7 best online booking systems for businesses in 2024

Zoho Bookings

Zoho Bookings is an efficient online booking system that is easy to set up and embed into your website. You can create different event types, assign your team, configure booking rules, and allow customers to schedule appointments easily.

Zoho Bookings is a great option for businesses of all sizes that are customer-facing and want to automate their appointment scheduling process.

You can start with a simple one-on-one meeting, round-robin meeting allocation, calendar sync for bookings, online payment, and email notifications. Zoho Bookings is also equipped to link a resource to a service (for example, a media room with devices for a meeting) and scale your bookings as your business grows with collective bookings, team management, custom workflows, and more.

With Bookings, you can create a seamless booking experience for your customers. You have plenty of options to incorporate your branding on the booking page and in the email notifications. For your appointment booking pages, you can add images, choose between four booking page themes, add your logo, change color palettes, and more.

Simplybook.me

Simplybook.me is a booking system that caters to service-based businesses. It provides features like client app login, service add-ons, packages, coupons, online payment and tips, and more focused on helping service-based businesses manage their appointments.

Apart from booking widgets, Simplybook.me offer integrations with Facebook, Instagram, and Google (reserve with Google My Business, etc.) to help collect appointments easily. Additionally, if you don't have a website, you can create one specifically to collect bookings and choose from the multiple templates that they offer.

While Simplybook.me covers most of the essential features, some good-to-have features fall under "custom features," which are limited based on your chosen subscription.

Appointy

Appointy focuses mainly on service providers who want to get started with a simple and easy-to-use booking system. The option to link a resource to a service (for example, a meeting room linked for an in-person meeting) helps Appointy offer more versatility for service providers in providing their services.

With Appointy, you can also provide discount coupons for your services, create and run offers that customers can redeem when making an appointment, or let customers gift your services and offerings to their friends and family by creating gift certificates.

Appointy enables you to create and manage multiple business locations, with the option to add staff and services for each location independently. However, the booking page is one important area where Appointy falls short of customizing your online booking system.

Square Appointments

The Square ecosystem helps businesses handle all their sales operations on a single platform. Solopreneurs, retail businesses, and service providers can benefit from what Square offers.

Their online booking system, Square Appointments, is one of the products they offer, along with built-in POS systems, inventory management, an online retail store, payment processing, HR and payroll management, marketing operations, and more.

You can get started with Square Appointments if you'd like; in most cases, businesses that use Square Point of Sale are more likely to build their booking system with Square. They offer one-on-one appointments and classes (as packages) that can be booked online or in person, and payment management is simplified within Sqaure's ecosystem.

Just like Appointy, Square also allows you to link resources or add-ons to the appointments that you offer. You can create and customize your booking website to the tee with their templates and embed them into your website. Compared to other online booking systems, Square is a costlier option.

Acuity Scheduling

Acuity offers a flexible booking system that can be customized for service-based businesses or business meetings. The system's interface makes it effortless to set up and embed the booking widget into your website.

With Acuity, you can create one-on-one appointments or classes, allow customers to schedule multiple appointment slots, convert the selected time slot into a recurring appointment, and include add-ons before they make a booking.

You can also offer discounts and coupons to customers. Acuity makes it easy for businesses to create appointment packages and subscription services that can be easily managed. Compared to other solutions (like Zoho Bookings), Acuity doesn't offer many options to customize your booking page to match your branding.

Setmore

You can easily manage and assign your team to one-on-one meetings or class bookings. Setmore offers a customer portal where customers can log in to view their appointment history and collect reviews after an appointment is completed, which can be published on your booking page.

The functionalities that Setmore offers are fewer than those of other booking systems, which could become a challenge as your business grows. However, they make up for this with diverse integrations with other prominent apps like Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Slack, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and more.

Appointlet

Appointlet is yet another simple and easy-to-set-up booking system for any small business looking to get started. Appointlet covers almost all the bases of what a good booking system should have, except for advanced functionalities for branding your booking page.

One-on-one and class booking can be created easily, and each service can be customized with its own booking rules—like meeting buffers, restrictions, notification setup, payment collection, and more. Appointlet allows you to either accept all appointments automatically or do so manually.

If you're looking to use Appointlet as a team, you can configure round-robin meeting allocation or create a collective booking for multiple staff members. Appointlet integrates with Salesforce, Stripe, MS Teams, Google Calendar, Zapier, and more to automate the business operations surrounding your meetings.