Best Aesthetic Clinic Software UK: Twelve Systems Compared

This guide compares what twelve systems actually cost, what each one is genuinely good at, and the questions that separate a demo from a decision. Prices were last checked on 28 September 2026 and are quoted from each vendor's own published pages.

What UK aesthetic clinics actually pay

Start here, because it is the part of the market most guides skip. Pricing in this category is harder to compare than it should be, and the reason is simple: a quarter of the systems on this list do not publish a price at all.

Figures taken from each vendor's own published pricing pages on 28 September 2026, with UK currency selected where a switcher is offered. Prices and plans change; check both before you decide.

Read the table by column rather than by row and three things fall out.

Eight of the twelve publish a starting figure. Three publish nothing at all. Pabau, Phorest and Consentz all route you to a demo before you can find out whether they are affordable. That is a deliberate sales choice rather than an oversight, and it means the cheapest way to shortlist is to eliminate on the published prices first and only book calls for the systems that survive.

One is free, and it is not free. Faces Consent costs nothing as a subscription and earns from your transactions instead. Faces publishes a 1.19% FacePay fee including VAT and its terms also entitle it to a percentage of every deposit it collects, deducted weekly. On a clinic turning over £6,000 a month, a fee of roughly 2% is about £1,440 a year, which is more than most of the subscriptions in this table. Fresha, often assumed to be free, charges a subscription from £14.95 + VAT a month and takes a one-time 20% commission, minimum £4, on each new client its marketplace sends you.

Per-user pricing is fine until it isn't. MERIDIQ at £4 per user for booking looks like the cheapest entry on the board, and for one person it very nearly is. Add the records module at £22 per user and payments at £16, and a single practitioner is at £42 a month before a second person joins. Clinicminds charges per location and per schedulable practitioner. Both are sensible models for a growing clinic; neither is the number on the front of the box.

The cost that never appears on a pricing page

Transaction fees are invisible in month one and material by month twelve. When you compare, work out the annual cost including card fees at your actual turnover, not the monthly headline. The ranking usually changes, and it changes most for the systems that lead with "free".

The same applies to tier placement. The features an aesthetic clinic genuinely needs, consultation forms, photo comparison and treatment plans, often sit on the second or third tier rather than the entry one. Check where they land before you compare headline prices.

What each system charges beyond the subscription

Everything below comes from each vendor's own pages on 28 September 2026. "Not published" means the vendor does not state it, not that the charge is zero.

These two columns are where comparisons usually go wrong. A cut of your takings grows with your success, and a cap or add-on only shows up once you have outgrown the entry price.

What "best" means for an aesthetic clinic specifically

It is tempting to use whatever scheduling app a colleague in another industry recommends. Aesthetic work comes with obligations that generic tools do not accommodate.

You need clients to complete health history forms and sign consent documents before they arrive, ideally on their phone before they leave the house. You need to record exactly which product and which batch was used, on which area, at each appointment. You need before and after photographs that live alongside the treatment notes rather than scattered across your camera roll. And you need all of it to survive being asked for by an insurer, because your records are the mechanism by which your indemnity cover actually works.

Most aesthetic practice management software is also designed for multi-practitioner clinics with receptionists and managers. A solo practitioner needs something leaner: a system that does the heavy lifting without demanding hours of setup or a monthly support retainer.

The shortlist, honestly

No single system suits every clinic. Here is where each one sits, and who it is for.

Beautay, our recommendation. One flat price at £24.95 a month including VAT, additional practitioners at £9.95, no client cap, no transaction fee and no tier to climb when your record keeping gets more serious. Consent attached to the service, injection mapping, batch tracking, deposits, multi-location diaries and staff permissions are all in the one plan rather than spread across an upgrade path. It is built for UK aesthetic practice specifically, and it scales from a single treatment room to a multi-site team without changing product. The one thing it deliberately leaves out is prescribing and labs, because that is a different business.

Pabau is the most feature-complete platform on this list and the strongest brand in UK clinic software. It carries prescribing, labs and diagnostic coding, which matters enormously to a medical practice and not at all to a solo injector. If you run a medical clinic that genuinely prescribes and orders labs, that machinery is a real requirement. If your week is consultations, injectables and skin treatments, you will pay for a great deal you never open, and you will not find out how much until you have had the call.

Phorest and Fresha both come from the salon world and are good at it. Phorest's own plan cards describe its tiers as suited to three or more staff and quote only on request. Fresha's marketplace brings new clients to some businesses, for a one-time 20% commission on each one on top of a monthly subscription. Neither was built around aesthetic record keeping, and for an injector the consultation forms, batch tracking and photo timelines are the working week rather than premium extras.

Aesthetic Nurse Software prices its Foundation plan at £25 + VAT, right at the entry point. The Foundation tier caps you at 150 clients, and stock management, a customised booking page and staff access restrictions sit on the £50 + VAT Advanced plan. Read the tier boundaries carefully rather than the headline.

AesthetiDocs is the closest direct comparison on price and audience. Its Startup plan is £25 + VAT for up to 200 treatments and consultations, Solo removes the cap at £50 + VAT, and Team is £75 + VAT for two practitioners with £25 for each one after that. It publishes everything, which is more than most of this list does, and its 14-day trial is short but real.

MERIDIQ has a well-regarded records product and sells its modules separately, which suits a clinic that wants records without booking, or booking without payments. Buying two or three of them puts it above a flat subscription, so price the combination you would actually use.

Consentz has built its position on consent and documentation and ranks strongly for exactly those queries. It publishes no pricing.

Square Appointments is the outlier. It is a formidable payments company, its free plan is genuinely free and its card rates are competitive at 1.4% + 25p online. It is also not aesthetic clinic software: no consent workflow, no batch tracking, no injection mapping, and Square does not claim otherwise. It will run a diary and take a card, but the compliance side of an aesthetic practice has to live somewhere else.

The compliance floor, and why it decides the shortlist

This is the part that separates aesthetic clinic software from a booking app, and it is worth being concrete about rather than gesturing at "compliance".

You hold health information about every client. Under UK data protection law that is special-category data, which carries a higher bar than an ordinary customer list: it needs a lawful basis and a condition for processing, it needs to be held securely, and it needs a retention period you can actually state. A spreadsheet of names and a folder of photographs on a laptop meets none of that comfortably.

Your indemnity policy then adds its own conditions on top. Most aesthetics policies require adequate contemporaneous records, including signed consent, kept for a defined period. A claim defended without a signed consent form and a treatment note recording product, batch, dose and injection sites is materially harder to defend, and the record-keeping condition is the one practitioners most often breach without noticing. This is covered in more detail in the guide to aesthetics insurance and what your policy expects of your records.

So the practical test for any system on this list is not whether it has a consent feature. It is whether consent is attached to the service so it cannot be forgotten, whether the batch number is a field rather than a note, whether photographs sit against the appointment, and whether you could produce all three for a specific client on a specific date without hunting. A system that fails that test is cheaper for a reason.

What the software has to do day to day

Whichever you choose, these are the parts that save real time when you are running the show alone.

Online booking that works while you sleep. A branded booking page on your own domain lets clients browse services, see real availability and secure a slot around the clock. Deposits taken at the point of booking mean fewer no-shows and less time chasing payments. Multi-treatment bookings, add-ons and package purchases should all happen in one flow. Ask what each payment costs too, because card and deposit fees often come to more than the subscription.

Automated reminders. Email and SMS before the visit, at notice periods you control. For a solo practitioner, one no-show a week on a £200 treatment is over £10,000 a year. You can work out your own number rather than take that on faith.

Digital forms that arrive before the client does. Health histories, consultation questionnaires and consent forms completed on the client's phone and stored encrypted mean your records are in order before anyone walks in. Screening forms can flag an unsuitable booking before payment is taken, which paper consent cannot do. Nearly every system now claims consent forms, so it is worth comparing how each one handles consent, including whether the form is attached to the service and could be produced years later.

Client records without the paperwork. Treatment notes, injection mapping on anatomical diagrams, batch numbers and before and after photographs tied to each appointment. When a client returns six months later, their full history should be one view: products used, areas treated, photographs from last time.

Revenue tools that run in the background. Packages, gift cards, promo codes and loyalty rewards inside the same platform. Rebooking nudges when a client is due. Marketing campaigns that bring lapsed clients back without you building a list by hand.

Questions worth asking on a demo

Vendors demo the parts that look good. These surface the parts that do not.

• Can I record batch number and expiry against an individual treatment, and then pull a report of every client who received a given batch? The single most important question for an injector, and a lot of systems cannot do the second half.
• What happens to my data if I leave? Ask specifically whether you can export client records, treatment history and photographs, and in what format. "You can export a CSV of contacts" is not the same thing.
• Is the consent form attached to the service, or does someone have to remember to send it? Automatic is the only answer that survives a busy week.
• Where are before and after photographs stored, and are they encrypted? Clinical photographs in a phone camera roll are a data protection problem waiting to happen.
• What is the total cost at my turnover, including card fees? Ask for the number, not the plan name.
• Which tier are consultation forms, photo comparison and treatment plans on? Frequently not the one you were quoted.
• Can I take a deposit at the point of booking rather than chasing it afterwards? Chasing costs you the time the deposit was meant to protect.

Migration is the part people underestimate

The reason practitioners stay on software they dislike is rarely the software. It is the fear of moving years of client history and losing something.

A reasonable migration covers client profiles and contact details, appointment history, treatment notes, service menu and durations, and any stored photographs. Ask whether the vendor does it for you or hands you a template to fill in, and ask what it costs, because "free migration" and "we will send you a spreadsheet" are very different offers.

Whatever you choose, do not run two systems in parallel for longer than a fortnight. Split records are worse than imperfect ones, and the gap between them is exactly where a missed allergy or an unrecorded batch hides.

How to choose, in one page

If you are one practitioner doing injectables and skin. You need consent, records, batch tracking, booking and deposits, and you need them included rather than tiered. Compare Beautay, AesthetiDocs and Aesthetic Nurse Software on published price, then check where each puts the compliance features.

If you are a growing clinic with two to five practitioners. Per-user pricing starts to bite here. Model the cost at the headcount you expect in twelve months, not today, and include card fees.

If you run a multi-practitioner medical clinic. Prescribing, labs and diagnostic coding are real requirements and the larger platforms are built for them. Pabau and e-clinic belong on that shortlist.

If your compliance genuinely lives elsewhere. If consent and records sit in another system you are contractually committed to, a strong diary and payment tool such as Square Appointments may be all you need from this category.

If you are choosing on price alone. Work out the annual figure including transaction fees and VAT, at your real turnover. Free is the most expensive option in this table for a clinic taking meaningful card payments.

How this comparison is checked

Every figure here comes from the vendor's own website, captured with a real browser so that prices loaded by scripts and answers hidden in collapsed FAQs are read in full. Where a fee sits in the terms and conditions rather than on the pricing page, the terms are quoted. Where a vendor does not publish something, the tables say so rather than guessing.

The figures are re-checked regularly, and the date at the top of the page is the date of the last full check. If a vendor has changed its pricing and this page is out of date, tell us and it will be corrected.

Related reading

More on choosing and switching:

• How to evaluate clinic software as a solo aesthetic practitioner
• What to look for in aesthetic clinic management software
• What practitioners wish they had known before choosing software
• The hidden costs of free booking software
• Fresha vs specialist aesthetic software
• Compare Beautay against the alternatives, side by side