Acuity Scheduling vs SavvyCal

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.

SavvyCal is a scheduling tool built by a small, bootstrapped US team around one idea: booking a meeting should feel considerate to the person receiving the link. It competes with Calendly but puts the invitee's experience at the center of the product.

The signature feature is calendar overlay: invitees can connect their own Google or Outlook calendar and see your availability laid over their week, so they pick a mutually free slot without switching tabs. Hosts can rank preferred times, set different availability per link, and personalize links with the recipient's name and a custom message. Team features include round robin, collective availability and shared links, and higher tiers add Stripe payments, workflows for reminders and follow-ups, and polls for group meetings. Integrations cover Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zapier, webhooks and some CRMs. Pricing is per user with Basic and Premium paid tiers and no free plan, so regular scheduling needs a paid subscription.

SavvyCal fits founders, consultants, coaches, recruiters and sales teams who send many scheduling links to important external people and care about first impressions. It has a smaller ecosystem and fewer native CRM integrations than Calendly, which remains the default for large teams and enterprise routing. Cal.com is the open-source and more budget-friendly option, Chili Piper is stronger for inbound lead routing in B2B sales, and zcal offers a free alternative with a clean design.