Open-source salon software: the diary is free, the deposit isn't

The search usually starts after a price rise. A salon with four stylists looks at what Fresha, Booksy or Vagaro charge this year, adds up the per-chair fees, and someone asks whether there's a free version you just install. "Open source salon software" sounds like it should be that.

I went through what actually comes up for that search on 4 November 2026, read each project's README, code or plugin listing, and sorted them by the one question that matters to a salon: which part of the job does it do?

Three different things get called salon software

A salon runs on three pieces, and most comparisons blur them together.

1. The diary. Who's working, which chair, which client at 15:30, the lunch break nobody is allowed to book over. Staff use it.
2. The front door. The page where a client picks a cut, a stylist and a time at 23:00 without phoning. Clients use it.
3. The till. A deposit on a three-hour balayage, a card on file, a refund when someone cancels properly. Money moves.

Every open-source project I found does the first. Fewer do the second. In their free form, none does the third. Keep that in mind and the rest of this page reads quickly.

OpenSalon is a good diary with no front door

OpenSalon is the newest of the bunch and the one that comes up first on GitHub. It's a TypeScript app (Preact and Tailwind on the front, Hono on the back) from Clawnify, part of the OpenClaw ecosystem. The README calls it an open-source alternative to Salonist and Fresha.

What it does, it does neatly: a day calendar with a column per stylist, multi-service appointments that add up duration and price, blocked slots for breaks, a client list with visit history, a product inventory with low-stock alerts, and a status flow from booked to completed or no-show. The server code checks for conflicts before it saves, so two appointments can't quietly land on one stylist.

What it doesn't have is anything a client touches. Every screen is for staff. There's no public booking page, no reminders, and no payments: the code itself describes its revenue figure as "not settled payment revenue". I also didn't find a login in the server code; access control, if there is any, would come from the Clawnify platform it deploys to, and I didn't test that.

Two things I'd check before trusting it with a real salon's client list:

• The licence contradicts itself. The README ends with "License: AGPL-3.0". The LICENSE file in the same repo is MIT, and GitHub shows MIT. Those mean very different things if you modify it and host it for someone else. Ask the maintainers which one they meant before you build on it.
• The README and the code disagree about how it runs. The README says it runs locally on SQLite with pnpm run dev. The package.json dev script starts Cloudflare's wrangler with a D1 database, and the server is typed for D1. It's a young project: 10 commits and 19 stars when I looked.

Pick OpenSalon if you want a self-hosted diary for the front desk and clients will keep phoning or messaging to book.

The WordPress plugin is the only one that takes bookings and stops at the money

Salon Booking System is a WordPress plugin, and the free version on WordPress.org (which only lists GPL-compatible plugins) is the closest thing on this list to a complete salon front door. On 4 November it was at version 10.31.13, with 2,000+ active installations and 4.4 stars from 187 reviews.

The free version is generous: unlimited bookings, services and staff, a client-facing booking form, a back-end calendar with a view per assistant, staff timetables and holidays, email and SMS reminders (through Twilio and others), two-way Google Calendar sync, and discount codes. No per-booking fee.

Then you reach the till. From its own pricing page, checked 4 November 2026:

So deposits, the one feature salons most often switch software for, are a paid tier. €89 a year is still cheap next to per-chair SaaS pricing, and I'd say that plainly. But it's no longer "free open source", and you're running WordPress, a booking plugin and a payment add-on yourself, with the updates that come with that.

Pick it if the salon already has a WordPress site and someone who keeps it updated.

Easy!Appointments books clients and never charges them

Easy!Appointments isn't built for salons, but it's the most mature general-purpose open-source scheduler and it maps onto a salon reasonably well: services, providers (your stylists), working plans and breaks, a public booking page, Google Calendar and CalDAV sync. It's GPL-3.0 and PHP. The current release is 1.6.1 from 12 October 2026, which fixed a list of security issues, so anyone on an older version should upgrade first.

It has no payments at all, as far as I could find in its feature list and changelog. The maintainer sells hosting, support and custom work instead. I wrote up the details, including the same-name WordPress plugin that confuses the search results, in Easy!Appointments alternatives.

Pick it if clients book online, pay at the chair, and you're comfortable running a PHP app.

SalonERP is still downloadable, with no dates on anything

SalonERP describes itself as a "tiny open source ERP system" for salons: a calendar of appointments across several employees, customers and products, and revenue reports, in English, German and Spanish, on any server that runs PHP. Its site names no licence, no version and no release date, and says its own demo server sometimes doesn't work. There's no client booking page. I'd only look at it if you want a desk tool and are happy to read the code first.

What each one covers, checked 4 November 2026

The last row isn't open source in the same sense, and the next section explains exactly where the line is.

Open code for the salon's site, a rented engine for the money

I build Opencals, so weigh this paragraph accordingly. Opencals is not open source. It's a hosted booking and checkout engine. What is open source, under MIT, is the code around it: our Next.js salon templates, the storefront SDK and the agent skills.

The salon template is Haar (live demo), and the barbershop one is Frisor. Both are complete sites you can fork, rebrand and put on the salon's own domain. Clients pick a service, a stylist or "any stylist", and a time. The slot is held while they pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, or they choose to pay at the salon. They get an account to reschedule or cancel. In Haar, services are priced by hair length, so one "Blow Dry" carries short, medium and long options with their own price and duration, instead of three near-identical services in the menu.

What you give up compared with the projects above is the "runs on my server" part. Availability, payments and client data live in Opencals, not on your machine. If that's the requirement, OpenSalon or Easy!Appointments is the honest answer.

Pricing, from our pricing page on 4 November 2026: $0.99 per booking with no monthly fee, or $14.98 a month including 300 bookings, then $0.20 each. A free development store runs every feature in test mode, but it can't take real payments. Deposits and no-show fees are in beta on our side, so if a deposit on every colour appointment is your reason for switching, test that flow in the development store before you commit.

What I didn't test

I didn't install any of these for this article. Everything above comes from the projects' READMEs, code, plugin listing and pricing pages, read on 4 November 2026. OpenSalon is changing fast enough that its README and code already disagree, so check the repo again before you rely on a detail here.

I also couldn't tell you how well any of them handles a busy Saturday with six stylists and walk-ins, because I haven't run one through that. If I were setting up a small salon today and self-hosting was a hard requirement, I'd take the free WordPress plugin, pay the €89 the day I wanted deposits, and give OpenSalon six months to sort out its licence before looking again.