Hall Booking Online and Village Hall Hub both put a village hall's diary online, take booking requests from hirers and raise invoices. If that is all you are comparing, the choice mostly comes down to price and how each one feels to use. Where they differ is in what else they do: Hall Booking Online is a focused bookings and invoicing tool, and Village Hall Hub also keeps the committee's other responsibilities in the same place. This is an honest look at both, so you can pick the one that fits your hall.
Hall Booking Online's details below are taken from its own website, checked on 28 September 2026. Prices and features change, so check both sites before you decide.
What is Hall Booking Online?
Hall Booking Online is a UK online booking and invoicing system made by Fen Street Designs in Suffolk, for church halls, village halls and community venues. It gives a hall a hosted booking calendar, provisional booking requests from visitors that you approve with one click, repeat bookings, a calendar you can embed on your own website, and several rooms. Invoicing is included, with PDF invoices, bulk invoicing for regular hirers, credit notes and receipts. Hirers can pay online by Stripe, PayPal or Square, with the money going straight to the hall, and data can be exported for Xero, QuickBooks or a spreadsheet. It is advertised at £10 a month plus VAT, with a free trial.
What is Village Hall Hub?
Village Hall Hub is a UK platform built for volunteer-run halls, from the first booking enquiry to the annual safety checks. The booking side covers the same ground: an online diary for every room, a public booking page where hirers request their own dates, regular bookings, clash prevention, deposits, rates for different kinds of hirer, and invoices raised from the booking with card payments into the hall's own bank account. Alongside that it keeps the hall's safety and insurance dates with reminders, DBS checks, a safeguarding log, a Martyn's Law wizard, meetings and minutes, hall accounts, a grant directory and Hallie, an assistant that answers questions about your own hall. There is a phone app for iPhone and Android. Plans are £12.99, £24.99 or £39.99 a month, with a 30-day free trial and no card needed.
Side-by-side comparison
| Feature | Hall Booking Online | Village Hall Hub |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | £10 a month plus VAT | £12.99 a month (Community, up to 2 rooms) |
| Free trial | Yes | 30 days, no card |
| Online booking requests | Yes | Yes |
| Repeat bookings | Yes | Yes: weekly, fortnightly, monthly or chosen days |
| Calendar on your own website | Yes | Yes, on Standard and Professional |
| Invoices, credit notes, monthly invoicing | Yes | Yes |
| Online payment by hirers | Stripe, PayPal or Square | Card payments by Stripe |
| Export for Xero or QuickBooks | Yes | No; spreadsheet exports only |
| Hirer portal | Yes: bookings, payments, forms | Yes: bookings, invoices, conditions of hire agreed online, hall guide, key safe code (Standard and Professional) |
| Safety, insurance and inspection dates with reminders | Not mentioned on its site | Yes |
| DBS checks and safeguarding log | Not mentioned on its site | Yes (Standard and Professional) |
| Martyn's Law wizard | Not mentioned on its site | Yes (Standard and Professional) |
| Committee meetings and minutes | Not mentioned on its site | Yes (Standard and Professional) |
| Hall accounts and budgets | Reports and exports | Yes (Professional) |
| Phone app | Works on phones and tablets in the browser | iPhone and Android app, plus the browser |
Where Hall Booking Online is the better choice
If your hall only needs the diary and the invoices, Hall Booking Online is a little cheaper, and it has two things we do not: hirers can pay through PayPal or Square as well as by card, and your treasurer can export straight into Xero or QuickBooks. If your accounts already live in one of those, that matters. It is a well-established, focused tool, and a hall that wants exactly that will be well served by it.
Where Village Hall Hub is the better choice
Most hall committees are not only running a diary. Somebody has to remember when the fire risk assessment is due, whose DBS check runs out next spring, when the insurance renews, what was agreed at the last meeting, and, for halls that hold 200 people or more, what Martyn's Law asks of them. Those jobs usually live in a different spreadsheet on a different laptop. Village Hall Hub keeps them next to the bookings, so a new volunteer can pick them up without a handover. If that is where your committee's time goes, the extra few pounds a month buys back a good deal of it.
The phone app is the other practical difference. Checking the diary or taking a booking at the school gate is quicker in an app than in a web page.
Switching from Hall Booking Online
Export your bookings, hirers and invoices from Hall Booking Online as a spreadsheet, then import them into Village Hall Hub. You match your columns to ours on screen, so the file does not need tidying first, and every import can be undone if it does not look right. Because the trial is free, you can run both side by side for a few weeks before telling hirers about the change.
The short version
Choose Hall Booking Online if you want the simplest, cheapest online diary with invoicing, especially if you use Xero or QuickBooks. Choose Village Hall Hub if you want the bookings and the committee's safety, safeguarding, meetings and money in one place. Both have free trials, so the honest advice is to try the two with a month of your own bookings. For the wider field, including Hallmaster, My Hall Wizard, LemonBooking and MIDAS, see our comparison of UK hall booking software, or read how the Village Hall Hub booking system works.