Zedule vs Acuity Scheduling | Honest comparison
Acuity Scheduling and Zedule are both horizontal booking platforms — they handle services, staff, customer-facing booking pages, reminders. Acuity is the polished feature-deep option owned by Squarespace; Zedule is the lean alternative at a fraction of the cost. The choice comes down to which features you actually use vs which ones you'd rather not pay for.
Updated May 5, 2026
Acuity Scheduling (rebranded “Squarespace Scheduling” after the 2019 acquisition) is the polished, feature-deep horizontal booking platform. They’ve been at it for over a decade, and you can feel the maturity in the product.
Zedule is the lean alternative — fewer features, much cheaper, better branding control on the customer-facing page. This page covers when each makes sense.
How they differ
Acuity is a complete booking + intake + payment platform. Customer books → fills out intake form → pays → receives confirmation with a meeting link → gets reminders → can reschedule via a portal. Each piece works well; the integration between them is tight.
Zedule is a booking platform with bring-your-own messaging. The booking flow itself is fast and modern; messaging runs on your own provider keys (Resend, Twilio, etc.). Stripe payment, intake forms, and class check-in are not yet shipped.
If your business needs everything Acuity does end-to-end, Acuity is the right call. If you want a clean booking layer at a fraction of the cost and you’re fine running invoicing/intake on lighter tools, Zedule fits.
Side-by-side
| Zedule | Acuity Scheduling | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $100/yr flat | $20-61/mo ($240-732/yr) |
| Trial | 45 days, no card | 7 days, no card |
| Customer-facing booking page | Custom hex, full embed | Polished, less customisable on Emerging tier |
| Multi-staff scheduling | Yes | Yes (Growing tier) |
| Class scheduling with check-in | No (V2) | Yes |
| Intake forms with structured fields | No (notes field only) | Yes |
| Stripe / Square payment at booking | No (V2) | Yes |
| Gift certificate sales | No | Yes |
| Recurring appointment logic | V2 | Yes |
| Native Zoom / Google Meet | Email link only | Yes (auto-generated) |
| Calendar sync | V2 (ICS feed in V1) | Yes (Google + Outlook + iCloud) |
| BYO email/SMS provider | Yes | No |
| Branded customer emails (your domain) | Yes | Limited |
| Squarespace native embed | iframe (works) | Native widget |
| Setup time | ~30 min | ~1-2 hours |
| API | None public | Yes |
Where Acuity wins
- Stripe / Square payment at booking. Critical for any service where you charge upfront — coaches, consultants, paid classes, service businesses with deposits. Acuity ships this; we don’t yet.
- Intake forms with structured fields. Custom fields, file uploads, conditional logic. Useful for healthcare-adjacent businesses, coaching practices, anyone needing structured pre-call information. We have a free-text notes field; that’s it in V1.
- Class scheduling with check-in. Acuity handles classes, attendees, check-in flows. Closer to Mindbody than Calendly. We don’t try to do classes.
- Recurring appointments. A weekly piano lesson, a monthly consult, a quarterly review — all handled natively. Ours is V2.
- Squarespace native embed. If your website is on Squarespace, Acuity embeds tighter than a generic iframe.
- Gift certificates. Sell them, redeem them, track them. Useful for spas and salons during holidays.
Where Zedule wins
- Pricing. Even at the cheapest Acuity tier, you’re paying $240 per year vs our $100. At the Powerhouse tier it’s $732 — over 7× more. For a small business doing 100-300 bookings/month, that gap funds a lot of other things.
- BYO messaging providers. Customers see confirmations from your domain, sent through your own Resend or Twilio account. Acuity sends through their infrastructure. The deliverability argument matters: a confirmation email from your real domain with proper SPF/DKIM lands in the inbox; one from a vendor domain often doesn’t.
- Custom hex branding on day one. Acuity’s deeper branding is on the higher tiers. Ours ships on the trial.
- Per-tenant data isolation. Each business is its own Cloudflare D1 database. A bad query or migration on someone else’s tenant can’t affect yours. Acuity is shared multi-tenant.
- Flat pricing predictability. No tier upgrades, no per-staff fees, no per-booking fees, no add-on modules.
- Editable templates with
[tokens]. Each of the six lifecycle messages is fully editable from the dashboard with preview-time substitution. Acuity has template editing too, but it’s tier-gated.
Which one to pick
Pick Acuity if:
- You need Stripe/Square payment at booking (today, not V2).
- Intake forms with structured fields are core to your workflow.
- You sell classes with attendee check-in.
- You sell gift certificates.
- Your website is on Squarespace and the native embed matters.
- You’re at a price tier where the Acuity feature breadth pays for itself.
Pick Zedule if:
- You want flat pricing — $100/year, no tier upgrades.
- Branding control on the customer-facing page is important from day one (not a paid-tier feature).
- You’d rather bring your own messaging providers (Resend, Twilio) for deliverability and brand integrity.
- Stripe at booking, intake forms, and class check-in are all things you can live without (or handle on lighter tools).
- You’re a horizontal-platform user who hates feeling like 70% of what you pay for is unused.
Migration
If you’re on Acuity today:
- Export bookings from Acuity (Reports → Export). Past bookings stay in Acuity’s archive; the customer list can be re-imported to Zedule.
- Re-create services with the same names, durations, prices in Zedule. Most accounts have under 20 services; this takes 15 minutes.
- Re-add staff with their working hours.
- Set up messaging providers — bring your existing email provider key (or Resend if you want a clean cutover) + Twilio.
- Update your booking URL wherever Acuity’s was linked. New
URL:
book.zedule.app/your-slug.
Try it
Related reading
Frequently asked questions
- How much does Acuity cost?
- Acuity is $20/month (Emerging), $34/month (Growing), or $61/month (Powerhouse). Zedule is $100/year flat. Even Acuity's cheapest tier is $240/year, so Zedule is 60% cheaper at the entry point and 80% cheaper at the top tier.
- Does Acuity have a free plan?
- No. Acuity has a free trial but no permanent free tier. Zedule's 45-day free trial is comparable; after the trial it's $100/year, no upsell tiers.
- Which one has better branding?
- Acuity's customer-facing booking page is more polished out of the box. Zedule gives you more control over the brand (custom hex, full embed, your domain on emails) but the default page is more minimal. For a business willing to invest 30 minutes in branding, Zedule looks better in the end.
- Does Acuity integrate with Squarespace websites natively?
- Yes — Acuity is owned by Squarespace and embeds natively in Squarespace websites. If you run on Squarespace, Acuity has a small ergonomic edge. Zedule embeds via standard iframe on any platform including Squarespace.
- What does Acuity have that Zedule doesn't?
- Class scheduling with check-in, deeper recurring appointment logic, intake forms with structured fields, gift certificate sales, and Stripe payment at booking. All on the V2 roadmap for Zedule; available today in Acuity's mid-tier.
- What does Zedule have that Acuity doesn't?
- BYO email + SMS providers (you bring your own Resend/Twilio keys), per-tenant data isolation (your business in its own Cloudflare D1 database), and flat pricing ($100/year vs Acuity's $240-732/year).
Ready to try it?
Forty-five days free, no card. Hosted at book.zedule.app/<your-slug>,
embeddable on your own site with one iframe tag.