Calendly vs Setmore vs SimplyBook.me vs Acuity vs Lunacal: Which Scheduling Tool Fits Your Business?

Calendly, Setmore, SimplyBook.me, Acuity Scheduling and Lunacal turn up on the same shortlist constantly, and they are not really the same kind of product. Grand View Research valued the global scheduling apps market at USD 663.1 million in 2025, heading for USD 1,813.1 million by 2033 at a 13.46% compound rate, which is why five tools that all “let people book a time” have drifted into five different jobs. I ran the same business through all five — a paid consultation, a six-session package, a two-person team and an international client — and the gap between them showed up fast. Here is which one fits which situation.

How do Calendly, Setmore, SimplyBook.me, Acuity and Lunacal differ?

The five scheduling tools compared at a glance

Tool	Really Built For	Cheapest Paid Plan	Biggest Limitation
Calendly	Booking meetings and calls	$10/seat/month	No packages or memberships
Acuity Scheduling	Solo service appointments	$16/month annually	Bookable calendars capped
SimplyBook.me	Multi-service, multi-language businesses	€11.90/month annually	Monthly booking caps
Setmore	Small teams, minimal budget	$5/user/month annually	Thin beyond basic booking
Lunacal	Branded, content-rich booking	$9/user/month	No point of sale

Where each booking system wins and loses

Capability	Calendly	Acuity Scheduling	SimplyBook.me	Setmore	Lunacal
Booking page control	Colours and logo only; styling stays thin on paid plans	Colours out of the box; real changes need custom CSS	Multi-page booking site with service categories and provider profiles	Basic hosted page; Setmore branding until Pro	Full content control with FAQs, testimonials, video and custom domain
Packages and memberships	None natively	Packages, memberships with automated billing and gift certificates from Standard	Memberships, packages and gift cards as enableable modules	None natively	Multi-session packages and subscriptions from the Teams plan
Payments	Stripe and PayPal; limited invitee currencies	Stripe, Square or PayPal at booking	Deposits and payments as paid modules	Stripe, Square or PayPal deposits on Pro only	Stripe and PayPal, pay-before-confirm, 0% platform commission
Reminders	Paid plans only; nothing on free	Email on every plan; SMS from Standard	Depends which modules you enable	One email reminder free; SMS on Pro	Email and SMS on every plan, plus multi-step workflows
Team scheduling	Round robin and routing on Teams at $16/seat	Up to 6 calendars on Standard, 36 on Professional	5 providers on Basic, 15 on Standard, 30 on Premium	4 users free, unlimited on Pro	Round robin, collective, routing forms and multi-location from Teams
The limit that bites first	Per-seat cost once a whole team needs routing	Bookable calendar count, not features	50 to 2,000 bookings per month by plan	No packages, no client portal, no shared-capacity slots	No POS, retail or consumer marketplace

References: Calendly pricing · Acuity Scheduling plans · SimplyBook.me pricing · Setmore pricing · Lunacal G2 reviews

Calendly, Acuity, SimplyBook.me, Setmore and Lunacal reviewed in depth

Calendly

Calendly is the reference point everyone else gets compared against, and it earns that position by doing one job extremely well: getting a meeting into two calendars with no back-and-forth.

Who is Calendly best for?

Consultants, recruiters, agencies and sales teams whose product is their time. If what a client books is an hour of conversation and pays by invoice afterwards, Calendly is the least friction of the five and your invitees already know how it works.

When is Calendly a poor fit?

The moment a client buys something rather than books something. There are no packages, no memberships, no client portal and no service menu, so anyone selling a block of six sessions ends up tracking balances in a spreadsheet alongside the tool.

The homepage makes no attempt to be anything else — create a link, share it, let people pick a slot. Here is that page.

Features

Availability rules

This is where Calendly still beats the other four. Working hours, buffers, minimum notice and daily meeting caps combine into genuinely fine control over how much of your week is bookable. I set a three-consultations-a-day ceiling with a 15-minute buffer and it held through every edge case I threw at it, including same-day reschedules.

Routing forms

A short form sends a visitor to a different event type and a different owner based on their answers. Acuity has nothing equivalent, and Lunacal’s routing forms are the only comparable feature in this group. The catch is the price: routing sits on the $16 per seat Teams plan, so a ten-person team pays for ten seats even when two people need it.

Reminders

There are none on the free plan, which is the single most expensive thing about free Calendly. A Trustpilot reviewer described forms and reminders cutting out missed steps once they were switched on; that feedback is below. Setmore gives you one email reminder for nothing, and Lunacal includes email and SMS on its entry plan, so this is a real gap rather than a technicality.

Calendar sync

Google sync was flawless in testing. Microsoft 365 was less so — Trustpilot feedback points to Outlook sync going flaky when Calendly is connected to certain Microsoft accounts, and the screenshot below captures that. Acuity’s sync was the steadiest of the five across Google, Outlook and Apple.

Page styling

Branding control barely improves as you move up the tiers. If the booking page needs to persuade as well as schedule — showing what a session includes, who you have worked with, what it costs — this is the clearest reason people leave Calendly for SimplyBook.me or Lunacal.

Pros

• Invitees recognise the interface immediately, which removes any explaining from the booking flow.
• Availability controls are the most precise of the five, protecting your calendar better than any competitor here.
• Routing and round robin handle team lead assignment properly rather than as a bolt-on.
• The integration library is the widest in this group, which matters when bookings must reach a CRM.

Cons

• No packages, memberships or client portal, so repeat-client commerce lives outside the tool.
• No reminders at all on the free plan, which quietly costs appointments.
• Per-seat pricing punishes teams where only a few people need the team features.
• Booking page styling stays thin even on paid tiers.

Pricing

Free

• $0 permanently: one event type, one calendar connection, one-on-one scheduling only.

Standard

• $10 per seat, per month; yearly billing saves 17%.
• Unlimited event types, multiple calendars, automations and reminders, Stripe and PayPal payments.

Teams

• $16 per seat, per month; yearly billing saves 20%.
• Round robin, lead routing, centrally managed event types, advanced admin controls.

Enterprise

• From $15,000 per year, billed yearly, minimum 50 seats: Salesforce routing, SSO and SAML, dedicated account support.

The grid is worth reading closely because routing, teams and admin controls all cluster on the same upgrade, which is what makes Calendly expensive at team scale rather than solo.

Pricing checked on 6 September 2026 against Calendly pricing.

Acuity Scheduling

Acuity, sold by Squarespace, is the one built for appointments rather than meetings. Intake forms, paid bookings, packages and automated membership billing are all native, which puts it a category above Calendly and Setmore for service businesses.

When should you choose Acuity Scheduling?

Choose it if you are a solo or small-team provider — a therapist, tutor, photographer, coach — who already sells packages or memberships and wants the billing handled without a second system. If your site runs on Squarespace, the embed is the easiest of the five.

Who should avoid Acuity Scheduling?

Teams that will outgrow 36 bookable calendars, businesses that need phone support, and anyone who wants a distinctive booking page without writing CSS. The calendar caps force upgrades that have nothing to do with the features you actually use.

The product page leads with shareable scheduling links that carry rules and payments, which is a fair description of where it sits between Calendly and a full booking system. Here it is.

Features

Packages and memberships

This is Acuity’s strongest card and it arrives on the $27 Standard plan. Memberships bill automatically on a schedule you set, packages deduct as clients book, and a five-session package deducted correctly through every reschedule I tried. Only SimplyBook.me and Lunacal match this among the five, and Calendly and Setmore have nothing.

Intake forms

Forms attach per appointment type, so a first consultation can ask twelve questions and a follow-up none. The risk is overdoing it — a Reddit complaint about Acuity is less about scheduling and more about long intake forms making clients drop out mid-booking. That discussion is below, and it is a fair warning for anyone tempted to collect everything upfront.

Payments at booking

Stripe, Square and PayPal all connect, and requiring payment before confirmation is the most reliable no-show control any of these five offers. The MGMA Stat poll published on 8 January 2025, covering 622 medical group leaders, found practices charging a no-show fee reported more improvement in no-show rates during 2024 (25%) than practices without one (16%). A Trustpilot reviewer named calendar sync, intake and payments as the three reasons they stayed; that review appears below.

Calendar sync

Two-way sync with Google, Outlook, Apple and Exchange was the most dependable of the five across a fortnight of deliberate double-booking attempts. Where Calendly wobbled on Microsoft 365 and Setmore has no two-way sync at all on free, Acuity simply worked.

Client access

Clients reschedule and cancel from the confirmation email, which removed most admin messages. Managing who can see what is more manual than it should be, though — reviewers argue Acuity’s client access controls take too much hand-management for a growing list. That feedback is shown below.

Pros

• Automated membership billing and session-deducting packages at the mid tier, which Calendly and Setmore cannot do at any price.
• The steadiest calendar sync of the five, across all four major calendar providers.
• Per-appointment-type intake forms give new and returning clients different question sets automatically.
• Embeds into a Squarespace site with almost no setup work.

Cons

• Bookable calendars are capped at 1, 6 and 36 by plan, so growth forces upgrades unrelated to features.
• Support is email and chat only — no phone line when bookings break mid-day.
• Meaningful design changes require custom CSS, putting a branded page out of reach for non-technical owners.
• Client access controls need more manual management than the client list justifies.

Pricing

Starter

• $16 per month billed annually, or about $20 billed monthly.
• 1 bookable calendar, unlimited services and appointments, payment collection, confirmation and reminder emails.

Standard

• $27 per month billed annually, or about $34 billed monthly.
• Up to 6 bookable calendars, global text reminders, packages, memberships with automated billing, gift certificates.

Professional

• $49 per month billed annually, or about $61 billed monthly.
• Up to 36 bookable calendars, branding removal, HIPAA BAA, multiple time zones, custom API and CSS access.

There is no free plan, only a 7-day trial. The table below is the fastest way to see the exact tier where text reminders and packages unlock.

Pricing checked on 6 September 2026 against Acuity Scheduling plans.

SimplyBook.me

SimplyBook.me is the only one of the five that gives you a genuine multi-page booking website rather than a booking page, and the only one that sells capability as switchable modules instead of fixed tiers.

Which teams benefit most from SimplyBook.me?

Multi-service businesses booking across languages and currencies — clinics, driving schools, tour operators, salons outside the US. If customers need to browse fifteen services and pick a provider, this handles it better than the other four.

Where does SimplyBook.me fall short?

Volume. Plans cap at 50, 100, 500 and 2,000 bookings a month, and hitting the ceiling stops bookings rather than simply costing more. None of Calendly, Acuity, Setmore or Lunacal caps you this way.

The product page leads with round-the-clock self-service booking for service businesses, which is an accurate summary of the job it does. Here is that view.

Features

Custom feature modules

Memberships, packages, gift cards, deposits, intake forms, approvals and coupons are each a module you switch on. Basic allows 3, Standard 8, Premium unlimited. It is honestly flexible, and it also means I spent more time deciding which eight features mattered than configuring them — a planning cost the fixed-tier products do not impose.

Booking website

Service categories, provider profiles and a class timetable across several pages beat a dropdown menu once you pass about ten services. Acuity and Calendly both make you scroll one list; this does not. The admin view behind it is shown below.

International handling

Languages, currencies and time zones are handled better than in Calendly or Setmore, and HIPAA and SAML SSO arrive at the Standard tier rather than an enterprise plan. That matters more than the feature list suggests: Fortune Business Insights, in a report last updated 17 August 2026, put North America at 34.10% of the appointment scheduling software market in 2025, and much of the rest is served poorly by tools that assume a US phone number and a dollar price.

Setup and support

The onboarding wizard is good and support replied quickly during testing. A Trustpilot reviewer said the same — easy to use, responsive support, and that feedback is below. The admin interface itself is the most dated of the five and takes longer to learn than its feature depth implies.

Membership billing rules

Memberships work but the billing cycle is not fully configurable. A Reddit reviewer pointed out it cannot enforce strict first-of-month billing, a constraint that also comes up in G2 feedback on its billing options. Acuity’s automated membership billing is the more predictable of the two. That discussion is captured below.

Pros

• A real multi-page booking site, which none of the other four provides.
• Modular pricing means a simple business is not paying for membership and intake machinery it never enables.
• Language, currency and time-zone support is the strongest here alongside Lunacal.
• HIPAA and SAML SSO at €24.90 a month make regulated bookings viable without an enterprise contract.

Cons

• Monthly booking caps constrain busy businesses regardless of which features they use.
• Module counts on Basic and Standard force trade-offs between capabilities you may both need.
• The admin interface is the most dated of the five and the learning curve is longest.
• Membership billing cannot be pinned to a fixed calendar date.

Pricing

Free

• €0 per month: 50 bookings, 1 custom feature, 1 provider.

Basic

• €11.90 per month billed annually, €13.90 monthly: 100 bookings, 3 custom features, 5 providers.

Standard

• €24.90 per month billed annually, €29.90 monthly: 500 bookings, 8 custom features, 15 providers, branded client app, HIPAA, SAML SSO.

Premium

• €49.90 per month billed annually, €59.90 monthly: 2,000 bookings, unlimited custom features, 30 providers, Payments PRO, accounting integrations, white-labelled footer.

Enterprise

• Custom pricing: multi-location access, dedicated account manager, full white label, data location selection.

Match your monthly booking volume to a tier before comparing features, because that ceiling picks the plan more often than the feature list does.

Pricing checked on 6 September 2026 against SimplyBook.me pricing.

Setmore

Setmore is the cheapest credible option of the five and the fastest to set up. A four-user free plan with unlimited appointments covers more ground than you would expect before anything is paid for.

What does Setmore suit best?

Small teams that need bookings taken reliably without a management platform behind them — tutors, mobile trades, two-chair barbershops, a new clinic. I had a live page taking bookings in under twenty minutes, faster than any of the other four.

Who needs an alternative to Setmore?

Anyone selling packages, running memberships, or booking small-group sessions where two people share one slot. It books individuals into individual slots very well and stops there.

The homepage is honest about the offer: free scheduling, mobile apps, round-the-clock booking, reminders and payments. Here is that page.

Features

Free plan reach

Four users, unlimited appointments and a public booking page for nothing. Calendly’s free plan gives you one event type and no reminders; Setmore gives you a working small-team booking system. The constraints are email-only reminders, no two-way calendar sync and Setmore branding on the page.

Two-way calendar sync

This is the upgrade that matters most and it sits on Pro. Without it a personal-calendar commitment will not block a public slot — I created that exact collision in testing and it booked straight over the top. A reviewer made the same point about two-way sync on Pro keeping double bookings down; the screenshot is below. Acuity and Lunacal both include two-way sync from their entry plans.

Deposits and payments

Deposits need Pro at $5 per user per month on annual billing, which is the cheapest route to prepayment in this group. Stripe, Square and PayPal all connect, so unlike some competitors you keep your existing processor.

Support experience

Support is genuinely good when you reach it, and one reviewer recommends booking the onboarding video call to find features you would otherwise miss. Follow-ups are less consistent — Trustpilot feedback describes support follow-ups stalling once an issue drags on. Both screenshots appear below, in that order.

Automated emails

Confirmation emails cannot be meaningfully customised, which is a real gap against Lunacal’s custom SMTP and Acuity’s editable templates. Several users end up sending a separate manual email to explain their process, which defeats part of the point.

Pros

• Four free users with unlimited appointments — by far the most generous free plan of the five.
• $5 per user per month is the cheapest paid route to SMS reminders, deposits and branding removal here.
• You keep your own payment processor rather than being tied to a vendor’s.
• Setup is fast enough to switch on online booking the same morning.

Cons

• No two-way calendar sync on free, so double bookings are a live risk until you upgrade.
• No native packages, memberships or client portal.
• Confirmation emails cannot be meaningfully customised.
• Shared-capacity slots for small-group sessions need manual workarounds.

Pricing

Free

• $0 per user, per month, up to 4 users.
• Unlimited appointments, one email reminder, Setmore branding, no SMS, no deposits, no two-way sync, no API.

Pro

• $5 per user, per month billed annually, or $12 billed monthly, with unlimited users.
• SMS reminders, deposits, two-way calendar sync, branding removal, Google review requests, API access, priority support.

Live Receptionist

• $99 per month add-on for Free or Pro, US only, putting a human on your phone line to take bookings.

Enterprise

• Custom pricing; contact sales.

Free versus Pro is the whole decision here, and two-way sync sits on the paid side of that line.

Pricing checked on 6 September 2026 against Setmore pricing.

Lunacal

Lunacal takes the opposite position to Calendly: instead of stripping the booking page back to a slot picker, it treats the page as the place where the customer decides, then puts payments, packages and workflows behind it.

Is Lunacal right for your business?

It is if customers reach you through your own site and marketing, and need to understand what they are booking before they pick a time — consultants, coaches, clinics, agencies and small studios selling repeat work.

When should you skip Lunacal?

Skip it if you need a point of sale, retail inventory or payroll behind the front desk, or if you want a consumer marketplace sending you discovery bookings. It does the booking relationship, not the shop floor.

The homepage puts the page builder front and centre rather than the calendar, which is the clearest statement of how it differs from the other four. Here it is.

Features

Booking page content

Content blocks sit beside the calendar — services, prices, FAQs, testimonials, images, video — so someone choosing between a 30-minute intro and a 90-minute session can actually read the difference. This is the single biggest divergence from Calendly, where the same decision happens in an email thread beforehand. The layout is shown below.

Paid events and packages

Charging for a meeting means connecting Stripe or PayPal and setting a price on the event; multi-session packages arrive on the Teams plan at $15 per user. A client buys six sessions once and books them across weeks with the balance visible to both sides. A G2 reviewer picked out the split between paid and free event types as the thing that made the booking flow work for them — that review is below — and it is the trade against Calendly’s $10 Standard plan, which has no packages at any price.

Time zones and languages

Availability shows in the customer’s local time automatically and the booking flow supports 13+ languages. A G2 reviewer put the benefit in practical terms — fewer time-check messages because slots display correctly in local time. That is the same problem SimplyBook.me solves well and Calendly and Setmore solve less reliably. The review is below.

Team scheduling and routing

Round robin, collective scheduling and routing forms come in on the Teams plan, and setting up a multi-instructor flow took three steps. Calendly charges $16 per seat for the equivalent; Acuity has no routing at all. The setup screen is below.

Custom domain and email

Bookings can run on your own domain, and confirmations and reminders can be sent through your own SMTP. Setmore cannot customise its emails at all and Calendly keeps you on its URL, so this is the widest gap in the group for anyone whose brand does the selling. An AppSumo review noted quick help setting up custom domains across multiple accounts, which is the step most likely to need support. Availability depends on plan, so confirm it before you build a URL into your marketing.

Reminders and workflows

Email and SMS reminders are on every plan — not the paid tier, as with Calendly — and can be chained into multi-step sequences covering pre-session intake, a day-before nudge and a post-session follow-up. This is where the category is heading generally: Salesforce’s seventh State of Service report, based on 6,500 service professionals, expects AI to resolve 50% of service cases by 2027, up from 30% in 2025.

Pros

• The booking page answers customer questions in place, which cuts the enquiry thread a bare slot picker creates.
• Reminders on every plan, where Calendly gates them behind the first paid tier.
• Packages and round robin at $15 per user undercut Calendly’s $16 seat for team features that do less.
• Custom domain and custom SMTP keep the whole booking journey on your own name.
• 0% platform commission, so growing booking volume does not increase what the scheduler takes.

Cons

• No point of sale, inventory or payroll, so retail-heavy businesses need a second system.
• No consumer marketplace, so it generates no discovery bookings on its own.
• Routing and approval logic take real setup time once intake questions branch.
• Custom domain availability depends on plan, so confirm before committing to a URL.
• A smaller ecosystem than Calendly’s, with fewer third-party integrations to fall back on.

Pricing

Standard

• $9 per user, per month; annual billing saves 10%.
• Unlimited calendars and services, Stripe and PayPal payments, SMS and email reminders, booking page customisation.

Teams

• $15 per user, per month.
• Team scheduling, multi-session packages, round-robin assignment, webhooks.

Enterprise

• $25 per user, per month.
• AI voice agent, complete branding, account manager, premium support, personalised onboarding.

Every tier includes a 7-day trial. The plan view shows where packages and round robin begin, which is the only real decision most businesses face here.

Pricing checked on 6 September 2026 against Lunacal pricing.

How I tested these five scheduling tools

Each tool ran the same four scenarios so the comparison stayed like for like rather than feature-list against feature-list.

• Connected Google, Outlook and Apple calendars, then created deliberate conflicts to see whether public slots were correctly blocked.
• Built a booking page with three services at different durations and prices, noting what could be changed before any code was needed.
• Sold and scheduled a six-session package where supported, then rescheduled twice to check the remaining balance stayed correct.
• Took a deposit through the connected processor and triggered a late cancellation to see how fees were handled.
• Booked as an international client in a different time zone, on mobile, and timed the flow to confirmation.
• Set up a two-person team with round robin or shared calendars and measured how long the configuration took.
• Priced each tool for a solo provider and a five-person team, including add-ons, to find where the real cost lands.

Questions people ask when comparing these five

Which of these is the cheapest?

Setmore Pro at $5 per user per month on annual billing is the lowest paid price, and its free plan covers four users. Lunacal starts at $9 per user, Calendly at $10 per seat, SimplyBook.me Basic at €11.90 and Acuity at $16 per month annually. The cheapest tool that actually does what you need is a different question — Setmore has no packages, so a coaching business will pay more elsewhere regardless.

Which has the best free plan?

Setmore, comfortably. Four users and unlimited appointments beats Calendly’s single event type with no reminders and SimplyBook.me’s 50 bookings a month with one provider. Acuity has no free plan at all, only a 7-day trial, and Lunacal offers a 7-day trial rather than a free tier.

Which handles packages and memberships?

Acuity Scheduling from its $27 Standard plan, SimplyBook.me as enableable modules, and Lunacal from its $15 Teams plan. Calendly and Setmore have no native packages or memberships, which is usually the deciding factor for anyone selling blocks of sessions rather than single appointments.

Which is best for a team rather than one person?

Calendly and Lunacal are the only two with proper routing forms and round robin. Calendly’s is more mature and better integrated with CRMs; Lunacal’s costs $15 per user against Calendly’s $16 per seat and includes packages in the same tier. Acuity handles teams as bookable calendars capped at 6 or 36, and Setmore gives unlimited users on Pro without routing logic.

Which works best for international clients?

SimplyBook.me and Lunacal. Both display availability in the client’s local time and support multiple booking languages, and SimplyBook.me adds multi-currency handling. Calendly limits the currencies invitees can pay in, which rules it out for some practices before any other consideration.

Can I move my bookings from one of these to another?

Client lists and service definitions generally export and import, but historical bookings, packages with remaining balances and active memberships usually do not carry across. Plan a switch at a natural break — the start of a month, or the end of a membership cycle — and expect to re-enter active packages by hand.

Which one would I choose?

If customers book your time and pay afterwards, Calendly is still the right answer and the availability controls alone justify it. If you sell packages or memberships as a solo provider and your site runs on Squarespace, Acuity at $27 a month is the most direct path. If you have a long service menu and clients in several countries, SimplyBook.me is the only one here with a real booking website — just check the monthly booking cap first. Setmore is the pick when budget is the binding constraint and bookings are simple. And if the booking page has to sell as well as schedule — your brand, your domain, your content, with packages and reminders included rather than gated — Lunacal at $9 to $15 per user is the one I would set up, with the caveat that you will still need something else for a till and a stock room.

Related comparisons on this site: client booking software compared, online booking software for customer self-service, Calendly alternatives, Acuity Scheduling alternatives and scheduling software with packages and payments.