Appointment scheduling software

Choose appointment scheduling software around the bookings your business takes. Compare named options by service lengths, staff and shared-resource capacity, calendar commitments, customer changes and costs in the plan you would buy. A booking page can look simple while its rules leave a room double-booked or a customer unsure which appointment is current.

Define the booking job

List your services, the time shown to customers, and any preparation or clean-up time. Note which staff can provide each service and whether a room or piece of equipment must be reserved. Decide whether customers choose a staff member, how far ahead they can book, and how they cancel or reschedule.

Keep customer-facing duration separate from time the business needs. If an appointment is followed by clean-up time, include both in the schedule. If a service includes processing time, decide whether staff can take another booking during that interval and whether the room remains occupied.

Square, Acuity Scheduling and iinsight

Square Appointments

Square Appointments suits a service business considering bookings alongside payments and point of sale. Its service library supports prices and durations, variations for different service lengths or prices, and optional or required booking add-ons, each with its own price and extra duration. Plus and Premium add processing time during a service and extra blocked time after an appointment.

Email and SMS reminders are available on Free, Plus and Premium. Square's guidance warns staff when manually booking over an existing appointment, but the warning is not a guarantee that staff cannot create a clash.

Acuity Scheduling

Acuity Scheduling sells by calendar, with separate calendars per employee or location. Starter covers 1 calendar, Standard up to 6 and Premium up to 36; Standard adds an appointment waitlist for fully booked times. All plans take payments via Stripe, Square, PayPal or Venmo and convert appointments to each client's time zone.

Ask Acuity Scheduling to demonstrate what happens to existing appointments when a service is edited, how padding affects offered times, how an outside calendar event affects availability and which bookings a resource limit blocks. Check what clients see after a change rather than assuming the same behaviour across systems.

iinsight is a clinic-focused option in Australia, developed for Allied Health providers. It combines client, staff and appointment management with SMS, while its wider system also covers case files and data, assessments, invoices and budgets. Its plans are a free trial, a Premium Subscription with unlimited user licences and an Enterprise License for organisations with 100+ users.

Compare running costs

Separate the subscription from transaction charges when estimating the cost of a booking system. Square Australia lists its Free plan at $0 for a single location, Plus at $40 per month per location and Premium at $90 per month per location. A business with more than one location should compare the per-location subscription against the functions it would use at each site.

Square lists card processing rates of 1.6% for in-person payments and 2.2% for online and manually entered payments across all three plans. Afterpay is listed at 6% plus 30 cents per transaction, excluding GST.

Acuity Scheduling prices in USD and excludes applicable taxes: Starter is $16 or $20 a month, Standard $27 or $34 and Premium $49 or $61, the lower figure in each pair for annual payment, which saves 20%. Card fees depend on the payment provider you connect.

iinsight quotes its Premium Subscription on request. Its listed Australian add-on for SMS reminders and confirmations costs $10 AUD per month plus a charge per message.

Square lists unlimited staff calendars, with no employee limit, on Free, Plus and Premium. Its schedule customisation includes setting a daily appointment limit, blocking personal time and colour-coding by staff member or service. Customers can book in their chosen time zone or use the business location's time zone.

For a service business that wants to track the cost of providing a service, Square lists service-cost tracking among the features available on Plus and Premium. Include that plan boundary in the comparison if the business needs this operational information, rather than choosing a plan on its booking-page features alone.

Compare one booking journey

On these documented features, Square fits a service business that takes payment at the counter and needs unlimited staff calendars; Acuity Scheduling fits a solo practitioner or small team paying per calendar; iinsight fits an allied health clinic that also needs case files, assessments and invoicing.

Use one ordinary booking and the exception your team encounters most often in a demonstration. For Square, check its service duration and blocked time, and treat the warning before manual double-booking as a warning rather than a hard stop; for Acuity Scheduling, check padding, calendar syncing, resource limits and client-facing appointment information.

With iinsight, verify that its clinic-oriented client, staff, appointment and SMS workflow fits your service business. Across all three, check whether outside-calendar commitments and required shared resources change customer availability, and whether staff and customers can identify the current booking after a change. For a full calendar-conflict test, use the dedicated guide.