Acuity Scheduling vs Notion Calendar

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.

Notion Calendar is a desktop and mobile calendar app from Notion Labs. It began life as Cron, a keyboard-driven calendar startup that Notion acquired in 2022 and relaunched under the Notion name in January 2024. It was built on top of Google Calendar accounts, added Outlook and Microsoft 365 calendar support in 2026, and connects these calendars with Notion workspaces.

The app shows several Google accounts in one view, so work and personal calendars sit side by side. Keyboard shortcuts and a command menu make creating events, finding free time and joining video calls very fast, and a menu bar item on macOS shows the next meeting. Notion integration is the key difference: you can attach Notion pages to events for agendas and notes, and show date properties from Notion databases, such as project deadlines or content schedules, directly on the calendar. Scheduling links and availability sharing help book meetings across time zones. The app is free to use.

Notion Calendar suits Google Workspace users, especially teams already running their work in Notion. Its Google integration is the most mature, Outlook support is newer and still catching up, it has no task manager of its own, and the mobile app is less capable than the desktop. Google Calendar itself is enough for basic needs, Fantastical is a richer option for Apple users with many account types, and Calendly offers more advanced booking pages.