Doodle vs. Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace company

Doodle is great when you need to coordinate dates among a group and don't want to send a bunch of group emails or texts. It allows a number of dates to be proposed and the group can easily see those dates that are most preferred. If you need to do something more complex than that it may not be your tool.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Doodle approaches this problem different than most other scheduling platforms I've looked at (and I've looked at most of them). Doodle allows the person who is making their calendar available for scheduling to make the final decision on the meeting in contrast to other platforms that typically do it the other way around. Both can be beneficial depending on preference
• I love that Doodle allows for proposing multiple times, which is a feature I've yet to find on other scheduling platforms (and I've looked at/tried a lot of them)
• Doodle makes the scheduling process very simple even for someone who's never used it before

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• I would appreciate a more intuitive add-on within Google Calendar so we can schedule meetings directly in there.
• I think missing functionality might be adding sliders, photos, and colors to the polls to make it look really beautiful.
• I find the options on the poll settings are a bit confusing. It could be elaborated on more or have tooltips to explain the options better.

Incentivized

• There are a lot of pages for similar things so sometimes its hard to find the location of where to edit things
• The ability to stop a review request email from being sent to specific clients.
• A way to block of clients scheduiling 3 times when you only have 2 openings and a way to cancel that easier.

Incentivized

Easy to use and basically free.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Very simple journey with the few important questions/fields

Incentivized

It's just very intuitive once you get the hang of it, which won't take long. They try not to make complex things very complex and they provide explanations for everything with a greyed-out question mark icon next to the function. Also, I love that they encourage people to just get live help when they need it.

Incentivized

Doodle has customer service support available as needed, but honestly, it is so easy to use that I have rarely had to seek support. They are always a click away and responsive to resolving any need or to clarify the next best step to using Doodle to meet my needs.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Doodle is more customizable and I love the animation aspect. It is missing the engagement piece, but again I am new to it so there may be features in Doodle that I haven't discovered yet.

Incentivized

Acuity's user interface was much cleaner and easier to use when scheduling meetings. We love that you can embed it within your own website and it shows the calendar right there instead of redirecting you. Acuity gave us the ability to customize our meeting types and the information collected from the person scheduling the meeting.

Incentivized

• Doodle saves so much time. Time is valuable, and it cuts the time involved with scheduling in half.
• Doodle connects our team across campus. Even if we don't see each other, we can still check in and plan a meeting.
• Doodle doesn't always work well with our campus network, which can be annoying.

Incentivized

• Minimizing no shows
• Giving me back time by taking tasks off my mind/to-do list to focus on bigger more important things
• Payment management (it helps me make sure I receive my payments/recurring payments and follow up with clients if a payment has failed)
• Honestly just saving me from scheduling nightmares and headaches
• Timezones! It does it for you! (I work internationally)

Incentivized