Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace company vs. Zoho Bookings

I think any business can benefit from Acuity Scheduling. In my experience, however, and maybe I just haven’t found the correct settings yet, it’s been difficult to manage 4 business schedules with multiple employees and varying hours that change day-to-day and week-to-week. So I definitely would recommend it to more simple business models with set hours, as it seems like it would have all the functions one might need. I still would recommend to more complex businesses like mine as well, but also include discussion of some of the potential drawbacks.

Incentivized

Zoho Bookings from my personal experience is best when you have a growing list of customers and need to get free of the hassle of taking written notes in your Rolodex. It's like a CRM but optimized for booking tasks. I believe it would be less suited, if you are a new business starting from scratch

Incentivized

• Clicking on the link opens up my calendar, which has an uncluttered look, making it easy for my prospects and clients to review their options and make their choice.
• I am able to customize my schedule, the types of appointments I want to offer, and even decide how many appointments I want in a day. There are so many details that I can customize.
• I can customize how my calendar and emails look for my prospects and clients so that I come across professional and coordinated. I want the look of my business, website, etc. to have a polished, cohesive, and interesting presence.
• I love that there is a workshop/class/series option for my workshops. My attendees reserve their place and pay upfront. I can duplicate these events or add future dates. It's wonderful. This saves us a lot of time and is so convenient.
• I haven't had any trouble with my scheduler. It works flawlessly, so I don't have to take time out of my day to fix, troubleshoot or call customer service.
• I love that I can add questions for my prospects to answer right away before booking a call. This means 3 fewer steps for me. 1. They answer these questions without an email from me. 2. They make their reservation and get a follow-up email, right away. 3. I customized the follow-up email with more details and actions to take to prepare for our call.

Incentivized

• Online booking without hands on involvement by our team
• Security of publishing a link for free consultations
• Automated two-way syncing with our calendar
• Ease of use both for us as well as our clients

Incentivized

• There are a lot of pages for similar things so sometimes its hard to find the location of where to edit things
• The ability to stop a review request email from being sent to specific clients.
• A way to block of clients scheduiling 3 times when you only have 2 openings and a way to cancel that easier.

Incentivized

• Remove Zoho Branding in Basic Plan
• Provide Reports on revenue in all plans
• Remove the expiry date for Zoho Wallet credits

Incentivized

Acuity Scheduling has been very reliable. If you don't believe me, check out their status page here. They do a pretty decent job maintaining their app. To be fair, it's a pretty simple tool so they shouldn't run into too many hiccups given it doesn't feature near as many options as other applications on the market run.

Incentivized

It still needs more robust features and customization, like workflows and such. I'm confident they'll continue improving it, but some particular customization settings aren't available, in terms of triggers, content, look and feel, but it is mostly very detailed and particular. If you're ok with adapting to it, it is an excellent tool.

Incentivized

It's just very intuitive once you get the hang of it, which won't take long. They try not to make complex things very complex and they provide explanations for everything with a greyed-out question mark icon next to the function. Also, I love that they encourage people to just get live help when they need it.

Incentivized

Some of the integrations and features are harder to set up. Once everything is set up its fairly straightforward, but if like ATI you have multiple branches or departments utilizing Bookings, you would need to set up separate booking sites for each office/salesperson

Incentivized

Every time I had a question on how to do something or had any issues with Acuity Scheduling, mainly in the very beginning, when I was learning the platform, customer service was excellent. They were prompt to respond, friendly, and very helpful until I had the right solution.

Incentivized

A lot of things are not great as this is a new tool, but they fix it relatively quickly. They don't have a direct phone number, but Zoho support has good service overall

Incentivized

Acuity's user interface was much cleaner and easier to use when scheduling meetings. We love that you can embed it within your own website and it shows the calendar right there instead of redirecting you. Acuity gave us the ability to customize our meeting types and the information collected from the person scheduling the meeting.

Incentivized

I found the integration with the two above is great if you're a Google Calendar user which we are not. While with Zoho Calendar we can have two way integration with Google Calendar there wasn't a need to do so. With Zoho Bookings which also integrates with Google Calendar we didn't have to worry about that as the integration with our Zoho Calendar was virtually automatic. There was also the cost consideration as the two above have a free version it was limited and didn't have all the bells and whistles we needed. Zoho Bookings provide us with everything from a single sign-on web browser and mobile app

Incentivized

• Minimizing no shows
• Giving me back time by taking tasks off my mind/to-do list to focus on bigger more important things
• Payment management (it helps me make sure I receive my payments/recurring payments and follow up with clients if a payment has failed)
• Honestly just saving me from scheduling nightmares and headaches
• Timezones! It does it for you! (I work internationally)

Incentivized

• Zoho Bookings does not have either a positive or negative ROI as this is included with our Zoho Suite of features and we have enough licenses currently for anyone who would need access.
• It would be a negative ROI if we needed to purchase additional licenses solely for our engineers or the entire organization, most of who do not need access to any of the other Zoho Suite of features.

Incentivized