If your hall is looking at booking software, Hallmaster is almost certainly on your list. It is the best known name in this corner of the market, it has been running for years, and it is used by well over a thousand venues. Village Hall Hub is newer and takes a wider view of what a hall committee actually has to keep on top of.
This is an honest comparison, written by us, so read it with that in mind. We have tried to be straight about the things Hallmaster does better, because a committee that picks the wrong tool and switches again in a year has wasted everybody's evening.
The short answer
If the problem you are solving is bookings and invoices, and you want the most established option in the market, Hallmaster is a very good choice and has a longer track record than we do. If the problem you are solving is bookings and the pile of other things a trustee is responsible for - insurance renewals, fire risk assessments, DBS checks, Martyn's Law, grant deadlines, meeting minutes - then Village Hall Hub covers ground Hallmaster does not set out to cover.
What Hallmaster does
Hallmaster is an online booking and invoicing system for church halls, village halls, clubhouses and community centres. It gives you a live availability calendar you can embed in your own website, lets hirers request bookings around the clock, handles recurring bookings, and turns those bookings into invoices without anybody retyping them.
It has some genuinely useful integrations that we do not have. It links to accounting software including Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, FreeAgent, Liberty and ClearBooks, so your bookkeeping is not a second job. It can talk to heating systems so the hall warms up for a booking and not otherwise, and to RemoteLOCK door access so a hirer's code works only for the hours they have paid for. For a hall that has invested in that kind of kit, those are strong reasons to choose Hallmaster.
What Village Hall Hub does
Village Hall Hub covers the same booking and invoicing ground - public booking page, multi-room diary, recurring bookings, deposits, seasonal pricing, PDF and email invoicing, payment tracking - and then keeps going into the administrative work that usually lives in a filing cabinet and one trustee's memory.
That means a compliance dashboard with reminders for insurance, electrical testing, fire equipment and the rest; a Martyn's Law wizard for the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025; a DBS tracker; a grant directory with deadline reminders and an AI writing assistant; a document vault; volunteer hours; meeting minutes; a safeguarding incident log; and GDPR tools. The full list is on the features page.
Price, like for like
This needs care, because the two of us quote prices differently and comparing the headline numbers gets you the wrong answer.
Hallmaster quotes prices including VAT. We quote prices excluding VAT. Most village halls are not VAT registered, so what actually leaves the bank account is the VAT-inclusive figure. The table below shows both, so you can compare the number that matters to you.
| Plan | Price as quoted | What a non-VAT-registered hall pays per year |
|---|---|---|
| Hallmaster, Booking System Only | £195/yr inc VAT | £195 |
| Hallmaster, Booking & Invoicing | £279/yr inc VAT | £279 |
| Village Hall Hub, Community | £129/yr ex VAT | £154.80 |
| Village Hall Hub, Standard | £249/yr ex VAT | £298.80 |
| Village Hall Hub, Professional | £399/yr ex VAT | £478.80 |
Read honestly, that says: for bookings and invoicing alone, Hallmaster at £279 is a little cheaper than our Standard plan at £298.80. We are not going to pretend otherwise. Our Community plan is the cheapest way in at £154.80, but it caps you at two rooms and three committee logins, so it suits a single-room hall rather than a busy one.
Two other differences worth knowing. Hallmaster charges £30 a year per add-on module for payment integration, accounting integration, heating and door access, so a hall wanting two of those is adding £60 a year. And Hallmaster bills annually, where we offer monthly billing as well, which some treasurers prefer and some find fiddly.
Trials differ too, and in Hallmaster's favour: they give you 90 days, we give you 30. Neither asks for a card up front.
Prices checked in August 2026 from each company's own pricing page. Prices change, so confirm before you commit.
Side by side
| Feature | Village Hall Hub | Hallmaster |
|---|---|---|
| Public booking page and live calendar | Yes | Yes |
| Recurring bookings | Yes | Yes |
| Invoicing and payment tracking | Yes, on every plan | Yes, on the Booking & Invoicing plan and above |
| Online card payments | Yes | Yes, £30/yr add-on module |
| Accounting software integration | No, CSV export instead | Yes, £30/yr add-on module |
| Heating and door access control | No | Yes, £30/yr per module |
| Compliance dashboard and reminders | Yes | Not a focus |
| Martyn's Law wizard | Yes, Standard and above | No |
| DBS tracking | Yes, Standard and above | No |
| Grant directory and deadline reminders | Yes | No |
| Meeting minutes and volunteer hours | Yes, Standard and above | No |
| Mobile app | Yes | Browser based |
| Free trial | 30 days | 90 days |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Annual |
| Venues using it | Growing, newer to the market | 1,500+ |
When Hallmaster is the better choice
We would point you at Hallmaster if any of these describe your hall:
- You already use Xero, QuickBooks or Sage and you want bookings to flow into the accounts without a CSV in the middle. We do not have that integration and it is a real gap.
- You have smart heating or a RemoteLOCK keypad, or you are planning to install them. Having the booking system drive the heating is a genuine saving on an oil bill.
- Your committee wants the safest possible choice. Over a thousand halls and years of trading is a fair thing to weigh, and we are the newer name.
- Bookings and invoices are genuinely all you need, your compliance paperwork is already handled some other way, and you would rather pay less for less.
When Village Hall Hub is the better choice
- Compliance is the thing that keeps trustees awake. If nobody is quite sure when the electrical inspection is due or where last year's fire risk assessment went, that is the problem we were built for.
- Martyn's Law applies to you. Halls with a capacity of 200 or more need documented procedures before enforcement begins, and a wizard that walks a volunteer through it is worth more than a reminder that it exists.
- You are chasing grants. The grant directory, deadline reminders and writing assistant have paid for a subscription several times over for halls that landed something they would otherwise have missed.
- The knowledge lives in one person's head. If your hall is one bereavement or one house move away from losing how everything works, getting it into a system the whole committee can see is the point.
- You want it on a phone. Checking the diary from the hall doorway rather than the office computer changes how often it gets checked.
What switching involves
Moving between systems is less painful than committees fear, mostly because the thing that takes the time is not the software. Expect to spend an evening getting your rooms, rates and regular hirers in, and a second evening entering forward bookings. Recurring bookings are the fiddly part: a weekly Brownies booking is one entry, not fifty, but you need to set it up deliberately.
Our advice, whichever way you go: run the new system alongside the old one for a month rather than switching overnight, and pick a quiet month to do it. Both of us give you a free trial long enough to do exactly that, and 90 days on Hallmaster is generous room to try before you decide.
How to decide
Write down the three jobs your committee most wants to stop doing by hand. If all three are booking or invoice shaped, either system will do them and you should probably pick on price, trial length and which interface your treasurer prefers. If one of the three is a compliance date, a grant deadline, a DBS check or a Martyn's Law document, that is the point where the two of us stop overlapping.
Then try both. Neither of us asks for a card, and an hour spent putting your own real bookings into each will tell you more than any comparison table, including this one.