Acuity Scheduling vs Motion

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.

Motion is an AI-powered planner that combines calendar, tasks and projects so that the software, not the user, decides when work gets done. Users enter tasks with priorities, durations and deadlines, and Motion schedules them into open time around meetings, then reshuffles the plan automatically when a meeting runs over, an urgent task arrives or a deadline moves.

On top of individual scheduling, Motion offers projects with stages, dependencies and team workload views, booking pages for external meetings, AI-assisted docs, and an AI meeting notetaker that turns calls into summaries and follow-up tasks. It connects to Google Calendar and Outlook calendars. There is no permanent free plan; pricing is per user after a free trial, with an individual tier and a business tier that adds team features, workflows and meeting notes.

Motion suits founders, consultants and small teams whose days are fragmented by meetings and who would rather follow a generated plan than plan manually. It works only as well as task estimates and priorities are maintained, the constant rescheduling can feel controlling, and it costs much more than a to-do app. Reclaim.ai, now part of Dropbox, is a lighter calendar-blocking alternative, Sunsama favors deliberate manual daily planning, and Akiflow focuses on fast task capture combined with time blocking.