According to a recent survey, employers spend between 2 to 12 hours per workweek on scheduling tasks. Fortunately, various scheduling programs automate this process so you can focus on more important tasks.
Now, with so many options out there, choosing good scheduling software is a headache on its own. Don’t worry; we have you covered. We have shared our top 10 picks for the best scheduling software to buy in 2022.
| Software | Our score | Best for |
| Calendly |  |
Best Overall Scheduling Software |
| Acuity Scheduling | |
Best for Organizing Clients’ Info |
| SimplyBook | |
Best Solution for Service-Based Businesses |
| Hubspot Meetings | |
Best Meeting Room Scheduling Software |
| Bookafy | |
Best for Small Businesses |
| Setmore | |
Best Appointment Scheduling Software |
| Findmyshift | |
Best for Drag-and-drop Scheduling |
| Bitrix24 | |
Best for Logistics Company |
| Appointy | |
Best Class Scheduling Software |
| SuperSaaS | |
Best for 24/7 availability |
Best Scheduling Software 2022 List:
Calendly – Best Overall Scheduling Software
Source: calendly.com
- It only takes 3 steps to book an appointment
- Process payments with integrated applications like Paypal
- Automatically maintain availability status
- Automatic reminders for upcoming events
- Integrates with hundreds of other applications
Calendly is free-to-use scheduling software that can help you manage your staff schedules. With Calendly, you can book appointments anywhere you want with web-based and mobile-based solutions.
You have the option to create schedules in a matter of minutes and share them with multiple people in real-time. You and your employees can also customize their availability any time of any day, with all the relevant people getting notified of changes immediately.
Calendly interface is quite easy to use and understand. There are no unnecessary features. In the free version, you have the option of scheduling unlimited one-on-one appointments.
Coming to buying options, you can use Calendly completely free if you only want to use one calendar. Their paid plan starts from $8/month with the option of a 14-day free trial.
Acuity Scheduling – Best for Organizing Clients’ Info
Source: acuityscheduling.com
- Embeddable calendars
- Group scheduling
- Customizable intake forms
- Third-party synchronization
- Secure online transactions
Acuity is a cloud-based scheduling solution that allows employees to track their availability in real-time and make or change their appointments accordingly.
This product has a friendly user interface and a lot of handy functions. You can automate your schedules and sync your calendars according to the user time zones.
Acuity scheduling offers a free trial. If you want to upgrade to premium, the plans range from $14/ month to $50/ month to cater to different scheduling requirements.
SimplyBook – Best Solution for Service-Based Businesses
Source: SimplyBook.me
- Option to accept multiple bookings from clients
- Customizable site to match branding style
- Customizable intake forms for clients
- Better marketing through client memberships, coupons, packages, and gift cards
- Option to send customized emails to clients
If you are in a service business, SimplyBook is the best scheduling tool for you. Along with various scheduling features, SimplyBook also provides customized pages with complete booking solutions.
You can also add “Book Now” CTA buttons on your social profiles with booking pages.
SimplyBook offers a free 14-day trial so you can test the waters. After that, their premium plans range from $9.9 per month to $59.9 per month.
Hubspot Meetings – Best Meeting Room Scheduling Software
Source: hubspot.com
- Customizable booking links and pages
- Group meetings links
- Customized form questions for valuable context in regards to the prospect
- Embeddable calendar for your website
- Fully integrates with the HubSpot suite of tools
This tool provides personalized booking links to invite people to book meetings with you according to your availability.
You will automatically receive their contact details in your calendar whenever someone books a meeting with you. These details will also be added to your HubSpot CRM database.
You can also integrate Hubspot Meetings with Google Calendar and Office 365. As soon as you sign up with HubSpot Meetings, you will also gain access to the following:
- HubSpot free CRM
- HubSpot Marketing
- HubSpot Sales and Customer Service Tools
- HubSpot Academy
HubSpot Meetings offer a free plan in which you get: 1 personalized meeting link, integration with CRM, unlimited meetings, and an embeddable calendar.
Their premium plans contain major features like integration with marketing and sales tools. The premium plans start from $50 per month.
Bookafy – Best for Small Businesses
Source: bookafy.com
- Feature-rich free plan
- Customizable interface to match your branding style
- Sync with iCloud, Outlook.com, Google Calendar, and ICS
- Enterprise options available
Bookafy is a versatile tool to schedule calls, meetings, sales demos, and appointments. The set-up is quite easy, and it can seamlessly integrate or embed your personal calendars.
You can also generate meeting links for your appointments using apps like Zoom and GoToMeeting.
Its most unique feature is skill-based scheduling – when a customer wants a meeting, they will be booked with the employee having the most related skills and expertise in the subject matter.
They offer a 7-day trial with no obligations. Their pro plan starts at $7 per month.
Setmore – Best Appointment Scheduling Software
Source: setmore.com
- Offers text and email reminders
- Offers email and SMS alerts when an appointment is canceled or rescheduled
- Clients can make appointments through social media platforms
- Fast payment processing
- Top-notch customer support
Setmore is simple yet extremely powerful scheduling software. The great thing about it is that you don’t have to be technically experienced to get it set up – Its set-up wizard does the heavy lifting for you.
One other unique feature of this tool is its desktop application. You can see your appointments even when you are offline. No other scheduling tool offers this handy feature.
They offer a generous free plan with all the essential features unlocked and no credit card required. Their paid plans start from $9 per month.
Findmyshift – Best for Drag-and-drop Scheduling
Source: findmyshift.com
- Staff-tracking at all times
- Powerful web-based schedule making and instant sharing
- Time clock app to track hours and schedules
- Real-time notifications via SMS, emails, and push notifications
- Smart pay calculation for hourly employees
- Secured Automated backups to the cloud
Findmyshift is a cloud-based workforce scheduler that makes scheduling staff easier for the managers. You can create the whole schedule in a matter of minutes, thanks to its drag-and-drop feature.
With its extremely friendly interface, you can add as many items as you want in cells according to your business needs and requirements.
It also lets you create and save customized templates based on repeating patterns, making scheduling faster.
Findmyshift is completely free for teams of up to 5 employees. They also offer a free 30-day trial for premium plans that start from $25 per team.
Bitrix24 – Best for Logistics Company
Source: bitrix24.com
- Collaborate with other businesses with Activity Stream
- Access and acquire source codes, extra tools, and control your data
- Upload and instantly share files with others
- Manage external and internal communication more efficiently with intranet services
- Access various tools like task reports, employee directory, absence chart, time-tracking, and more
Bitrix24 is open-source scheduling software that provides various valuable solutions. You can do project and task management, share files, message your business contacts, and much more with it.
Bitrix24 also offers a call center feature that helps you reconnect with lost clients and prospects. That means you can view your past interactions with clients and immediately get access to the saved data if you miss any call from a certain client.
Bitrix24 is free to use for up to 12 people. You also get free trials for the premium plans. Their paid membership starts from $12 and goes up to $99.5 per month.
Appointy – Best Class Scheduling Software
Source: appointy.com
- Simple social channels integration in a matter of minutes
- Manage a large number of employees efficiently
- Implement personalized customer loyalty programs that help you to increase customer retention
- Analytics and reporting tools to track employee performance and appointments
- Automated reminders to reduce no-shows
If your business relies on social media channels more than your website, Appointy is the best option. It enables you to have your customized booking page that clients can use to book meetings with you.
Another handy feature of Appointy is its automated scheduling system that helps streamline your business. You can also navigate your previous client interactions in detail.
As an admin, you’ll have the option to set up different payment schedules and receive those payments directly. Appointy also lets you create invoices through its website.
They offer a free plan with limited features to test the software. Their paid plans start from $19.99 per month and come with a 14-days free trial.
SuperSaaS – Best Scheduling Software for 24/7 availability
Source: supersaas.com
- Offers solutions to scale the business to accommodate increasing staff members, unlimited users, and various other resources
- Offers automatic time zone adjustment along with supporting 34 languages
- Syncs with Google calendar, Microsoft outlook, phone calendar, and Zoom to avoid duplicate bookings and conflicts
- Integrates easily with iCal to provide instant updates about the status of your appointments
SuperSaaS is also a web-based scheduling software that works round the clock. With its availability on multiple platforms, you can log in remotely from anywhere and work seamlessly. It also supports 33 languages.
SuperSaaS provides customizable scheduling options, coupons, and discounts to clients, sends reminders, and integrates seamlessly with online payment options.
You can leverage SuperSaaS for reservations and rentals, service bookings, and one-on-one appointments, among others.
SuperSaaS offers a free version where you can set a maximum of 50 appointments. Their paid plans start at $8 per month.
Buyers Guide
Managing schedules is one of the most challenging tasks for any business manager. They are tedious and, frankly – time-consuming. Managing schedules for a small team is easy, but the task gets more complicated when the number of employees is high, or the business is about to be scaled.
The majority of organizations have historically relied on Microsoft Excel and other such spreadsheets to manage their schedules. But everyone can agree that these spreadsheets are not the best solution for scheduling needs as they were not primarily developed for scheduling purposes.
To that end, companies need a more elegant solution to meet their growing needs and requirements – one that can help them bridge this gap and offer a time-saving approach to scheduling and booking appointments.
That’s where a scheduling tool comes into play.
What is Scheduling Software?
Schedule software is a web-based and/or mobile-based tool that helps individuals and businesses streamline their operations by enabling them to create and maintain schedules, assign shifts, and track their employees’ time.
Usually, these apps come with various additional tools like customized booking pages, cloud backups, time clocks, and integration with different productivity and payment apps, among others.
These applications are also useful with:
- Scheduling and managing client appointments
- Scheduling inventory or other resources
- Tracking attendances/ absences
- Dispatching schedule changes in real-time
- Client retention tools
Typical Features of Scheduling Software
Many scheduling software usually contains some or all of the following features:
Workforce Scheduling
Scheduling software helps business owners to manage their employees by scheduling their shifts and tracking their calendars in real-time. It also allows owners and managers to schedule their employees based on their skills and expertise.
With scheduling software, managers can manage their staff across multiple locations and allow them to update their availabilities.
Automated Scheduling
Scheduling software should instantly update bookings requests made based on availability. A typical scheduling tool can also manage the waiting list of scheduling allocations should a booking be rescheduled or canceled.
Calendar Syncing
This tool can also share schedules and bookings with the relevant people, no matter their location. They can also integrate with other calendar applications like Google Calendar or iCal.
Reminders
Enables the user to send automated reminders to participants via SMS, email notifications, and/or push notifications.
Resource Scheduling
Furthermore, scheduling tools also enable clients to schedule meeting rooms. They also enable the users to schedule the company’s equipment.
Time-Clocks
Business managers can easily use these tools to track their employees’ time. They help track employee attendance, absence rates, and PTO (Paid time off) days. Some applications also integrate with HR and payroll processing software to help in other day-to-day tasks.
What Type of Buyer Are You?
So how do you choose the best scheduling software for your business? Well, that will depend on your business’s size and specific requirements. As a guide, here are typical buyer types:
Individuals
If you are an individual business person who just wants to keep on top of things, it would be a good idea to go with scheduling software that offers a free plan with limited features. Those features would be more than enough for your business, meetings with clients, and day-to-day tasks.
SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises)
SMEs usually have up to 70-80 employees, focusing on different operational areas. They typically have a specific niche they cater to.
For example, a dental clinic or a salon should look for an appointment scheduling software that enables them to schedule their appointments and bookings online. Similarly, a midsized organization should use a scheduling tool that offers features like resource scheduling, time clock management, and shift management.
Large Corporations
Automated work schedules are key for large corporations that operate in multiple functional areas with employees stationed in different locations. Organizations should consider a modular suite that allows them to choose the right modules according to their business needs and requirements.
For instance, a cash management firm would need field service management to optimize and track their vehicle routes. Such firms would also need a shift management feature to choose the right person for the right service schedule. Moreover, features like time-clock and automated reminders would also be needed to reduce no-shows and track staff location.
Benefits of Scheduling Software
- Better Communication Flow
One of the greatest benefits of scheduling tools is keeping everyone on the same page. Even a basic scheduling system should have a time clock and attendance system that lets managers track their employees.
The schedules are disseminated to the whole staff, and everyone knows when they are working. The staff also gets updated when there is a change in the schedule. These benefits result in a better communication flow throughout the organization.
- Reduced Conflicts
Businesses with non-repeating schedules or rotating shifts may run into availability conflicts more often. This results in lost time due to inefficient systems.
This mainly happens when businesses use outdated scheduling systems like excel and display the schedules only on the notice board. A scheduling tool reduces these inefficiencies by giving real-time updates and reminders to staff about their specific schedules.
- Increased Accountability
Scheduling tools help promote transparency when optimized schedules are generated automatically without human interference. This software also promotes accountability by letting the staff choose their shifts when the manager, of course, allows them.
The cost of scheduling software
Almost all scheduling software offers free trials so you can test their app and see if it’s a good fit. These trials are typically limited to basic scheduling, sharing, and access to mobile applications.
However, the paid plans depend on their pricing model. Most software offers monthly subscriptions for $1 to $4 per user. Others offer feature-based plans that average from $1 to $95/month or even more.
Conclusion
That was our rundown of the ten best scheduling software to buy in 2022. Choosing the right tools can make your life easier, and we have made the whole process easier by picking the best scheduling tools for you. So, you can’t go wrong with any of our picks above.
FAQs
What are the things to consider before choosing the right scheduling software for my company?
Here are a few pointers that you should keep in mind when you go about choosing the right scheduling software:
- Your company size
- Your industry
- Your budget
What are some important staff scheduling integrations?
Integration makes it easier for people to be efficient while remaining in the loop. Almost all the scheduling apps integrate with a bunch of popular tools.
Here are some of them:
- Video Calls: Zoom, Google Meets
- Calendars: Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar
- CRM: Salesforce, Hubspot
- Team Collaboration: Microsoft Teams, Slack
Why do I need a staff scheduling solution?
You need a scheduling solution because they are time-saving, effective, and boost productivity in your business. They also make day-to-day scheduling tasks automated to focus on your more important tasks.
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