13 Acuity Scheduling Alternatives in 2026, Priced and Matched to Your Business

Why buyers look beyond Acuity

Acuity Scheduling suits most appointment businesses, but not all of them. Buyers leave or skip it for four reasons: there is no free plan, texts and packages start at Standard, HIPAA and AI sit on Premium, and it is a scheduler rather than a full salon, studio or clinic suite. Some businesses need a marketplace that sends them new clients. Others need clinical notes and insurance billing. This guide covers both groups, and it starts with what you would give up by leaving.

Before you switch, take stock. On Standard, one $27 account covers up to six calendars ^[1]. It takes payments through Stripe, Square or PayPal, sells packages, memberships and gift certificates, runs classes with capacity limits, sends texts with no extra fee and signs a BAA on Premium. The gaps are just as real. There is no free plan for new accounts ^[2], no phone support, no commission tracking, no electronic signatures, no client marketplace and no clinical notes beyond internal SOAP forms. Those gaps define this list.

We started from the tools Acuity compares itself with on its own blog, then added the scheduling tools buyers search for next. Prices come from each vendor's pricing page, read from the United States in October 2026, in US dollars. Where a vendor publishes no price, we say so, and we flag the prices we only found on Acuity's comparison posts. Yearly totals are our own arithmetic.

Quick picks and the full comparison

The best alternative depends on how you get paid. Square Appointments is the best free option, and Setmore has the best free plan for a small team. Calendly is best for meetings rather than services. Vagaro, GlossGenius and Fresha are the strongest salon suites, while Booksy suits barbers who want new clients. Mindbody fits gyms and studios, Jane and SimplePractice fit clinics, and TidyCal has the cheapest one-time price. Pick by business type first, then check the pricing unit, because the pricing unit decides how the bill grows as you hire.

Free and low-cost schedulers for service businesses

Square Appointments: the best free option

Square Appointments is the natural first stop for a business that already takes card payments with Square. The free plan covers a booking site, reminders and staff calendars with no employee limit, and the product adds class bookings and Afterpay. The free plan is real. You pay through card fees instead. Square charges per location: $0, $49 and $149 a month per location for Free, Plus and Premium ^[3]. Square ties you to Square payments, and no-show fees, multi-staff booking and the waitlist sit on the paid plan for growing teams. A business with three locations that needs no-show fees pays $1,764 a year for Square Plus.

Setmore: the best free plan for a small team

Setmore targets the same service businesses as Acuity, with a free plan for up to four users, phone support around the clock and payments through Stripe, Square or PayPal. Free sends one reminder instead of two and lacks deposits, video appointments and two-way sync; Pro adds those, plus API access and HIPAA through Setmore Health with a signed BAA. Pro costs $5 a user a month on annual billing. The catch is that each staff calendar counts as a user, even without a login. Five stylists and a shared room calendar mean six Pro users, $360 a year, against $324 for Acuity Standard.

SimplyBook.me: the most add-ons

SimplyBook.me builds its plans around bookings and providers rather than calendars. It takes deposits through PayPal and Stripe, runs its own POS and is hosted in the EU. Free covers 50 bookings and one provider, Basic is $11.9 a month billed annually for 100 bookings, Standard $24.9 for 500 and Premium $49.9 for 2,000. Volume, not headcount, drives the bill. A busy practice booking 600 appointments a month outgrows Standard and must buy extra booking packages at $4 per hundred or move up. A BAA is available on request from Standard, but its HIPAA features are off by default.

Meeting schedulers: Calendly, YouCanBookMe, Cal.com and TidyCal

Calendly: the reference for meetings

Calendly is built for professionals booking meetings with each other: sales calls, interviews, consultations. Its free plan includes one event type and unlimited one-on-one meetings, and paid plans charge per seat, from $10 a seat a month billed annually on Standard to $16 on Teams, which adds routing forms and CRM sync. For sales teams, it is the reference. For service businesses, it is thin: no packages or memberships, no class capacity, no gift certificates. Six hosts on Calendly Standard cost $720 a year against $324 for one Acuity Standard account. By its own terms, it does not comply with HIPAA.

YouCanBookMe, Cal.com and TidyCal

YouCanBookMe has a free-forever plan with one calendar connection and one booking page, and paid plans from $8.10 a month billed yearly. It supports group sessions in the same slot, but SMS reminders carry an extra charge on every plan and it lacks packages and classes. Cal.com is a cloud scheduler with a separate MIT community edition, Cal.diy, for personal self-hosting, with free scheduling and paid collaborative features: Teams costs $12 per user a month billed yearly, so six users cost $864 a year. HIPAA, SAML SSO and SCIM come with Organizations at $28. It suits technical teams.

TidyCal is the cheapest option here. Individual Lifetime is a one-time $29, Agency Lifetime $79, and Pro costs $12 a month or $99 a year. The free plan connects one calendar and takes payments with a 1% platform fee, and paid tiers add group bookings for classes and an AI booking assistant. None of these three sells packages or memberships. For a solo coach, TidyCal is enough. For a salon, it is not.

Salon and beauty suites: Vagaro, Fresha, GlossGenius and Booksy

Vagaro and Fresha

Vagaro is an all-in-one platform for salons, spas and fitness, with its own payment processing and hardware: card readers, a QR scanner, a receipt printer and a cash drawer. We could not read a pricing page. Acuity's own comparison posts list Vagaro at $23.99 a month for one bookable calendar as part of a promotion, with standard pricing of $30 a month and extra staff calendars costing more. Treat those numbers as Acuity's reading, not Vagaro's. Since it charges per calendar, compare the full monthly bill, processing included.

Fresha is a booking platform and marketplace for beauty and wellness, and the marketplace is its main draw. Independent costs $19.95 a month for a single calendar column, and Team $14.95 per team member a month, so three stylists pay $44.85 a month, about $538 a year. That looks cheap. The extras add up, though. New clients from the marketplace carry a 20% one-time commission with a minimum fee, so a new client's $50 first visit costs $10, and online card payments cost 2.79% plus 20 cents. Fresha can be used without its own processing.

GlossGenius and Booksy

GlossGenius is a salon and studio app whose main selling point is a "Flat 2.6% rate" with no extra fees for Tap to Pay, cards on file or manual entry. Standard costs $28 a month or $24 billed annually, Gold $56 or $48 for up to nine staff, and Platinum $168 or $148 for teams of 10 or more. The flat rate is the trade for tying payments to its own processing. On $10,000 of monthly card sales it costs $260 a month, so add processing before deciding which tool is cheaper. There is no free plan, only a 14-day trial without a card.

Booksy combines a booking app with a consumer marketplace popular with barbers. One plan costs $29.99 a month plus tax with all features, plus $20 a month for each additional team member. Its Boost feature charges 30% of a new client's first visit, capped at $100, so a $150 first visit costs $45. The price grows fast with the team. Six barbers pay $129.99 a month, about $1,560 a year, against $324 for six calendars on Acuity Standard. If you do not need the marketplace, Acuity is cheaper. If you need clients, Booksy finds them.

Studios and gyms: when Mindbody is worth it

Mindbody serves fitness studios, gyms, spas and wellness centers with class booking, memberships, a client app and marketing. It prices per location, not per staff, with unlimited users per location in all plans, and its entry plan starts at $79 a month in North America and Asia. A studio with two locations on that plan pays at least $1,896 a year before add-ons. Email and SMS marketing come only in Ultimate, and the Mindbody app charges 20% on a new client's first purchase, capped at $30.

Mindbody does more for a gym with many classes and members, including a branded app as an add-on, but it costs roughly three times Acuity Standard per location. Acuity already handles class capacity, packages and memberships on Standard, and its class series sell multi-week courses. Small studios rarely need Mindbody's depth. Studios with large memberships, on the other hand, should take a close look at it.

Clinics and therapists: Jane and SimplePractice

Jane is practice management for health and wellness clinics: online booking, charting, telehealth, insurance billing and payments, with HIPAA, PIPEDA and GDPR compliance on all plans. Balance costs USD $59 a month for one practitioner and 20 appointments, while Practice costs $79 and Thrive $99. There is no free trial. We could not read the price of additional practitioner licenses, so a clinic with three full-time practitioners should ask for a written quote. Jane costs more than Acuity Premium, but Acuity cannot integrate directly with any electronic medical record system, as its own help center notes.

SimplePractice is practice management for therapists and counselors, with scheduling, notes, billing and telehealth. Starter costs $49 a month, Essential $79 and Plus $99, per practitioner, each 50% off for the first three months when we checked. After the promotion, Starter costs $588 a year, which equals a year of Acuity Premium on annual billing. The two cover very different ground. For a therapist, SimplePractice handles the notes and insurance that Acuity cannot, while a wellness business that sells packages and memberships gets more from Acuity. Choose by whether you bill insurance.

The costs that never show on the plan card

Marketplace commissions

Booksy, Fresha and Mindbody each run a consumer marketplace and take a cut of the new clients they bring: Booksy 30% of a first visit up to $100, Fresha 20% with a minimum, and the Mindbody app 20% capped at $30. Acuity and Square Appointments charge no commission. Count commissions as a marketing cost. If a marketplace sends a salon ten new clients a month with $120 first visits, a 20% commission costs $240 a month and a 30% commission $360. Marketplaces only pay off when those clients come back without the platform taking another cut.

Processing fees

Acuity adds no fees to payments; you pay only the standard processing fees set by Stripe, Square or PayPal. Square Appointments charges 2.6% plus 15 cents in person and 3.3% plus 30 cents online on Free ^[3]. GlossGenius charges a flat 2.6%, and Fresha 2.79% plus 20 cents online. Small rate differences add up. On $8,000 a month of online bookings, the gap between a 3.3% and a 2.6% rate is $56 a month, or $672 a year, more than a year of the cheapest paid plan on most schedulers in this list.

HIPAA: who will sign a BAA

HIPAA support varies widely. Acuity signs a BAA only on Premium ^[4]. Setmore offers a signed BAA on Pro through Setmore Health, SimplyBook.me on request from Standard, and Cal.com on Organizations, while Fresha and GlossGenius list HIPAA for medspas. Jane and SimplePractice are built for health care, and clinics that chart and bill insurance need one of them rather than a scheduler. Calendly does not comply with HIPAA. Read each BAA's scope. A BAA is the minimum, not the finish line.

Which alternative fits, and when to stay

A solo practitioner who takes card payments in person and books one service type should start on Square Appointments Free. A solo coach who only books meetings should use Calendly Free, Cal.com or TidyCal, while a solo massage therapist who sells packages and needs deposits fits Acuity Starter or Standard. For three to six stylists, Acuity Standard is hard to beat: a five-chair salon pays $324 a year on annual billing, against about $1,320 a year for five people on Booksy. Match the tool to how you get paid.

Switching has a cost. Packages, gift certificates and subscriptions do not travel between tools through any import file, so a studio with 40 active monthly memberships must ask 40 clients to enter their cards again and rebuild every package by hand. Stay if you run two to six calendars, sell packages or memberships, take deposits, and want texts without per-message fees. Leave if you need a free plan, a marketplace, insurance billing or phone support. Our Acuity pricing guide has the plan-by-plan math.

The bottom line

There is no single best Acuity alternative. Square Appointments wins on free, Setmore on free teams, Calendly on meetings, GlossGenius and Booksy on salons, Mindbody on studios, and Jane or SimplePractice on clinics. Acuity stays the balanced choice for small service teams that sell packages and take deposits, and our full Acuity review explains why. Before you switch, price your real team, add processing and commissions, and pick the tool your business model needs.