Calendly vs Acuity Scheduling: Which Booking Tool Is Right for Your Business?

Calendly's core use case is eliminating the scheduling email chain. A sales rep drops their link in a cold email. A consultant sends it to a prospect. A recruiter shares it with a candidate. The other party picks a time and the meeting is on both calendars, Zoom link already included. No back-and-forth.

Calendly's Free plan gives individual users one event type at no cost. For most solo users scheduling a single type of meeting (a 30-minute discovery call, for example), this is a genuinely functional tier — not a crippled demo. The Standard plan at $12 per user per month unlocks multiple event types, basic routing, and additional integrations. The Teams plan at $20 per user per month adds round-robin scheduling, collective events (where multiple team members must all be available), and more advanced routing forms.

Where Calendly wins:

• The booking experience is exceptionally clean and fast. Prospects encounter minimal friction: pick a date, pick a time, confirm. Drop-off is low.
• Round-robin scheduling assigns incoming bookings automatically to available team members — critical for sales and support teams that want to distribute meetings evenly without manual assignment.
• Collective scheduling requires multiple team members to all be free simultaneously — useful for panel interviews, multi-stakeholder demos, and partner calls.
• Routing forms let you ask qualifying questions before booking and send the prospect to the right event type or team member based on their answers. Useful if your offerings are segmented by company size, use case, or geography.
• The integration ecosystem is the strongest of any booking tool. Calendly connects natively with Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and hundreds more — which is why it dominates in corporate and SaaS environments.
• Automated reminders cut no-show rates without manual effort.
• Calendar sync, timezone detection, and embeddable widgets are included across plans.

Where Calendly has limitations:

• Visual customization of the booking page is minimal. Calendly's look and feel is Calendly's — you can add your logo and pick a color, but the experience is not deeply brandable for client-facing service businesses.
• Payment collection exists but is not the heart of the product. Businesses that need clients to pay a deposit, select a service package, or purchase a session bundle will find Acuity more purpose-built for that flow.
• Intake forms are available but less feature-rich than Acuity's — fewer field types and less control over required responses.
• Group class or workshop scheduling is not a native Calendly use case.

Acuity Scheduling, now owned by Squarespace, is built around the idea that a booking and a transaction are the same event. When a client books a haircut, a training session, or a coaching call, they pay a deposit, complete an intake form, and get preparation instructions — all in one flow. Not steps that happen afterward. Part of the booking itself.

Acuity's pricing is structured by the number of calendars (staff members or locations) rather than per-user seat fees. The Emerging plan at $20 per month supports one calendar and is suitable for solo practitioners. Growing at $34 per month supports up to six calendars. Powerhouse at $61 per month supports up to 36 calendars. There is no free plan, only a free trial.

Where Acuity wins:

• Payment at booking is a first-class feature. Acuity integrates natively with Stripe, Square, and PayPal, making it straightforward to require a deposit or full payment before confirming an appointment. For businesses where no-shows are costly, this is a meaningful operational tool.
• Packages and gift certificates let clients purchase a block of sessions (say, 10 yoga classes or a 3-month coaching package) and draw down from that balance with each booking. This is a revenue and retention mechanic that Calendly does not offer natively.
• Coupons and discount codes can be applied at booking — useful for promotional campaigns and referral programs.
• Intake forms are comprehensive. You can require health history forms, liability waivers, preference questionnaires, or any client information before the appointment is confirmed.
• Group class and workshop scheduling is built in. Clients can see available spots in a class, register, and pay — the same flow as individual appointments but for group settings.
• The booking page is more customizable visually — better branding controls, custom confirmation pages, and a client-facing experience that can feel like your own website rather than a third-party tool.
• Calendar sync, automated reminders, timezone detection, and embeddable widgets are all included.

Where Acuity has limitations:

• The tool is less suited to B2B scheduling contexts. There is no equivalent to Calendly's routing forms that direct different prospects to different team members based on qualifying answers.
• The integration ecosystem is smaller than Calendly's, particularly for CRM and enterprise sales tools. Zapier covers many cases, but native integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot are not as robust.
• Round-robin meeting assignment across a team — a key Calendly Teams feature — is not how Acuity's multi-calendar model works. Acuity assigns by calendar (staff member), not automatically by availability across a pool.
• The UI is somewhat more complex than Calendly's. The trade-off for more features is a slightly higher setup burden.