Acuity Scheduling vs Reclaim.ai

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.

Reclaim.ai is an AI calendar assistant that automatically schedules focus time, tasks, habits and breaks around your meetings. Founded in 2019 in Portland, Oregon, it was acquired by Dropbox in 2024. Its core job is to defend time for real work in a calendar that would otherwise fill with meetings.

You define habits such as lunch, exercise or a daily planning block, and set goals for weekly focus time. Reclaim finds the best slots in Google Calendar or Outlook and keeps them flexible: blocks show as free while there is room and switch to busy as they become at risk, then move automatically when meetings shift. Tasks from Todoist, Asana, Linear, Jira, ClickUp and Google Tasks are scheduled into the calendar by priority and due date. Smart Meetings find the best recurring time for 1:1s and team syncs, scheduling links share availability externally, and buffer and travel time are added automatically. Analytics show how time splits between meetings, focus and other work. A free Lite plan covers basics, with per-seat Starter, Business and Enterprise plans adding more habits, team analytics and SSO.

Reclaim fits knowledge workers, engineers and managers who live in their calendar. Automation can clutter calendars and needs tuning at first. Motion combines calendar automation with project management, Sunsama and Akiflow favor manual daily planning, and Calendly is better for pure external booking.