Acuity Scheduling vs Cal.com

Acuity Scheduling is an online appointment booking tool for service businesses. It was founded by Gavin Zuchlinski and acquired by Squarespace in 2019, and it is also sold inside Squarespace as Squarespace Scheduling. Clients pick a service, a staff member and a time from a booking page, fill in intake forms, pay a deposit or the full price, and receive email and SMS reminders, while the business manages availability, buffers and booking rules per staff member and location.

Beyond basic booking, Acuity handles the commercial side of appointments: packages, gift certificates, memberships and subscriptions, coupons, and payments through Stripe, Square or PayPal. Intake forms support conditional questions, which matters for clinics, therapists and coaches. Plans are tiered by the number of staff calendars: Starter (formerly Emerging) covers one, Standard (formerly Growing) up to six and Premium (formerly Powerhouse) up to 36 with multiple locations. There is a free trial but no permanent free plan.

Acuity fits salons, spas, therapists, tutors, fitness studios and consultants who sell time to individual clients. It is less suited to B2B sales teams that need round-robin routing and CRM enrichment, where Calendly or Chili Piper are stronger. Compared with Square Appointments it is more flexible on forms and packages, and compared with SimplyBook.me it offers a cleaner client experience, though its admin interface feels dated in places and SMS reminders have limits.

Cal.com is an open-source scheduling platform positioned as the Calendly alternative you can own. The hosted version is free for individuals with unlimited event types; teams pay per seat for round-robin, routing forms and workflows. The code is on GitHub, and companies can self-host or embed scheduling into their own products with Cal.com Platform APIs and atoms.

It supports many calendars and conferencing tools, includes its own Cal Video, and offers payments, workflows (reminders), and dynamic group links. Development is fast and public.

The product occasionally feels less polished than Calendly, and self-hosting requires maintenance, but for price, openness and embeddability it leads the category.

Cal.com offers an Enterprise plan with SSO and dedicated support, and exposes bookings, availability and routing through a public API and webhooks. That is why product teams often treat it as scheduling infrastructure rather than a standalone booking link, which is the clearest difference from Calendly. For individuals the practical advice is simple: start on the free plan and pay only when you need team features such as round-robin or routing forms.