Is Fresha or Trafft cheaper?

Fresha starts at $19.95 per month (Independent, one bookable calendar) (free plan available). Trafft starts at $0 (Free Forever, 1 user and 100 appointments a month), then $29 per month (free plan available).

Fresha vs Trafft

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Fresha compared with Trafft

Trafft is a neutral subscription booking platform from $29 a month that plugs into your existing processor and never takes a commission, with strong multi-location and custom-domain support. It has no POS, no inventory, and no marketplace. Trafft suits an operator who wants control and no intermediary; Fresha suits one who will trade a percentage for demand.

Trafft compared with Fresha

Fresha bundles POS, inventory, memberships, and a consumer marketplace at $14.95 per bookable member, and takes 20 percent of new marketplace clients. Trafft is $79 flat for fifteen users, takes nothing, and has no marketplace or till. Fresha is the better answer for a salon that needs demand and retail operations; Trafft for a multi-site service business that generates its own demand and wants a predictable bill.

Choose Fresha if

Salons, spas, barbershops, nail bars, and wellness clinics that want a full operating system for the business and are actively trying to fill empty appointment slots with new clients from a consumer marketplace.

Choose Trafft if

Multi-location service businesses and the agencies that run booking on their behalf, especially operators who want a predictable flat bill, their own payment processor, their own domain, and no platform standing between them and their clients.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Fresha	Trafft
Category	Scheduling	Scheduling
Starting price	$19.95 per month (Independent, one bookable calendar) (free plan available)	$0 (Free Forever, 1 user and 100 appointments a month), then $29 per month (free plan available)
Pricing model	Per bookable calendar or per bookable team member subscription, plus a one-off percentage commission on new clients acquired through the Fresha consumer marketplace, plus published card processing rates. Priced per market, so local currency figures vary.	Flat monthly subscription with tiers defined by included users and locations rather than by booking volume. Additional users are a low flat fee. No commission on bookings and no bundled payment processing.
Free plan	None. Fresha retired its long-running free subscription model in 2025 and now requires a paid plan.	Free Forever covers 1 user, 1 location, and 100 appointments per month, with no credit card required to start.
Free trial	7 days	Free plan with no credit card required, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee on paid plans
Best for	Salons, spas, barbershops, nail bars, and wellness clinics that want a full operating system for the business and are actively trying to fill empty appointment slots with new clients from a consumer marketplace.	Multi-location service businesses and the agencies that run booking on their behalf, especially operators who want a predictable flat bill, their own payment processor, their own domain, and no platform standing between them and their clients.
Setup time	One to three days for a small salon: service menu, staff, hours, and client import are the bulk of it. Payments onboarding adds identity and bank verification, and a marketplace profile worth publishing needs photos and copy, which takes an afternoon on its own.	Half a day to two days depending on scope. Employees, services, extras, and locations are straightforward; a custom domain, branded templates, and API or webhook integration add configuration time.
Learning curve	Low to moderate. The calendar and checkout are approachable for staff with no software background. Owners need time on the reporting, memberships, and marketing automation, which are where the value beyond a basic diary sits.	Low to moderate. The concepts map directly onto a service business, and the admin is cleaner than the salon platforms. Custom roles and the API are the only parts that need someone technical.
Platforms	Web dashboard, iOS and Android partner app, iOS and Android consumer marketplace app, Hosted booking page and website embeds	Cloud web application, Hosted booking page with eight templates, Embeddable booking form, Custom domain hosting on Professional and above
Compliance	PCI DSS for payments, GDPR, UK and EU data protection obligations as a London-headquartered operator	GDPR
Founded	2015	2021
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom	Belgrade, Serbia
Ownership	Venture-backed and private-equity-backed	Independent and unfunded

Strengths and limitations

Fresha

Strengths

The consumer marketplace is a genuine demand channel rather than a directory, and no flat-fee competitor offers an equivalent.
The commission is charged once per new client rather than on every booking, so a marketplace client who becomes a regular is acquired very cheaply.
Commerce depth is strong for the price: memberships, prepaid packages, gift cards, inventory, and stock control are native rather than add-ons.
Team pricing at $14.95 per bookable member is competitive, and cheaper per head than the solo plan.

Limitations

The marketplace lists your competitors alongside you and encourages clients to think of Fresha as the brand they book with, which is a strategic cost as well as a financial one.
The 20 percent new client fee with a $6 minimum bites hardest on low-priced services, where the commission can be a large share of the ticket.
The free plan is gone, so the reason many businesses originally chose Fresha no longer exists, and the 2025 change damaged trust with part of the installed base.
The economics assume Fresha Payments; using an outside processor undercuts deposits, no-show fees, and much of the automation.

Trafft

Strengths

Flat pricing with $5 additional users, which makes it dramatically cheaper than per-seat competitors at any real headcount.
Takes no commission on bookings of any kind, and runs no marketplace, so it never sits between you and your clients.
Works with five payment processors (Stripe, Square, PayPal, Mollie, Authorize.Net), so you keep your existing merchant relationship rather than adopting a new one.
Custom domain on the Professional tier makes it genuinely white-labellable, which is rare below enterprise pricing and is why agencies use it.

Limitations

The free plan's 100-appointment monthly cap makes it an evaluation tier rather than a permanent home for any working business.
The included SMS credits (5 and 10 a month) are nominal, so anyone relying on text reminders is buying message volume separately and should model that cost before comparing prices.
No point of sale, inventory, memberships, packages, commission tracking, or payroll, so retail-attached businesses will outgrow it.
No consumer marketplace, so the product generates zero demand; all client acquisition remains your problem.

Pricing compared

Fresha

Per bookable calendar or per bookable team member subscription, plus a one-off percentage commission on new clients acquired through the Fresha consumer marketplace, plus published card processing rates. Priced per market, so local currency figures vary.

Independent$19.95
Team$14.95
EnterpriseCustom

As pure software, Fresha at $14.95 to $19.95 a calendar is fair, roughly in line with Vagaro and cheaper than Booksy per head, and the commerce layer (memberships, packages, gift cards, stock) is deeper than Square's. The real question is the marketplace. If you take 20 new marketplace clients a month at an average $70 first visit, you are paying about $280 in commission, which is a lot next to a $49 flat fee at Square, and a bargain if those clients rebook. The commission is a customer acquisition cost, not a software cost, and it should be judged against what you would otherwise spend on local ads. A full book makes Fresha expensive; an empty Tuesday makes it cheap.

Trafft

Flat monthly subscription with tiers defined by included users and locations rather than by booking volume. Additional users are a low flat fee. No commission on bookings and no bundled payment processing.

Free$0
Mini$29
Growth$49
Professional$79
Business$129

For a multi-staff or multi-location business, Trafft is one of the best-value subscriptions in the category, because the price is flat and the marginal user is $5. Twelve staff on Professional costs $79 a month against roughly $180 on Fresha and $250 on Booksy for a comparable booking capability. You are also keeping 100 percent of your revenue and your existing processor. What you sacrifice is everything adjacent to booking: no till, no inventory, no memberships, no payroll, no marketplace demand, and no vendor scale. If your business already has payments and marketing solved and only needs a good multi-location booking layer, this is the cheapest competent way to get one. If you were hoping the software would also bring you clients, it will not.

Editorial verdict on each

Fresha

Fresha is two purchases wearing one price tag: competent, commerce-heavy salon software, and a marketplace that will introduce you to strangers for 20 percent of their first visit. Judged as software it is good value, with memberships, packages, inventory, and multi-location included at $14.95 per bookable team member and card rates below Square's. Judged as an acquisition channel, the commission is either the cheapest local marketing you will ever buy or a pointless tax, and which one it is depends entirely on whether your Tuesdays are empty. Buy it if you are growing and need demand. Do not buy it if you are full, have a waiting list, and would resent a platform standing between you and your clients, in which case Square Appointments costs nothing and Trafft never takes a cut. The 2025 removal of the free plan is worth remembering as evidence of how the commercial terms can change under you.

Read the full Fresha profile

Trafft

Trafft is the flat-fee, no-commission, bring-your-own-processor option in a category full of platforms that want a percentage of your business. For a multi-location service operation or an agency running booking for several clients, the arithmetic is decisive: $79 a month covers fifteen users and unlimited locations with a custom domain, where Booksy would charge $249.99 and Fresha around $180 for comparable headcount, and neither would let you keep your own Stripe account or hide the vendor's name from your clients. The tradeoffs are equally clear. There is no till, no inventory, no memberships, no marketplace demand, and the company is ten people with no funding. Buy it if booking is the only problem you need solved and you want to solve it once, cheaply, without giving a platform a share. Look at Picktime if the budget is tighter, Vagaro or Fresha if you need the rest of the business in the same system, and Square if you have not solved payments yet.

Read the full Trafft profile

Fresha profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Trafft last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.