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Whether you're a solopreneur or small business, if you have clients to book, you need a scheduling software that more than meets expectations. In a crowded field, there are several functions and characteristics that go into making one system better than the other. Taking into consideration things such as user-friendliness, ability to integrate with existing software, and customizability, we've rounded up our 10 favorite appointment schedulers, fit for a variety of business needs.
There's so much to consider when you are looking for the best appointment scheduling software, the one that's just right for your business. Your online scheduling tool should do more than just book appointments as the basic requirement.
If you are going to spend the time and money integrating a system, you want a scheduling app that fits seamlessly into your day-to-day, adding value in many areas, not performing only one job fairly well.
Whatever roles you need your scheduler to play, you want one that goes above and beyond pretty much all the way through.
Product | Description | Next Steps |
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10to8
Rating image, 4.60 out of 5 stars.
4.60/5
Our ratings are based on a 5 star scale.
5 stars equals Best.
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10to8 is a cloud-based appointment scheduling software that simplifies and automates the process of scheduling, managing, and following up with appointments.
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Rating image, 4.50 out of 5 stars.
4.50/5
Our ratings are based on a 5 star scale.
5 stars equals Best.
4 stars equals Excellent.
3 stars equals Good.
2 stars equals Fair.
1 star equals Poor.
We want your money to work harder for you. Which is why our ratings are biased toward offers that deliver versatility while cutting out-of-pocket costs.
= Best = Excellent = Good = Fair = Poor |
With many integrative features all working efficiently to streamline your customer service, HoneyBook nails the scheduling side of things and excels in operations and customer management.
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Calendly
Rating image, 4.30 out of 5 stars.
4.30/5
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5 stars equals Best.
4 stars equals Excellent.
3 stars equals Good.
2 stars equals Fair.
1 star equals Poor.
We want your money to work harder for you. Which is why our ratings are biased toward offers that deliver versatility while cutting out-of-pocket costs.
= Best = Excellent = Good = Fair = Poor |
Calendly is a meeting scheduling software that eliminates the need for back-and-forth emails about availability or time zones. It integrates with your calendars and allows you to set preferences.
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Acuity Scheduling
Rating image, 4.10 out of 5 stars.
4.10/5
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4 stars equals Excellent.
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2 stars equals Fair.
1 star equals Poor.
We want your money to work harder for you. Which is why our ratings are biased toward offers that deliver versatility while cutting out-of-pocket costs.
= Best = Excellent = Good = Fair = Poor |
Acuity is intuitive appointment scheduling software that handles almost all aspects of scheduling and managing appointments. You set your availability and preferences, and clients self-schedule.
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Appointlet
Rating image, 4.00 out of 5 stars.
4.00/5
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1 star equals Poor.
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Appointlet is a budget-friendly scheduling software that succinctly and efficiently solves most booking woes while adding operational efficiency.
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AppointmentPlus
Rating image, 4.00 out of 5 stars.
4.00/5
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4 stars equals Excellent.
3 stars equals Good.
2 stars equals Fair.
1 star equals Poor.
We want your money to work harder for you. Which is why our ratings are biased toward offers that deliver versatility while cutting out-of-pocket costs.
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With its intuitive backend and frontend nature, AppointmentPlus makes managing bookings across industries easier.
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Simplybook.me
Rating image, 4.00 out of 5 stars.
4.00/5
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1 star equals Poor.
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= Best = Excellent = Good = Fair = Poor |
Simplybook.me offers scheduling and sales solutions for a variety of industries. With an integrative setup and several options to streamline operations, it’s a smart choice for a scheduling app.
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Square Appointments
Rating image, 4.00 out of 5 stars.
4.00/5
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With a clean setup, a user-friendly interface, and the ability to handle multiple functionalities, Square Appointments is a reliable scheduling tool.
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TimeTrade
Rating image, 3.60 out of 5 stars.
3.60/5
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1 star equals Poor.
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= Best = Excellent = Good = Fair = Poor |
Despite some clunky aesthetics and limited personalizations, TimeTrade offers an affordable and reliable scheduling system that integrates well with CRMs.
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10to8 is a cloud-based appointment scheduling software that saves time and eliminates frustration by automating scheduling and managing appointments.
Just set your availability and preferences, and clients schedule their own appointments online. 10to8 then assists with confirmation, reminders, keeping track of client information, and following up with requests for customer reviews.
You can embed your 10to8 scheduling page on your website and feature your 10to8 link in emails and social media. With a wide range of branding options, you can easily customize the scheduler to align with your brand.
10to8 syncs with your calendars and integrates with business apps like Zoom and Salesforce. Through Zapier, you’re able to integrate 10to8 with over 1,500 additional business apps, seamlessly incorporating it into your existing workflow.
Setup is intuitive, with clear and straightforward directions. Once setup is complete, 10to8 requires little to no management on your part. Additional features include the ability to send personalized email, SMS, and voice call reminders and trigger them based on time or service type.
You can also request reviews and create email campaigns directly through 10to8. The software provides reporting on attendance, no-shows, staff performance, and more.
10to8 allows you to create multiple appointment types, customize your scheduling page, track analytics, and more. Image source: Author
10to8 offers five payment plans, beginning with a forever free plan. The paid plans range from $12 per month to $50 per month. If the standard paid plans don’t accommodate your business needs, the Enterprise plan allows you to create a custom solution with varying prices.
The Enterprise plan offers both online and phone support, but all other plans include online support only. Online support is available during business hours. Other forms of support include 10to8’s Quick Start guides, onboarding video, and FAQ articles.
10to8 functions like an extremely organized and reliable assistant, managing every aspect of scheduling from start to finish. If you’d like to save time, avoid email ping-pong, and reduce appointment no-shows, 10to8 could be the solution for you.
HoneyBook is world-class scheduling software with a strong handle on bookings and client management and the sales and operational processes of an administrative back end.
It knocks it out of the park when it comes to booking appointments. HoneyBook's client interface is clean and straightforward, can be branded to match your company's site, and syncs with your calendars to ensure accurate and efficient scheduling.
From there, it collects client information, tracks appointment history, and stores all communications in one easily accessible place. You can even set up highly detailed workflows to send clients automated reminders and instant confirmations, and you can trigger internal administrative tasks based on client events.
HoneyBook streamlines your admin operations. Image source: Author
HoneyBook software.
HoneyBook shines in many categories besides its exceptional scheduling services. From a financial standpoint, you can invoice clients electronically and track payments all from the app. You can also transfer funds into your account instantly. HoneyBook accepts credit, debit, and bank transfers.
From an operational standpoint, HoneyBook lets you initiate and store contracts, set up workflows, and customize reporting. Each task and ability is connected, so you never lose information or context.
The onboarding process is thorough and helpful. HoneyBook takes the time to set up your account for brand cohesion and ease of use. While the whole experience is very user friendly, they also offer an extensive resources database and live help 24/7.
Thanks to all its features and intuitive nature, HoneyBook is an excellent software choice.
Calendly is a time-saving meeting scheduling software that eliminates some of your biggest scheduling headaches, including navigating availability and time zones. It integrates with your calendars and a wide variety of other popular business applications.
You can easily embed your Calendly link in marketing campaigns and on your website. You can set meeting preferences, choose from several meeting types, send email and SMS reminders, and collaborate with your team.
Calendly allows you to automate text messages or emails when meetings are booked and send email reminders, thank-you emails, requests for follow-up meetings, feedback surveys, and more. With Calendly, everything you need to schedule, track, and manage appointments is available in one convenient and easy-to-use application.
It offers three plans, ranging from free to $12/month, per user. These fees are charged per user, not per team. You can pay monthly or annually.
Calendly’s top features include a wide range of integrations with popular business software, including calendars, CRMs, and video conferencing apps. It also allows users to set preferences, track metrics, and schedule multiple meeting types directly through Calendly.
Calendly provides support via blogs, videos, and a community forum. The free plan gives users access to email support, while the paid plans provide access to both email and live chat. No phone support is available.
With Calendly, you can plan and manage meetings while staying organized and saving time. If you’d love to automate the process of scheduling meetings and eliminate the back-and-forth emails that ensue, then Calendly is worth checking out.
Acuity is appointment scheduling software ideal for small to midsize service-based businesses. It spares you from time-consuming, often frustrating, back-and-forth conversations about availability and time zones.
Acuity syncs with other calendars and integrates with popular business applications, including software for accounting, analytics, email marketing, CRMs, video conferencing, and more.
Other features include the ability to customize and brand your Acuity scheduler, set scheduling preferences and limits, accept payments online, access advanced reporting, customize various automated email reminders and follow-ups, and more.
You can embed your Acuity scheduler into your website, social media, and marketing emails. Acuity is intuitive not only for you but for your clients as well. Besides saving time, the ease of scheduling appointments can give you an edge over the competition.
Acuity offers four pricing plans ranging from a basic Freebie plan to a $45/month Power Plan. The Freebie plan allows clients to book appointments with only one employee or location. The Power Plan allows for up to 36 employees or locations. If these plans do not accommodate your scheduling needs, Acuity will work with you on a custom solution.
Acuity offers many features focused on powerful integrations, extensive customization, and automation that makes scheduling and managing appointments easy and painless.
Support for Acuity includes a thorough Help Center and live training webinars. Direct customer support is available via email only or through paid, independent Acuity Certified Experts.
Acuity saves you and your clients time when scheduling and managing appointments. It allows you to stay organized and provide stellar customer service with minimal time and effort.
Appointlet is a cloud-based scheduling system that integrates with other apps to make operations for almost any type of business run smoother and your customer bookings happen seamlessly.
Human resources professionals, office managers, business owners, and others can benefit from its streamlined features. Customize intake questions to gather necessary information, automate workflows by connecting with existing systems, allow customers to book in themselves, reduce missed appointments via automated reminders, and much more.
Appointlet offers very affordable pricing with two tiers available: free and premium, which costs less than $10/month. With both plans, you have access to a fleet of useful features that go a long way toward making Appointlet an integral part of your day-to-day operations.
Appointlet is also designed to seamlessly sync with many third-party tools such as Office 365, Salesforce, Google, etc. Its daily use is intuitive and unobtrusive with a reasonable learning curve.
Though the frontend UI (user interface) can be a little dated -- and hard to preview or see it from the admin side -- it gets the job done, letting customers book themselves and track their upcoming appointments.
Appointlet is pretty easy to set up and manage. The tool has a helpful onboarding process, a library of resources, and a knowledgeable chat service. The 15-day free trial period is more than enough time to explore the software and acquire a natural ease while using the system.
AppointmentPlus offers an intuitive and streamlined solution to scheduling and booking while boosting business operations. It has an innate understanding of the underlying struggles of business owners, not just with scheduling but with maximizing efficiency.
With a dashboard and administrative interface that are easy to use, AppointmentPlus makes viewing, adjusting, and tracking appointments easier.
You can have it integrate directly with your existing software infrastructure for seamless operations or add on integrations from its marketplace to build the exact right type of customization for your business.
Features such as automated scheduling reminders and detailed reports go a long way toward maximizing business efficiency and returns.
Whether you need a full 360-degree view of your business or to drill down into a specific day, employee, or customer trend, AppointmentPlus has layers to give. Tracking trends and adjusting as needed within AppointmentPlus makes business operations smoother and more efficient.
The pricing of AppointmentPlus is a bit higher than its competition. Still, it makes a case for the spend thanks to its carefully designed features, easy-to-use interface, and stellar customer service.
Onboarding sets you up for success by allowing you to customize your dashboard and system as needed for your business while also giving you room to grow. From there, you have ticketing support access to a responsive team and an extensive library of resources.
For streamlined scheduling and data-driven operations, AppointmentPlus makes life so much easier for business owners, managers, employees, and customers alike.
Simplybook.me is an affordable, features-laden booking software that stands out in a crowded category.
Fitting exceptionally well into small and medium-sized businesses, Simplybook.me increases customer satisfaction, returns, and interaction with minimal involvement on the administrator's part.
It integrates with email, social media, and personal calendars to ensure appointments are scheduled without overlap. Bookings can be made from various platforms, and it even lets you create coupons and promotions you can email to a client list to boost return rates.
Using auto-reminder capabilities, Simplybook.me will ping customers to remind them of upcoming appointments to cut down on missed bookings.
Plus, you can collect deposits upfront if you choose, which helps make sure clients show up to appointments.
It is adaptable to multiple industries, allowing for recurring bookings for salons while meeting HIPAA compliance confidentiality requirements for medical offices.
You can also customize intake forms to ensure you have all customer information collected at the time of booking.
Simplybook.me support is fast and very helpful, so problems are resolved quickly. They even offer a long-term free plan (the Basic level) with many features, and it’s an excellent solution for small or solo businesses just starting out.
With several great features and an easy-to-navigate interface, for both admin and customers, Simplybook.me is a great choice in scheduling software.
Square Appointments is an affordable and straightforward scheduling system. It syncs with existing calendars while also allowing you to set up unique in-app rules that make for secure and efficient bookings.
Because of this, it is easy to use on a daily basis, even for the most tech-reluctant employee. It can be optimized for all business sizes, from a single person to many employees. You can set up various permissions and abilities on a user-by-user basis to make things more accessible across the board.
Square Appointments also helps build customer loyalty. You can set up discounts and policies, and you can save all kinds of customer information from appointment histories to payment information for future processing.
Plus, the Square scheduler makes for easier customer management, thanks to automation. From instant booking confirmations to preset automated reminders, it helps ensure that customers will show up for bookings.
Data pulls are easy to do and can be broken down in various ways, giving you insight into inventory management, sales trends, customer activity, and much more. Documents and files can be stored and emailed as needed to customers for confirmation, signing, and sharing information.
The pricing scale uses a mix of monthly fees and per-transaction fees (although there are no monthly costs for solo users, just transaction costs).
It uses a tiered pricing system for two to five calendars, six to 10 calendars, and then 11 and up. Overall, the setup and integration are easy to install, and the day-to-day usage is efficient and user-friendly.
For administrators (and some retail and service-based businesses) that prioritize structure and efficiency, TimeTrade offers a solidly built and operationally efficient scheduling system.
It specializes in bookings of all kinds -- internal team meetings, one-on-one appointments, and web video meetings -- using time blocking and smart scheduling matches to pair appointment requests to the best-suited providers.
Designed to be your CRM’s best friend, TimeTrade seamlessly syncs existing customers and prospects in your sales funnel to facilitate customer tracking and information gathering.
It has limited customization options, but that makes the setup process even faster. The interface is clean and uncluttered, so you can easily view calendars, appointment information, and reports.
From a customer’s point of view, the booking process is simple. The forms are concise. After booking, clients can even get automated reminder emails to ensure they do not forget their appointments.
There have been occasional page-loading issues stemming from some Java code, but for the most part, TimeTrade is a smooth experience. Automatically optimized for all devices, you can check your bookings from your mobile or laptop.
It offers two custom pricing packages and two base levels ($6.50/month per user and $29/month per user) with increasing levels of features. When it comes to support, TimeTrade has a full online library of docs and videos and a 24/7 customer support team.
All online scheduling programs are not created equal. Still, there are certain characteristics that they must meet to nab a coveted "top choice" distinction. Setting the bar a little higher than "successfully completes client bookings," there are a few characteristics that we believe any good booking software should have.
By the time you bring in a scheduling app, you likely already have a whole fleet of office, operational, sales, and other software running. Since your scheduler deals so much with both the customer and administrative back end, it should be as unobtrusive as possible.
It should be adept at pulling customer information and tracking progress with your CRM. You should also be able to sync your existing calendars to it so that any premade blocks of unavailability or other existing standing appointments plus personal time remain protected.
It is also ideal for your scheduler to sync with your email platform so that you can communicate with customers. Great apps also let you hang out where your customers are by integrating with Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc. to create "book now" buttons for a wider appointment net.
If you are running a standalone, professional business, you want to remove all traces of external branding you can. For brand cohesion and a smooth customer experience, it is important that your scheduler allow you to customize its client-facing parts.
From uploading your company logo to selecting brand colors for your booking buttons, it all goes a long way to make the booking experience feel seamless.
You also should be able to customize it on a more technical level. As every business is different, you'll have your own automation rules, employee permissions, scheduling block lengths, and appointment types that you need to set up to uniquely suit your company.
It may sound like a no-brainer, but not every tool out there is intuitive. Since your business's goal is to have as many customers complete the booking process as possible, you need to make that experience easy and hassle-free.
A good scheduler should not have too many steps, should load well, be easy to understand, and auto-send confirmations and reminders to customers without you having to do any extra work.
Ditching the fallibility of analog booking and stepping into the digital age comes with a unique set of benefits that you just can't get from pen and paper.
With reports on the back end and built-in catches on the front end, a good booking app won't just make your life easier; it will positively impact your business.
When you can set both confirmations and reminders to automatic, not only is it one less thing for you to worry about doing manually, but it also helps keep upcoming appointments top of mind for customers, so they don't forget. You can even include cancellation policies in the reminders so that if they do need to miss a booking, they give you enough notice.
Many software solutions will also allow you to collect a deposit upfront or hold onto a card number securely. That knowledge that they are on the line for actual money is an excellent motivator for clients to keep their appointments.
You've got your hands full running all aspects of your business, so sitting down daily and optimizing schedules is not going to be the best use of your time. If schedules aren't optimized, you run the risk of accidentally overbooking, which leads to unhappy customers and lost revenue.
With all bookings being tracked electronically, the ever-present threat of human error is virtually erased, and appointment calendars are up to date and efficient.
Online schedulers that approach booking as an all-in-one service go a long way to increasing customer satisfaction. Because they store all information and history, you can have past records on a person in an instant, making them feel attended to and appreciated. Also, by storing data such as payment information and appointment preferences, your clients will complete bookings and checkouts faster and more willingly.
The information stored and tracked can be used to market your business better. Whether you offer personalized promos to existing customers or highlight add-on services they may like, having all that information about them in one place is a big help.
We're firm believers in the Golden Rule, which is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers. The Ascent, a Motley Fool service, does not cover all offers on the market. The Ascent has a dedicated team of editors and analysts focused on personal finance, and they follow the same set of publishing standards and editorial integrity while maintaining professional separation from the analysts and editors on other Motley Fool brands.