Fresha vs Textmagic: Which is a better fit?

Adam B.: Hi, my name's Adam. I'm the commercial manager for Botanicals Limited and Botanicals Bake World Limited, and we are a small medium business in the skincare industry and in the salon and spa industry. And I rate Fresha a five out of five. I found Fresha in a industry magazine that was related throughout the salon industry. And essentially we had a look around all the competitors at the time, and it seemed like Fresha was a little bit too good to be true, but it's absolutely revolutionized our business. And I still have that same magazine today, which I often look at with the same advertisement that's recommended Fresha. So the main reasons and features as to why we chose Fresha for our salon was because it allowed the ability to take memberships. And that's really essential for our business because we're based in a tourist location, which means that we have a brilliant on season. But during the off season, we allow to facilitate the locals, which is great because it means that we've always got money coming in and it means that we can keep our heads above water. And also the ability to take vouchers and make vouchers and sell them online. The user interface is super simple and really easy to use. And also one of the main other reasons, probably the contributing factor as to why we chose Fresha was because it isn't a subscription based service. You don't pay a flat rate for it every month. You only pay for when you use it. So it's a percentage of what you take per transaction, which is really good for our business because when we were first starting out, we didn't have any software, we didn't have any business, so it allowed for us to build ourselves up without having too much of a big overhead. So Fresha was really easy in terms of the onboarding process. It was just a case of going through the motions of going on their website, signing up as a Fresha partner. You then got a account manager who ran you through all of the features, at which point I'd already done my due diligence. So I was familiar with them all and I was telling them about it. And it was all really, really nice considering we were nervous to start our business in this industry. But yeah, the onboarding was great. The technical onboarding was excellent. We had a person who was assigned to our account, which was great because when we were first getting set up, we had different ways to configure it and they really helped us get set up and get the ball rolling without putting in a whole lot of effort on our side. And yeah, the onboarding procedure was probably one of the easiest software onboarding procedures that we've done for our business and for our other business as well. So the one thing that I would recommend to anybody who is looking to settle with Fresha is look at their two different options. They've got a simple option, which essentially means that you can use the software for free without even taking any fees off of you. You can just use it as a calendar and you can use a separate payment terminal, and you don't have to pay anything for the software. However, if you do want to use the feature, which means that you pay through the software, that's where the fees come off. So there are two features. We decided to go for the higher end option because we wanted it to be all integrated, and the wallet that was in there means that all the payouts were done through Fresha. The fees were super simple rather than using a third party payment machine. And it just meant that we could cover our backs with the cancellation fee, which is probably one of the main reasons, again, why we chose Fresha. So yeah, I would say that is a really good point to consider. The other thing is if you're a small business and you're not really marketing savvy, it's really important to know that you don't have to worry about email marketing on a third party. Fresha has an inbuilt marketing tool, which means you can make mailers or newsletters that go up to your audience and you can have offers on there, which was really great. And another thing that came up when we were looking into it is we didn't know how we were going to work out commissions when people and therapists in our place sell products. Fresha allows that to be done super simply. All you have to do is set up your practitioners or therapists with a specific commission amount, and you've even got tiers and it just automatically calculates it when you check out at the end. And yeah, that's a really good feature. And then one of the other things that I think is a really good point for you to know before you actually download the software and try it is the fact that if you do want to go ahead with the card machine and you do want to confirm your bookings through Fresha and you want to go through the way in which you pay with fees, they will look into your account, see how much business you will do, and they will potentially offer you some devices at a reduced rate, which is really good. And I think just to touch on the last point, when you're looking at other pieces of software, just make sure that you are checking all of the extra add-ons that you're buying with it, because there are certain things that you pay for extra in regards to rental of line, the card machine, all these other features. Whereas Fresha is literally just simple. We've been using it for two years now. There's no hidden costs and yeah, it's an amazing piece of software.

Kelli D.: Hi, my name is Kelli. I am the Chief Creative Officer at a small company under 10 folks. I would give TextMagic, on a scale from one to five, I would give it a four. I use TextMagic on a day-to-day basis to communicate with clients, with folks on my mailing list who have asked to have that daily communication. The thing I like most about TextMagic is that the price is pretty good for what it offers you and... I guess I have two things that I like most, is that it helps you... It has a little mechanism within it that can help you rephrase the text to get it within the amount of characters that you can reasonably send. The one thing that I wish were a little bit better with TextMagic is I wish it were easier to... If multiple folks are using the same app to log in and out of different users using our same company, but a different user. That's a tiny little bit clunky.