Gold Vision CRM
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Comparison · CRM
Phorest vs Planhat
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Phorest and Planhat — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Phorest vs Planhat: at a glance
What is Phorest?
Phorest keeps handing salon owners the settings they used to phone support about
Phorest is salon and clinic management software shipping small, well-scoped changes every week or two, written in the voice of the front desk. The recent run is dominated by giving owners control they previously had to request: adding product brands without contacting Phorest, per-staff-per-service pricing, per-staff online booking visibility, and finer permissions on who may edit service versus retail prices. Around that sit operational tools like geofenced clock-in on the mobile app.
What is Planhat?
Planhat doubles down on automation — Portals, Task dependencies, AI steps, OAuth — for scaled CS ops.
Planhat's recent stream skews heavily toward automation infrastructure for customer-success teams. New advanced Task dependencies, automated end-to-end Portal setup, full execution logs for Automation Runs, and live company-field merge tags in Dashboards and Presentations all reduce the manual per-account work that defines mid-tier CSM tooling. OAuth connections enter Labs, replacing API-key plumbing for integrations.
Phorest vs Planhat: editorial side-by-side
Phorest
5.0CRM
Phorest keeps handing salon owners the settings they used to phone support about
◆ Current state
Phorest is salon and clinic management software shipping small, well-scoped changes every week or two, written in the voice of the front desk. The recent run is dominated by giving owners control they previously had to request: adding product brands without contacting Phorest, per-staff-per-service pricing, per-staff online booking visibility, and finer permissions on who may edit service versus retail prices. Around that sit operational tools like geofenced clock-in on the mobile app.
◆ Where it's heading
The through-line is decentralising configuration to the salon and making the booking model match how these businesses actually run. Nearly every recent release either removes a support ticket or lets one staff member be treated differently from another — different price, different online availability, different qualifications. The multi-service booking flow extends the same thinking to the client-facing side, where a visit involving two practitioners was previously modelled as an edge case.
◆ Prediction
Per-staff settings have now landed for price, online visibility and qualifications separately; the obvious next step is a single staff-level view that shows all three together, since the release notes already admit owners are hopping between screens to check them.
Planhat
5.0CRM
Planhat doubles down on automation — Portals, Task dependencies, AI steps, OAuth — for scaled CS ops.
◆ Current state
Planhat's recent stream skews heavily toward automation infrastructure for customer-success teams. New advanced Task dependencies, automated end-to-end Portal setup, full execution logs for Automation Runs, and live company-field merge tags in Dashboards and Presentations all reduce the manual per-account work that defines mid-tier CSM tooling. OAuth connections enter Labs, replacing API-key plumbing for integrations.
◆ Where it's heading
The product is moving from a health-score-and-playbook CS platform toward a low-code automation backbone for customer-success orgs. Recent additions of frontier LLMs (Claude Sonnet/Opus 4.6, GPT 5.4) into AI Automation steps, combined with portal-creation building blocks, position Planhat as a CS workflow engine that runs without per-account human babysitting.
◆ Prediction
Expect more native AI step types (action-taking, deeper retrieval), OAuth graduating out of Labs into the standard integrations surface, and continued investment in automation observability — failure analytics, retry policies, version history.
Alternatives to Phorest and Planhat
Other CRM products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Phorest or Planhat.
Twenty
Twenty's sprint through v2.39-v2.40 stabilizes yarn pull and relicenses UI components as MIT.
Close CRM
Close is systematically expanding Chloe from Q&A into an operational CRM layer
Lime Connect
Lime Connect adds time-based workflow triggers and interactive UI elements for its AI Agent, deepening its bet on AI-augmented customer communication.
Easy!Appointments
Easy!Appointments 1.6 lands video conferencing, GDPR tools, and a serious security overhaul across its CalDAV and booking stack.
Streak
Streak wires automations to email and call activity, turning Gmail CRM into an event-driven workflow engine.
See all Phorest alternatives → · See all Planhat alternatives →
Recent activity from Phorest and Planhat
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 15d agoPhorestBooking multiple services with multiple staff? Now way easier to mix up who's doing what 💇
- 21d agoPhorestChoose which team members show up for online bookings — service by service
- 26d agoPhorestPermissions to change service / retail prices
- 29d agoPhorestAdd New Brands
- 29d agoPhorestPricing just got personal
- 1mo agoPhorestGeofencing Clock In/Out on Phorest Go
- 4mo agoPlanhatSet up advanced Task dependencies in Workflows
- 4mo agoPlanhatOAuth connections now available in Labs
- 4mo agoPlanhatOAuth connections now available in Labs (duplicate)
- 4mo agoPlanhatInsert live company fields into Dashboards and Presentations
- 4mo agoPlanhatAutomate Portal setup end-to-end for every customer
- 5mo agoPlanhatSync email attachments and subfolders from Outlook into Planhat
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Phorest and Planhat?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Phorest and Planhat are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 5.0 vs 5.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Phorest better than Planhat?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Phorest and Planhat are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 5.0 vs 5.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other CRM products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Phorest?
Top Phorest alternatives in CRM are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Phorest alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/phorest for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Planhat?
Top Planhat alternatives in CRM are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Planhat alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/planhat for the full list with editorial commentary on each.