Scheduling and booking software

Scheduling and booking tools turn your calendar availability into a link or booking page, so a client, candidate or customer picks a time that suits both sides without an email back-and-forth. Sales and recruiting teams use them to spread meetings across a team and route leads to the right person; salons, studios, tutors and health practices use them to let clients book, pay and fill in forms. They differ in how they bill (per user, or per account with a set number of staff calendars), which plan first shares bookings across a team, whether payments and text reminders are included, and which plan carries single sign-on or a HIPAA agreement.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, security, legal, help center and developer pages:

• Pricing clarity: whether the plan you need has a published price, can be bought online and month to month, and whether the pages leave prices out or contradict each other.
• Free plan and trial: a permanent free plan that takes bookings, and what it allows (event types, calendars, payments, users); otherwise the length of the trial and whether it needs a card.
• Price for 3 hosts: the monthly cost for 3 hosts on the cheapest plan that spreads bookings across them, billed annually, with the arithmetic shown; 0 when the pages cannot price it.
• Booking features: collective events with several hosts, routing forms, payment at booking, text reminders and removing the vendor's branding, and on which plan each one sits.
• Compliance and data residency: the vendor's own SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, a DPA, a HIPAA agreement, and storing data in the EU.
• Admin, API and data export: SAML single sign-on, an audit log, admin-managed event types, a REST API, webhooks and a self-serve export of your bookings.

How quickly invitees book or how often they show up depends on the business, not the tool, so we do not score it. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.