Bookafy is an online appointment scheduling solution targeted at a variety of industries. The vendor’s value proposition is that their solution is simple to use, fully customizable, has an elegant user interface and can be embedded into the business user’s website. Support is available via phone, email or chat.
$9
per month
Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace company
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Acuity Scheduling is an appointment management platform developed by the company of the same name in New York and acquired by Squarespace in 2019.
$14
per month
YouCanBookMe
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
YouCanBook.me is appointment scheduling software from the UK company of the same name.
$0
(free with one calendar connection and one booking page)
Pricing
Bookafy
Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace company
YouCanBookMe
Editions & Modules
Pro
$9
per month
Pro+
$13
per month
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Emerging
$14
per month
Growing
$23
per month
Powerhouse
$45
per month
Individual
$9
per month
Professional
$13
per month
Teams
$18
per month per member
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bookafy
Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace company
YouCanBookMe
Free Trial
Yes
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
30% discount available for annual pricing.
—
10% discount available for annual pricing, and 20% discount for 2-year pricing. Special discounts available for educators.
The Acuity embedded calendar loads. Fast. That's KEY to everything. I don't like a slow load time because it's representative of my brand. The UI design, while not 100% yet, or as beautiful as Calendly's, is just what I need. They come up with all sorts of new, innovative ways …
In my experience, Bookafy has pretty much the same features as the other well-known scheduling apps. In terms of functionality, the two obstacles I experience were setting up a hidden (not shown on the main booking page) meeting for special bonus calls you don't want anyone to have access to. Yes, you can set up a paid meeting and give someone a coupon to access it free but that seems like an extra unnecessary step. The other limitation was how ugly it looks to embed meetings on a website. The scheduler looks fine inside Bookafy, but when embedded, it doesn't flow as well. For everything else, it works well. If you want to sync the scheduler with email marketing systems, most of the integrations work through Zapier so that can be an additional cost. Bookafy focuses on the meeting schedules.
I think any business can benefit from Acuity Scheduling. In my experience, however, and maybe I just haven’t found the correct settings yet, it’s been difficult to manage 4 business schedules with multiple employees and varying hours that change day-to-day and week-to-week. So I definitely would recommend it to more simple business models with set hours, as it seems like it would have all the functions one might need. I still would recommend to more complex businesses like mine as well, but also include discussion of some of the potential drawbacks.
Youcanbook.me is great for small businesses or for self-employed professionals who need an easy-to-use and cost-effective solution for handling large numbers of clients. It's great for eliminating inconvenient miscommunication and tedious back-to-back emails in order to set a proper date and/or meeting details. However, if you need a more sophisticated system that fits into your company's IT procedures and carries sensitive data, an in house solution would fit best.
Clicking on the link opens up my calendar, which has an uncluttered look, making it easy for my prospects and clients to review their options and make their choice.
I am able to customize my schedule, the types of appointments I want to offer, and even decide how many appointments I want in a day. There are so many details that I can customize.
I can customize how my calendar and emails look for my prospects and clients so that I come across professional and coordinated. I want the look of my business, website, etc. to have a polished, cohesive, and interesting presence.
I love that there is a workshop/class/series option for my workshops. My attendees reserve their place and pay upfront. I can duplicate these events or add future dates. It's wonderful. This saves us a lot of time and is so convenient.
I haven't had any trouble with my scheduler. It works flawlessly, so I don't have to take time out of my day to fix, troubleshoot or call customer service.
I love that I can add questions for my prospects to answer right away before booking a call. This means 3 fewer steps for me. 1. They answer these questions without an email from me. 2. They make their reservation and get a follow-up email, right away. 3. I customized the follow-up email with more details and actions to take to prepare for our call.
One really helpful feature of YouCanBook.Me for our organization is that everyone can see appointment times in their own time zone. We frequently schedule interviews with applicants nationwide, as well as communicating with team members located in 32 different countries, so this has really simplified scheduling.
We rely heavily on Google Calendar for staff scheduling, so it is great that YouCanBook.Me can sync your availability straight from your calendar as well as automatically adding meetings to your calendar when they are booked.
We use YouCanBook.Me to schedule follow-up calls with people we meet at conferences and other recruiting events. It's really simple to have someone sign up for a call, and this has been a really effective tool for us to stay in communication with prospects.
I don't like the generic email invite to a Zoom meeting it sends out. Once I get the date sent to me in my email, I have to cancel the meeting and re-set the meeting with my own personalized Zoom Invite. Sometimes that is confusing for the prospect. However, now that I write this...I see an article on the web site about creating a unique Zoom meeting invite. I will have to check that out.
I set my work days as 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. but on the calendar it shows a time available at 6 p.m. My last appointment should be listed as 5 p.m., as my appointments are in 30-minute increments and I leave at 5:30 p.m. So that is confusing and resulted in a few appointments booked when I am not actually working.
I book demos for a coworker, and if he is busy in another meeting, I have to block it off in my calendar as "Jack is Busy" so that prospects won't pick a time that is not available for Jack. I wish there was a way I could link his Outlook calendar to my YouCanBook.Me. Perhaps there is, but I am unaware of it.
Acuity Scheduling has been very reliable. If you don't believe me, check out their status page here. They do a pretty decent job maintaining their app. To be fair, it's a pretty simple tool so they shouldn't run into too many hiccups given it doesn't feature near as many options as other applications on the market run.
It is very easy to use once you get to know the program but with years of working with the program I am still finding new things that I had wished I knew about earlier. I feel like aspects of the website become hidden that would help productivity a lot if I knew they existed beforehand.
Every time I had a question on how to do something or had any issues with Acuity Scheduling, mainly in the very beginning, when I was learning the platform, customer service was excellent. They were prompt to respond, friendly, and very helpful until I had the right solution.
Bookafy is more advanced and has more features that I need comparing to these other brands. Calendly is very basic while Bookfy offers more robust features.
In the case of Schedulicity, the system was awesome (very easy to set up and had some nice features) but did not offer the functionality and flexibility that AcuityScheduling does. In the case of SimplyBook.me, they offer lots of functionality but the interface is extremely complex and you pay a la carte for features so you're going to pay exponentially more for the same set of features as compared to AcuityScheduling. Their customer service was also lacking, in my opinion.
YouCanBook.Me allows fuller messaging in addition to appointments. Calendly is more minimalist than YouCanBook.Me. I prefer having more control over the look and feel, and functionality than it offers.
It's helped our Professional Services Team immensely. Although we don't have numbers as far as an ROI, we use it daily across our whole team of 8 project managers.
We also use youcanbook.me to schedule in interviews with our 20+ researchers who are moderating sessions. Our admin team also uses youcanbook.me to allow our employees to schedule our weekly massages.
