because it is part of the site, the booking page can rank for searches in its own right.
Where it falls short. No marketplace, so it only brings in clients who found your site. Deposits and cancellation rules take a bit more setting up. The app for clients is less familiar than Fresha's.
The exceptions
A massage therapist who also runs classes or retreats is usually better on Wix Bookings, because Fresha cannot do groups. A barber who wants to keep every client on their own site and never pay a marketplace fee can be perfectly happy on Wix. A mobile hairdresser who needs "home visit" versions of every service with a call-out charge built in is easier on Fresha, where duplicate services with different prices are simple. When it is close, I go with whichever one the client's existing customers already use.
The five settings that decide whether either one works
The system matters less than the setup. These are the settings I check on every build, in order of how often they are wrong.
1. Reminders on, and at the right time. A text or WhatsApp reminder 24 hours before, and another two hours before for anything under an hour. This alone cuts no-shows more than anything else you can do.
2. A deposit on anything over about £40. A £10 deposit, refundable up to 24 hours before, turns a "maybe" into a booking. Both systems support it. Most businesses have it switched off because they are worried it will put people off. It does not, and the people it puts off are the ones who would not have turned up.
3. Buffer time between appointments. Ten or fifteen minutes so you are not running late by eleven o'clock. Set it once in the service settings rather than trying to remember it when you build the diary.
4. Availability that matches reality. If you finish at six but the system offers six-thirty, you will either work late or cancel on people. Block the times you do not want, including the lunch break you keep saying you will take.
5. The booking link on every page. Not just the contact page. Every service description, every blog post, the footer, and a sticky button on mobile. A client should never be more than one tap from the diary.
Connecting it to your calendar
Wix Bookings syncs to Google Calendar in both directions out of the box, so a dentist appointment in your personal calendar blocks that slot for clients. Fresha syncs out to Google and Apple calendars, and can block times from them too. In both cases the sync is worth setting up on day one, because a double booking is the fastest way to lose a client you already had.
What I set up as standard
Every package on the pricing page includes one of these two systems set up with your services, durations, prices, deposits, buffer times and reminders, connected to your calendar, and linked from every page of the site. Starter is £395, Business £795, Full Launch £1,495. If you already have one of them and it is just not filling up, the fix is usually in the five settings above, and a phone call sorts it. Ring me on 07940 022854.