Calendly vs. Acuity: Choosing the Best Appointment Scheduling Software

The days of personally visiting your clients for every little thing are long gone. 

With over 55 million meetings held each week in the United States alone, appointment scheduling is an unavoidable task to deal with. To make appointment scheduling easy, it’s important to choose the right software with the right features. 

In this Calendly vs. Acuity guide, we will cover their individual features and strengths. So you can determine the best appointment-scheduling software for your needs.

Calendly Overview

Calendly is a scheduling automation tool that makes setting appointments and meetings easy. It saves your time by eliminating back-and-forth emails typically associated with scheduling.

With Calendly, users share their availability and let others book meetings with them. Its flexibility makes it perfect for individuals, teams, and companies wanting to set up meetings. 

The best part? 

Getting started is really easy, and there’s no credit card required. So whether you’re looking to drive more revenue, improve lead response times, or simplify your scheduling, Calendly has got you covered!

Acuity Overview

Acuity Scheduling is an all-in-one appointment management solution that makes your life simpler. It’s like having a personal assistant who works 24/7 and plans your entire schedule for you. 

With Acuity, phone tags are history. Clients will view your real-time availability and self-schedule their own appointments. Plus, it can manage multiple locations and employees. 

That’s not all! 

Acuity helps control your availability and organize client information. And it even enables online payment integrations with Stripe, Square, or PayPal. You can also offer gift certificates, packages, memberships, or group classes. 

Its integrations include video conferencing tools for virtual meetings and sending automated reminders.

Calendly vs. Acuity: Working

Calendly

For those unaware, Calendly is a scheduling tool that works by eliminating the back-and-forth of finding a suitable meeting time. Here’s how it works 👇

#1: Setting Up

You start by creating an account and customizing your booking page. You can add a profile picture, change your name in the directory, and align your calendars. This way, the app can see your complete schedule and only show your open time slots on your booking page.

#2. Customizing Event Types

Calendly lets you customize its preset Event Types to set meeting parameters while booking a slot on your calendar. You can set the events like:

• Name
• Description
• Date Range
• Duration
• Online or offline schedule

You can also add time buffers before or after your meeting to avoid back-to-back bookings.

#3. Sharing Your Calendly Link

Once you personalize Event types and have your ideal schedule, it’s time to invite others. 

Clicking Send Email simply sends the link to your Calendly page to those who want to schedule an appointment. They’ll also have to click the confirmation links to confirm your terms.

#4. Booking Process 

The person clicking on your Calendly link will see the details of your events and the calendar. They can select specific days to further check available time slots for appointments. The time slots automatically adjust for the time zones. 

After confirming the ideal time slot for both parties, a new window opens up to get the person’s details. Once they have entered their email ID and name, they can click ‘Schedule Event’. After scheduling, the attendees get a booking confirmation email.

#5. Integration with Other Calendars

You can integrate Calendly with other calendars like Google Calendar, Outlook, Office 365, and iCloud. This allows your other calendars to reflect the meeting time slots and your schedule.

Acuity

Acuity helps you schedule meetings and appointments at your and your client’s convenience. Here’s how it works 👇

#1. Setting Up

To start scheduling appointments using Acuity, you need an account. You can create the account using your existing email ID, or you can choose your existing Google, Apple, or Facebook account. 

Once created, add your personal details as required. 

#2. View Calendar and Set Availability

After going to the dashboard, go to your calendar panel. There, you can:

• View or edit upcoming appointments
• Schedule an appointment for a client
• Block off time

You can also use the view filter to switch to a day, week, or month view. To set up your availability, you can start by setting regular weekly hours. To cancel regular weekly hours on particular days, you can override hours to adjust your schedule anytime. 

#3. Adding Appointment Types

After scheduling your availability, you can also add different appointment types. This allows you to customize different service-dependent meetings you need to schedule. 

To add different service types, you can click on New Service Type in the Appointment Types Menu. 

There, add details like name, duration, price, and other details for your new service type. You can also edit or duplicate these types anytime you want from the same menu. 

#4. Integration with Other Tools & Calendars

Apart from connecting your Acuity accounts to your website or email campaigns, you can also integrate it with other tools. 

To align Acuity with your existing calendars, you can sync it with iCloud, Outlook, and Google Calendar. 

You can integrate it with video conferencing tools like Zoom, Google Meet, Join.me, and GoToMeeting. 

Lastly, you can also leverage integrations like Stripe, Square, and PayPal for payments.

Calendly vs. Acuity Benefits

Calendly

• Scheduling: Simplifies scheduling meetings as it lets you allocate available time slots and task distribution as per your schedule seamlessly.
• Easy Customization & User-Friendly Interfaces: Allows easy scheduling of events according to your calendar. It lets you set schedules for any time or event type with ease. 
• Improved Communication: Provides enhanced communication between teams and clients. It adjusts and notifies time with your respective time zones. What’s more, it works perfectly for scheduling demos, webinars, or events by identifying participants’ locations.
• Integration with Key Platforms: Has excellent integration capabilities with crucial and known platforms such as PayPal, Zoom, WordPress, etc. 
• Minimizes Back-and-Forth Emails: Reduces the number of messages in your inbox by reducing back-and-forth emails associated with the events.

Acuity

• Flexible Calendar Support: Supports calendars such as Google Calendar, iCalendar, Outlook, and Office 365. This makes it a versatile tool for businesses of all sizes.
• User-Friendly and Customizable Interface: A user-friendly tool that updates your calendar, sends out scheduling links or forms and integrates seamlessly with your other accounts. The platform also allows you to customize your scheduling page to match your brand identity.
• Time Zone Management: You can set appointments for various time zones. So you can manage the ideal schedule that works for both parties. 

Calendly vs. Acuity: UI & Experience

Acuity Scheduling offers a clean, easy-to-navigate, and customizable interface. It allows you to personalize scheduling pages with the brand’s colors, logo, and images. This aligns with your brand and creates an immersive experience for your clients. 

On the flip side, Calendly focuses on simple functionality over everything else. Its interface is straightforward and clean. It sticks to the basics to maximize ease of navigation. 

The opposite holds true for Acuity. That’s because it trades simplicity for personalization and visual customization. 

When it comes to user interface and experience, I’d suggest you go with Calendly, as it makes appointment scheduling effortless. But, if branding is everything for you, Acuity should be your choice.

Calendly vs. Acuity: Group Meetings

Acuity provides features such as group booking pages. These pages allow teams or clients to book multiple time slots with one agreement. 

It also has automated time zone identification that makes it easy for your team and clients to identify the timings. Lastly, Acuity comes with features that can help you restrict people from booking appointments to ensure this functionality doesn’t get stretched too thin. 

Calendly offers a bell margin of event types and unique queries which utilizes capacities to their fullest ability. Moreover, you can send rapid messages ahead of schedule. So it makes it easy for you to manage all participants.

Group meetings and events are the main functions of both tools, and they perform well. So, you can choose either of these and not regret it. 

Calendly vs. Acuity: Reporting and Analytics

Acuity’s reports give insight into revenue, appointment types, and no-show numbers. This data helps you improve performance and identify components that impede business operations.

Calendly focuses on metrics like:

• Date
• Volume
• Amount of appointments utilized
• Guest remarks

These analytics help you analyze the performance of your assignment proposition. You can also export data to analyze it manually or use the output in other programs necessary. 

Reports and Analytics is a feature where Calendly clearly outshines Acuity.

Calendly vs. Acuity: Customization

Customization is one key feature that Calendly and Acuity Scheduling hold. With it, you can add company colors, logos, and photos within the scheduling pages. This allows for a personalized professional appearance for your clients. 

Customization features aid in the recognition/loyalty of the brand leading to enhance business traits. However, both platforms also offer functional customization options. 

For instance, you can change your workflow for scheduling. Here, you can add new fields, pages, URLs, and separate customizations. You can do that by modifying preferred program utilization. 

This degree of customization enables you to individualize your scheduling process and satisfy your clients. 

As for the winner in this category, it is close, but Acuity takes the win. It has superior customization options and allows for a better representation of your brand. 

Calendly vs. Acuity: Integrations

Calendly has an impressive list of 100+ integrations for pretty much anything you’ll need. From video conferencing to payment integrations, Calendly covers over 11 categories. 

When you compare that to Acuity’s 30+ integrations, you see a clear winner. Acuity only manages to cover the basic integrations you’ll need without going above and beyond. 

Now, there is a possibility that you might not need all of those 100+ integrations that Calendly has to offer. In that case, Acuity works just fine for anyone that needs to get by with the basics. But, Calendly manages to serve a diverse set of users, making it the winner here. 

The Best Appointment Scheduling Software In the Market

For all the categories and features we covered, Calendly comes out as a narrow winner for the best appointment scheduling software, with Acuity coming very close. 

But, what really sends it home for me, is the price. Calendly starts with a free plan that offers basic features, going all the way up to $16/month. Whereas, Acuity starts from that $16/month price, making it much more expensive. 

But in the end, both software have their strengths and weaknesses. If you want superior deeper customization options, Acuity can beat Calendly any day. But you can count on Calendly to satisfy all of your appointment scheduling and analytical needs. 

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