Acuity Scheduling vs OnceHub

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.

OnceHub is a meeting scheduling and inbound engagement platform for sales, support and service teams. The company started in 2006 as ScheduleOnce, founded by brothers Rami and Gilad Goraly, grew without outside funding, and renamed itself OnceHub in 2019 when it moved from a single booking tool to a broader lead engagement suite. Its core job is turning a website visit or form fill into a booked meeting with the right person.

The product covers booking pages for single hosts, panels and group sessions, routing forms that qualify leads and assign them by rules, round robin and maximum-availability distribution, room scheduling, and chatbots that can hand a visitor to live chat or an instant meeting. Plans stack: a free Basic plan for one user, then Schedule, Route and Engage, each adding a layer (CRM sync and payments, then routing, then chatbots), with an Enterprise tier for 30+ users.

OnceHub fits revenue teams that want scheduling and routing in one place without paying Chili Piper prices, and regulated organizations that need a security add-on and custom agreements. The interface is busier than Calendly, which is easier for solo users and simple team links, and SavvyCal feels more polished for personal scheduling. Chili Piper remains deeper for complex Salesforce routing at large companies.

In 2026 OnceHub added AI phone and web agents for guests and an MCP integration that lets hosts manage their setup from an AI chat client. Buying tip: start on the 14-day Engage trial, then drop to Route if you do not need chatbots; annual billing saves up to 18%.