Acuity Scheduling vs Doodle

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.

Doodle is a Swiss scheduling tool from Zurich, created by Michael Näf and Paul Sevinç and fully acquired by media group Tamedia, now TX Group, in 2014. It is best known for the group poll: the organizer proposes time slots, participants vote without needing an account, and the most popular slot becomes the meeting. It later added booking pages, 1:1 links and sign-up sheets.

The four meeting types are Group Poll, Booking Page, 1:1 and Sign-up Sheet, all synced with Google or Microsoft calendars to avoid double booking. Free includes one of each and three basic sign-up sheets, with ads. Pro costs $15 per month or $11 billed annually and unlocks unlimited polls and pages, deadlines, reminders, hidden participants, video links and no ads. Team is $21 per seat ($16 annually) from two seats and adds an admin console, booking on behalf of others, branding and Stripe payments. Enterprise starts at $15,000 per year.

Doodle is strongest for finding a time across many external people, such as committees, academic groups or multi-company workshops, where participants should not need an account. For sales and customer booking, Calendly has deeper routing, workflows and CRM integrations, Cal.com offers an open-source option, and YouCanBookMe is simpler for single booking pages. The free plan is now quite limited.

Doodle lists SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA (with a BAA) compliance, which helps regulated and European buyers. Tip: occasional pollers can stay on Free; anyone scheduling weekly should take Pro annually, which Doodle prices about 26% below monthly billing.