How is this scheduling & booking ranking decided?

Mechanically. The 20 approved scheduling & booking listings on this page are sorted by their published rating, highest first, with the number of ratings behind each score as the tie-break and the product name as a final tie-break so the order is stable. Those ratings are aggregated from public sources, not collected from Softwr readers, this site hosts no reviews, so the order is a summary of what is already published elsewhere, not a verdict of our own. Nothing on this page is paid placement.

Is this list re-ordered for startups?

No, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. The catalogue records no data about which team sizes or roles each tool suits, so the ranking is the same published-rating order as the unsegmented list. What the startups framing changes is which of the figures below matter most. Startups are buying for a headcount they do not have yet, which makes the second and third tier of each ladder more important than the first. Check what the price becomes at ten people.

How much does scheduling & booking software cost?

Across the 20 scheduling & booking tools listed here, paid plans start between $0.01 and $175 a month, with a median entry price of $19.49. The most expensive single tier published in the category is $399 a month (Booker by Mindbody). 8 of 20 also publish a $0 plan.

What is the cheapest scheduling & booking software?

4 of the 20 tools listed here cost nothing at all. Among the ones that charge, Fresha has the lowest published entry price at $0.01 a month. Cheapest and best value are different questions: check which tier the capability you need actually appears in before you compare starting prices.

Is there free scheduling & booking software?

Yes, 8 of 20 tools in this category publish a plan priced at $0. 4 of them are free outright, with no paid tier above. A tool is only counted as free here when it publishes a $0 plan, an open-source licence, or a starting price of zero, a free trial does not count.

What features should scheduling & booking software have?

Judging by what vendors put in their own published pricing tiers, the most frequently named capabilities in this category are client management (6 of 10 tools that publish plan detail), online booking (4) and priority support (4). Treat those as the category baseline. Anything named by only one vendor, such as advanced booking or api access, is a differentiator rather than a standard, so it is worth deciding whether you need it before it narrows your shortlist to one.

How is scheduling & booking software usually billed?

subscription (9), freemium (4), quote (2), free (1), plus 1 less common arrangements, counted across the 20 listings on this page. The distinction that costs money is per-seat versus flat: a per-user plan at the same headline price scales with your headcount and a flat subscription does not. 1 of 20 tools also keep at least one tier unpriced and sold by quote.

What does scheduling & booking software actually cover?

The 20 tools on this page do not describe themselves the same way. The subject tags they carry most often are scheduling (7), booking (5), free (2), free-tier (2), marketing (2). That spread is the honest answer to what the category means in practice: it is not one product shape, and two tools filed under scheduling & booking may overlap on very little.

How many pricing tiers do scheduling & booking tools offer?

10 of 20 tools here publish a plan breakdown, and the median one has 3 tiers. 7 of 20 publish three or more. More tiers is not generosity, it usually means the capability you are buying for sits two rungs above the advertised price, so price your shortlist at the tier that contains it.

How many scheduling & booking tools are listed on Softwr?

20 approved scheduling & booking listings appear on this page, including Acuity Scheduling, Airbnb, Appointlet, Appointy. Each links to a full breakdown with its pricing tiers and plan detail, and the category can be filtered by price and sorted by rating above. You can also read the shortlist view at /best/scheduling-booking, which ranks the same set by published rating.

Scheduling & Booking · ranked shortlist

Best Scheduling & Booking software for Startups in 2026

20 approved scheduling & booking listings, ordered by published rating with the method stated below rather than assumed. Startups are buying for a headcount they do not have yet, which makes the second and third tier of each ladder more important than the first. Check what the price becomes at ten people.

Tools ranked: 20
Entry price range: $0.01-$175
Publish a $0 plan: 8 of 20

How this ranking is derived

The sort key

Published rating, highest first. Ties break on the number of ratings behind the score, then on product name so the order never depends on what the API happened to return first. That is the whole rule, there is no weighting, no score of our own, and nothing paid: no sponsored slot runs on these pages.

Where the ratings come from

No listing in this set carries a rating, so the order falls back to name. Those scores are aggregated from public sources rather than collected here, Softwr hosts no reviews of its own, which is also why no rating on this page is marked up as ours in structured data.

What the pool is

Approved scheduling & booking listings, capped at 20 per page; 20 came back for this one. It is not the whole market, and a tool being absent means we hold no record of it rather than that it failed a test. The unranked full set is on the scheduling & booking category page.

The ranking

Each entry lists why it sits where it sits, drawn from its own published rating and pricing.

#1
Acuity Scheduling
Highest rated here
Scheduling made simple
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Paid from $16 a month, with no free plan.
Billing
subscription
Tags
squarespace, scheduling, customizable, integrations
Acuity Scheduling breakdown Compare with Airbnb
#2
A
Airbnb
Book unique homes and experiences all over the world
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
Billing
transaction
Airbnb breakdown Compare with Appointlet
#3
Appointlet
The simple way to schedule meetings
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Paid from $10 a month, with no free plan.
Billing
Model not published
Tags
scheduling, appointments, sales, meetings
Appointlet breakdown Compare with Appointy
#4
Appointy
Smart scheduling for modern businesses
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Publishes a $0 plan, with paid tiers from $19.99 a month.
- 3 published tiers, topping out at $49.99.
Billing
freemium
Published tiers
3 tiers
Tags
scheduling, versatile, free-tier, multi-industry
Appointy breakdown Compare with Booker by Mindbody
#5
Booker by Mindbody
Complete spa management solution
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Paid from $129 a month, with no free plan.
- 3 published tiers, topping out at $399.
Billing
subscription
Published tiers
3 tiers
Tags
spa-software, mindbody, booking, pos
Booker by Mindbody breakdown Compare with Booksy
#6
Booksy
Book local beauty services
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Paid from $29.99 a month, with no free plan.
- 3 published tiers, topping out at $79.99.
Billing
subscription
Published tiers
3 tiers
Tags
booking-platform, barber-software, salon-management, beauty-marketplace
Booksy breakdown Compare with Boulevard
#7
Boulevard
Client experience platform for salons
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Paid from $175 a month, with no free plan.
- 3 published tiers, topping out at $325 plus a tier sold by quote.
Billing
subscription
Published tiers
3 tiers
Tags
client-experience, premium, salon-management, spa-software
Boulevard breakdown Compare with Cal.com
#8
Cal.com
Scheduling infrastructure for everyone
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Free, no paid tier is published at all.
Billing
freemium
Tags
scheduling, Open Source, booking, Self-Hosted
Cal.com breakdown Compare with Chili Piper
#9
Chili Piper
Meeting scheduling and lead routing for revenue teams
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
Billing
subscription
Chili Piper breakdown Compare with Cloudbeds
#10
Cloudbeds
Cloud-based hospitality management platform unifying PMS, channel management, and booking engine
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Free, no paid tier is published at all.
Billing
quote
Cloudbeds breakdown Compare with Doodle
#11
Doodle
Find the best time for anything
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Paid from $15 a month, with no free plan.
Billing
Model not published
Tags
scheduling, polls, group-meetings, coordination
Doodle breakdown Compare with Fresha
#12
Fresha
Free salon and spa software
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Publishes a $0 plan, with paid tiers from $0.01 a month.
- 3 published tiers, topping out at $2.19.
Billing
free
Published tiers
3 tiers
Tags
free software, salon-booking, beauty-industry, appointment-scheduling
Fresha breakdown Compare with GlossGenius
#13
GlossGenius
Beautiful booking for beauty pros
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Paid from $24 a month, with no free plan.
- 2 published tiers, topping out at $48.
Billing
subscription
Published tiers
2 tiers
Tags
beautiful-design, independent-stylists, booking, payments
GlossGenius breakdown Compare with Mews
#14
M
Mews
One pricing plan should not fit all
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
Billing
quote
Mews breakdown Compare with Moovit
#15
Moovit
Your public transit companion for seamless urban travel
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Free, no paid tier is published at all.
Billing
freemium
Published tiers
1 tier
Tags
public transit, mobility, navigation, crowdsourced
Moovit breakdown Compare with Motion
#16
Motion
Your intelligent calendar that prioritizes for you
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Paid from $19 a month, with no free plan.
- 2 published tiers, topping out at $29.
Billing
Model not published
Published tiers
2 tiers
Tags
calendar, ai, tasks, productivity
Motion breakdown Compare with Planday
#17
Planday
Danish workforce scheduling and shift management software for shift-based businesses
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
Billing
subscription
Planday breakdown Compare with Schedulicity
#18
Schedulicity
Easy online booking & payments
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Publishes a $0 plan, with paid tiers from $34.99 a month.
- 3 published tiers, topping out at $44.99.
Billing
subscription
Published tiers
3 tiers
Tags
easy-to-use, free-tier, class-scheduling, wellness
Schedulicity breakdown Compare with Setmore
#19
Setmore
Free appointment scheduling and customer management
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Free, no paid tier is published at all.
Billing
subscription
Tags
Free, appointment, scheduling
Setmore breakdown Compare with SimplyBook.me
#20
SimplyBook.me
Online booking system for service businesses
- No rating on record, so it ranks below everything that has one.
- Publishes a $0 plan, with paid tiers from $8.25 a month.
- 3 published tiers, topping out at $24.90.
Billing
freemium
Published tiers
3 tiers
Tags
booking, scheduling, service-business, website
SimplyBook.me breakdown

What scheduling & booking software costs

Counted from the published pricing of the 20 listings on this page. A tool counts as free only where it publishes a $0 plan, an open-source licence or a starting price of zero.

Cheapest paid plan: $0.01Fresha
Median entry price: $19.49across 12 priced
Dearest entry price: $175Boulevard
Publish a $0 plan: 8of 20

Paid scheduling & booking plans in this set start anywhere from $0.01 a month for Fresha to $175 for Boulevard. The median entry price across the 12 tools that publish one is $19.49, half of them start below that figure and half above it.

Entry price is not the ceiling. The dearest published tier anywhere in this category is Booker by Mindbody's at $399 a month, 2.3× the highest entry price on the page. Read the top of each ladder as well as the bottom, because that is where you land after two years of growth.

8 of 20 publish a $0 plan, and 4 of those charge nothing at all. 8 tools have no free tier of any kind.

1 of 20 keep at least one tier unpriced and sold by quote, which in practice means the number you end up paying at the top end is not on this page or on theirs.

Fresha pricing Boulevard pricing Booker by Mindbody plans

How these vendors bill

The billing model each of the 20 scheduling & booking listings publishes, counted. Two tools at the same headline price are not the same purchase if one of them charges per seat.

subscription: 9
freemium: 4
quote: 2
free: 1
transaction: 1

Separately, 1 of 20 publish at least one tier with no price attached. Those are sold by quote, so the top of the ladder is negotiable, and unknowable, until you talk to sales.

What comes as standard, and what you pay extra for

Every capability named in a published pricing tier by any of the 10 scheduling & booking tools here that break their plans down, counted once per vendor. This measures what vendors choose to advertise as a selling point, not everything the software does, an absence below is silence, not a missing feature.

Named by most of the category

Client management , 6 of 10

Named by fewer

Online booking , 4 of 10
Priority support , 4 of 10
Advanced analytics , 3 of 10
Marketing tools , 3 of 10
Mobile apps , 3 of 10
Unlimited appointments , 3 of 10
Advanced reports , 2 of 10
Automated reminders , 2 of 10
Calendar sync , 2 of 10

Named by exactly one vendor: Advanced booking, API access, Commission tracking, Email reminders, Payments, Route planning. Those are differentiators rather than table stakes.

What “Scheduling & Booking” covers in practice

The subject tags that recur across these 20 listings, with the number of tools carrying each. A category label is a filing decision; this is the closer read of what is actually filed under it.

scheduling7
booking5
Free2
free-tier2
marketing2
payments2
pos2
salon-management2
spa-software2

Carried by a single tool: ai, appointments, booking-platform, crowdsourced, hipaa, multi-industry, productivity, squarespace. If one of those is the reason you are here, the category page is the wrong lens, go straight to that product.

How to choose between them

Four things the numbers above should change about your shortlist.

Start with the free tiers if there are enough of them

8 of 20 scheduling & booking tools here publish a $0 plan, which is enough to run a real trial without a purchase order. A free tier is worth more than a free trial when you are evaluating: a trial expires on the vendor's schedule, a free plan expires when you outgrow it. The thing to check before you commit is which of the capabilities below sit above the free line, starting with client management, the single most frequently named capability in this category's published tiers.

Read the spread before you read the features

$0.01 to $175 is a $174.99 spread on entry price alone, and a spread that wide is never about polish, it is about who the vendor built for. Tools at the bottom of this ladder are priced for one person or a small team; tools near $175 are priced for a department with a procurement process. Decide which of those you are before you compare capability, or you will shortlist four tools that were never competing for the same buyer.

Check which tier you actually land on

7 of 20 tools here publish three or more tiers, and the median vendor in this category ships 3 of them. The advertised price is the first rung, and the things teams tend to need, client management, online booking, priority support, are named in higher plans far more often than in entry ones. Price your shortlist at the tier that contains what you need, not at the tier on the pricing page's left edge.

The billing model matters more than the headline number

This category splits across 5 billing models: subscription on 9 listings, freemium on 4, and 3 other arrangements across the rest. A per-user price and a flat subscription at the same headline figure are not the same purchase, the first one grows with headcount and the second does not. Multiply by your real team size before you compare two numbers side by side.

Compare scheduling & booking tools directly

Every pairing below is a full comparison: the same checklist applied to both, so a gap in one is a gap in the other.

Go straight to the numbers

Acuity Schedulingpricing alternatives
Airbnbpricing alternatives
Appointletpricing alternatives
Appointypricing alternatives
Booker by Mindbodypricing alternatives
Booksypricing alternatives

Build your own comparison See the shortlist instead

Questions people ask about scheduling & booking software

Answered from the listings on this page, and nowhere else.

How is this scheduling & booking ranking decided?: Mechanically. The 20 approved scheduling & booking listings on this page are sorted by their published rating, highest first, with the number of ratings behind each score as the tie-break and the product name as a final tie-break so the order is stable. Those ratings are aggregated from public sources, not collected from Softwr readers, this site hosts no reviews, so the order is a summary of what is already published elsewhere, not a verdict of our own. Nothing on this page is paid placement.
Is this list re-ordered for startups?: No, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. The catalogue records no data about which team sizes or roles each tool suits, so the ranking is the same published-rating order as the unsegmented list. What the startups framing changes is which of the figures below matter most. Startups are buying for a headcount they do not have yet, which makes the second and third tier of each ladder more important than the first. Check what the price becomes at ten people.
How much does scheduling & booking software cost?: Across the 20 scheduling & booking tools listed here, paid plans start between $0.01 and $175 a month, with a median entry price of $19.49. The most expensive single tier published in the category is $399 a month (Booker by Mindbody). 8 of 20 also publish a $0 plan.
What is the cheapest scheduling & booking software?: 4 of the 20 tools listed here cost nothing at all. Among the ones that charge, Fresha has the lowest published entry price at $0.01 a month. Cheapest and best value are different questions: check which tier the capability you need actually appears in before you compare starting prices.
Is there free scheduling & booking software?: Yes, 8 of 20 tools in this category publish a plan priced at $0. 4 of them are free outright, with no paid tier above. A tool is only counted as free here when it publishes a $0 plan, an open-source licence, or a starting price of zero, a free trial does not count.
What features should scheduling & booking software have?: Judging by what vendors put in their own published pricing tiers, the most frequently named capabilities in this category are client management (6 of 10 tools that publish plan detail), online booking (4) and priority support (4). Treat those as the category baseline. Anything named by only one vendor, such as advanced booking or api access, is a differentiator rather than a standard, so it is worth deciding whether you need it before it narrows your shortlist to one.
How is scheduling & booking software usually billed?: subscription (9), freemium (4), quote (2), free (1), plus 1 less common arrangements, counted across the 20 listings on this page. The distinction that costs money is per-seat versus flat: a per-user plan at the same headline price scales with your headcount and a flat subscription does not. 1 of 20 tools also keep at least one tier unpriced and sold by quote.
What does scheduling & booking software actually cover?: The 20 tools on this page do not describe themselves the same way. The subject tags they carry most often are scheduling (7), booking (5), free (2), free-tier (2), marketing (2). That spread is the honest answer to what the category means in practice: it is not one product shape, and two tools filed under scheduling & booking may overlap on very little.
How many pricing tiers do scheduling & booking tools offer?: 10 of 20 tools here publish a plan breakdown, and the median one has 3 tiers. 7 of 20 publish three or more. More tiers is not generosity, it usually means the capability you are buying for sits two rungs above the advertised price, so price your shortlist at the tier that contains it.
How many scheduling & booking tools are listed on Softwr?: 20 approved scheduling & booking listings appear on this page, including Acuity Scheduling, Airbnb, Appointlet, Appointy. Each links to a full breakdown with its pricing tiers and plan detail, and the category can be filtered by price and sorted by rating above. You can also read the shortlist view at /best/scheduling-booking, which ranks the same set by published rating.

Keep reading

Neighbouring categories

Adjacent in the same taxonomy, not a ranking.

How this ranking is derived

The sort key

Where the ratings come from

What the pool is

The ranking

Acuity Scheduling

Airbnb

Appointlet

Appointy

Booker by Mindbody

Booksy

Boulevard

Cal.com

Chili Piper

Cloudbeds

Doodle

Fresha

GlossGenius

Mews

Moovit

Motion

Planday

Schedulicity

Setmore

SimplyBook.me