2026 update: If you’re building a hotel or booking business today, you have two solid paths. A Shopify-based booking system gets you secure payments, a modern mobile checkout, and zero server maintenance — with rooms as products, availability via metafields or a booking app, and custom logic built by a developer (that’s what our custom Shopify development team does). Prefer full control on your own server with no platform fees? The free open-source PHP/MySQL system below still works for that — this guide covers it in detail.

Shopify vs open-source PHP for a hotel system: which should you pick?

Choose Shopify when you want to take bookings and payments online quickly without managing hosting, security patches or PCI compliance. Rooms become products, rates become variants, and a booking app or a small custom build handles dates and availability. It scales, it’s mobile-first, and your staff manage everything from one admin.

Choose the open-source PHP/MySQL system when you need a free, self-hosted tool for front-desk operations — check-ins, room assignment, day-to-day management — and you have someone comfortable running a PHP server. It’s a management system first; taking online payments securely is on you.

Many properties end up combining both: Shopify for the guest-facing booking and payment experience, and an internal tool for operations. If you want the Shopify route scoped, talk to our custom development team — fixed quote, and you own the code.

PHP Mysql Hotel Management System is a software which helps staff to manage the day to day work of hotel. Though lots of opensource software available online but some of them have become redundant and not working with latest technologies such as PHP 7 and Mysql 5. One such software is hotelmis which works great with an older version of PHP and Mysql but become redundant with latest updates.  You can download latest working version of this software from the link given below. Click here to Download This system uses basic php but still enough for small hotels and guiding path for new developers. It contains modules such as Admin, Guests, Reservations, Bookings, Agents, Rooms, Guest Bill, Rates, Lookups and Reports.Though this system does not have great user interface but with all the above modules. It is one of the best PHP MySql Hotel Management System available in the market. Each module contains form fields to get information from admin and generating reports. I will try to explain each module one by one: Admin Module: You can add staff members using this module. Its file name is admin.php. You don’t need to fill User ID, as it is primary key and generated automatically by mysql.   PHP Mysql Hotel management System Admin   Guests Module: From Guest module, you can add information about the guest with their identification such as Passport number or ID no.  It has all the text boxes to get name and address of the guest. To add a new guest, you just need to fill in all the details and click Add Guest in the right sidebar. And once added, you can use two arrows (>>) at the top to open latest guest details and add the guest check in button at the bottom. Click here to Download    
Guests GuestsReservation Module: This module helps you to reserve the room in advance. It works only if the guest has been added beforehand.
Room Reservations

Room_Reservations

  Booking Module: This module is an extension of guest check in, so when that button is clicked this screen will open where you can book a room for the customer.
Booking Module

Booking Module

  Agents: Agents are the people who bring customers to the hotel. They will get the commission with each booking and while booking customers, you can select booking type to the agent for adding their name.
Hotel Agents

Hotel Agents

  Rooms: it is self-explanatory as it can be used to add rooms
Hotel Rooms

Hotel Rooms

  Guest Bills: All the bills generated in the system has been listed here
Manage Bills

Manage Bills

  Rates: this will allow you to add rates based on various criteria. For example, if the booking has been done via an agent, you can add agent fees into one of the criteria. You can add as many rates as you want. So, if the hotel wants to charge higher rates during the festive time, this can be done easily using calendars at the top.
System to Manage Bills

System to Manage Bills

  Lookups and Reports: These two are helpful in seeing reports about hotel bookings and its billing. You can learn more about the installation of this PHP MySql Hotel Management System from this youtube video:
Click here to Download