What to actually look for when switching from Fresha or Vagaro

If you're searching for this, you probably already have a specific complaint about your current platform, not a vague sense that you should "look around." Maybe it's a fee charged on clients you brought in yourself. Maybe it's ads shown to your own clients while they're booking with you. Maybe an update quietly changed how commission gets calculated and nobody told you. Whatever it is, the useful way to evaluate a switch isn't a feature checklist, it's: does the new platform specifically not do the thing that made me start looking?

Questions worth asking before you commit

• Does it charge you for clients you already brought in? Some platforms take a cut of any booking, even from a client who found you on your own Instagram, not through their marketplace. Ask directly: is there ever a per-booking fee regardless of how the client found me?
• What happens to your data if you cancel? Ask specifically whether client records, appointment history, and staff pay records export in one click, at any time, not just at signup as a sales pitch. If the honest answer is "contact support to request an export," that's a real answer, but it's a different answer than "one click, always available."
• Does migration actually save you time, or just move the typing? A real CSV import for your client list and service menu should take minutes, not days of manual re-entry. It's reasonable for a new platform to not import your old appointment or payment history, most don't, but your client list and services shouldn't require retyping every name by hand.
• Is pricing simple enough to say out loud? If you can't describe your own pricing tier to a staff member in one sentence, that's worth noticing. Tiered-by-location-count, flat monthly, no surprise per-booking add-ons, is the version that's easiest to actually budget around.

None of this is about any one platform being universally "better." It's about matching the switch to the actual complaint you have today, not a generic list of features every platform in this space already has.