A Lebanese salon and a Lebanese clinic are sold the same appointment app, and one of them is buying the wrong category of software. Real published prices for Fresha, Cliniko, Booksy, Ehjouz, Gloora and SEHAFlow, and why the deposit feature fails here.
Most Lebanese clinics and salons shop for booking software by comparing calendars. The calendar never decides it. Two questions do: does the business need a patient record, and can it take a deposit at all. Answer those and a shortlist of thirty apps drops to about four. Fresha charges no monthly fee. Cliniko starts at $45 for a single practitioner. The gap between them is not features, it is which business you run.
What is the best software for booking appointments in a salon?
For a Lebanese salon, Fresha. Its pricing page lists no monthly fee at all: unlimited bookings, unlimited team members, unlimited locations. Booksy is the closest paid rival at $29.99 a month plus $20 for every extra team member. Setmore is free for up to four users and $5 per user per month on Pro. None of them fixes a no-show on its own.
The catch with Fresha is the marketplace. Listing there brings new clients and takes a cut of the first visit of anyone who found you through it. Booksy runs the same trade under the name Boost, and prices it at 30% of that first visit. If most of your bookings come from Instagram regulars, share your own booking link and you pay neither. If you want the marketplace to find clients for you, price the commission in before you switch it on.
Why do clinics need more than a calendar?
Because the appointment is the smallest part of the visit. A clinic has to hold a patient history, a prescription, a lab result and an insurance claim, and hold them for years. A salon calendar does none of that, and no amount of configuring will make it.
Cliniko prices by practitioner: $45 a month for one, $95 for two to five, $145 for six to eight, and $395 at the top of its published range covering 26 to 200. SMS costs 10 cents a message on top. That is practice management software with booking attached, which is the right shape for a clinic and the wrong shape for a barbershop.
SEHAFlow, built in Lebanon by NavyBits, sells that same shape with CNSS and insurance tracking, bilingual Arabic and English records with full RTL, and WhatsApp reminders. It publishes no price. It sells credits and quotes on a demo, which is normal for clinic software here and worth knowing before you try to compare it on cost.
One question decides more than the feature list: can you get your data back out. A salon leaving Fresha loses a client list and some history. A clinic leaving its system loses years of patient records it is legally obliged to keep. Ask for an export before you sign, not after, and ask what format it comes in. A CSV of appointments is not a medical record.
How much does booking software cost?
Between nothing and roughly $400 a month, which is a free Fresha account at one end and Cliniko's top published tier at the other. The spread says more about what the software is for than about how good it is. Every figure below was read off the vendor's own pricing page in September 2026: Cliniko, Booksy, Setmore, SimplyBook.me, Gloora, Ehjouz.
| Tool | Built for | Published price | Where it bills you again |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fresha | Salons, spas, barbers | No monthly fee | Commission on marketplace clients |
| Booksy | Salons, barbers | $29.99/mo | $20/mo per extra user, 30% Boost commission |
| Setmore | Any service business | Free to 4 users, $5/user/mo Pro | SMS availability varies by country |
| SimplyBook.me | Any service business | Free (50 bookings), Basic EUR 11.90/mo | Bookings cap per tier |
| Cliniko | Clinics and practices | $45/mo one practitioner | Every practitioner you add |
| Ehjouz | Lebanese service businesses | $20/mo to $65/mo | Extra locations |
| Gloora AI | Salons, spas, clinics | $79 to $239/mo per branch | Every branch, plus add-ons |
| Mawaeed | Lebanese salons | Free to 25 bookings/mo | Volume above the free tier |
| SEHAFlow | Lebanese clinics | Quoted on demo | Credits as you use them |
Two structures move the real number more than the headline plan does. Per-practitioner pricing punishes a clinic that grows, because Cliniko roughly doubles between one practitioner and two. Per-branch pricing punishes a salon that opens a second shop, because Gloora charges the full rate again for branch two.
Can a Lebanese business take a deposit online?
Not through the international tools, and this is the detail that quietly ruins the plan.
Cliniko's online payments run on Stripe. Cliniko says so on its own feature page: transactions pass directly between your site and Stripe, and Stripe is the processor it connects to. Stripe publishes its country list. That list holds 58 countries. The UAE is on it. Lebanon is not. Fresha's own knowledge base is similarly plain, describing its payment processing as available in a few countries, and Lebanon is not among the markets it names.
So the deposit setting exists in the software, and you cannot switch it on.
In practice that leaves three options, and the one most Lebanese businesses land on is the manual one: take the booking in the software, send a payment request over WhatsApp, mark the appointment confirmed by hand. It works. It also stops working the week you pass roughly forty bookings, because somebody has to watch for the transfer.
What works instead is a local rail. Whish and OMT both move money inside Lebanon without a card, and Whish Pay reached Shopify checkouts in June 2025. Mawaeed, a Lebanese booking platform, collects deposits over Whish for exactly this reason. If you would rather have a card gateway behind it, Areeba and the local bank gateways are the realistic route, which we compared in our guide to payment gateways in Lebanon.
Do WhatsApp reminders cut no-shows?
The vendors selling reminders say yes, and they put numbers on it. Timely's own research reports a 45% reduction when a deposit or cancellation fee backs the reminder up. Bookeo reports 29% from reminders alone and 65% once a deposit is attached. Both are vendor figures, published by companies selling the feature, so weigh them accordingly.
The part specific to Lebanon is the channel, not the percentage. A WhatsApp message costs nothing to send and lands where the client already is. Cliniko bills SMS at 10 cents each, which is a different economics entirely once you are reminding 400 patients a month. Ehjouz, Gloora and SEHAFlow all ship WhatsApp reminders as standard, and that is the clearest advantage the local platforms hold.
Should you pick a Lebanese platform or an international one?
Decide on two axes: deposits and language.
The Lebanese entrants are real and priced in the open. Ehjouz runs $20 a month for one location and one staff member, rising to $65 for multi-location, billed in USD only, with a client booking flow in Arabic, English or French. Gloora charges $79, $129 or $239 per branch per month, takes zero commission, and includes WhatsApp sending. Mawaeed is free to 25 bookings a month and takes Whish deposits, and states on its own site that its booking pages are English only for now.
The international tools win on polish, integrations and marketplace reach. They lose on the two things that decide it here: taking money, and speaking Arabic. A salon whose clients pay cash and book through Instagram can run Fresha happily and never feel the gap. A clinic filing CNSS claims will feel it in week one.
If you are still working out whether you need any of this, start with how online booking systems work for Lebanese service businesses, then come back to this comparison.
When does a custom booking flow beat a subscription?
When the booking is the business rather than an admin task around it.
Three signals. You are paying per practitioner or per branch on a number that keeps climbing. Your real flow does not fit any package: pre-visit intake forms, shared treatment rooms, weekend pricing, a calendar split across chairs and staff. Or the deposit matters enough that it has to be wired to a Lebanese rail now instead of waiting for a vendor to support one.
Below that bar, a subscription wins on cost every time. Ehjouz's top tier at $65 a month is $780 a year, and nothing custom competes with that.
What should you actually do this week?
Pick the category first, then the vendor.
- Salon or barbershop, cash clients, Instagram bookings: open a free Fresha account this week and run one stylist on it.
- Salon that needs deposits: look at Mawaeed and Gloora, and confirm the deposit rail works before you migrate a client list.
- Clinic with CNSS or insurance: shortlist SEHAFlow and Cliniko, and book the SEHAFlow demo early, since it quotes on credits rather than publishing a price.
- Multi-branch, or any calendar the packages do not fit: price three years of subscription before assuming a build costs more.
Then test one thing before you commit to anything. Send yourself a reminder, and try to pay a deposit. If either one fails, the rest of the feature list does not matter.
Sources
Ready to stop losing slots to no-shows?
If the software you want cannot take a deposit in Lebanon, that is a payments problem wearing a booking-software costume. Voxire builds booking flows that sit on rails which work here: WhatsApp confirmations, Whish or Areeba deposits, and a calendar shaped like your clinic or your salon instead of someone else's. We will also tell you when a $20 subscription is the better answer.
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