A booking system helps your business manage appointments, appointments enable your clients to book online or call in to book their appointment at their convenience.
Installing the best free booking system for your site is an excellent means of expanding your service or product. Having a sophisticated online appointment scheduler helps tremendously when it comes to growing your company in terms of traffic, visibility, revenue and customer satisfaction. The best free booking system enables your customers in making appointments with you through your site in an easy manner.
Pinpoint Booking System
Usually, the free version of a plugin is significantly different from the premium one. That’s not the case with Pinpoint Booking System. You can find almost all of its amazing features in the free version. Its renowned easy-to-use user interface makes everything simple. From setting up an availability calendar, customizing a booking form, to integrating payment methods, the process won’t wear you down. The key features are:
- AJAX-powered calendar. You don’t need to refresh the page when applying changes. The calendar also supports a multiple-month view and time zone settings.
- WooCommerce integration. If you run an online store or plan to start one, you can easily integrate this plugin with WooCommerce.
- Customizable offers. Creating coupons or vouchers is fairly easy to do.
In addition, it has a wide range of options when it comes to language support, currency preference, and calendar synchronization.
Housecall Pro
Housecall Pro certainly comes close to meeting all the needs of your home service business. HouseCall Pro’s management app is designed specifically with home services in mind—everything from cleaning and plumbing to electrical and HVAC to renovation and repair.
Customizable for any size business, the cloud-based software provides online booking with real-time scheduling for both customers and your team. It also has client messaging and notifications.
Want something even more robust?
The platform accommodates invoicing and payments, estimates, an internal company chat function, and assistance with marketing automation. You may not require the full suite of products immediately, but Housecall Pro provides you peace of mind knowing the functionality is ready when you are.
Pricing includes three tiers based on the number of users & features — $49/month, $109/month, or a MAX plan with advanced features for bigger companies.
Calendly
Calendly is the industry leader in automated scheduling tools that integrate with your online calendar. It allows people to book calls or meetings with you around your other commitments you added to your schedule.
Calendly is smart enough not to double book you when things are already in your calendar, and so it takes a lot of the back-and-forth out of scheduling with your clients. You just have to block off times when you don’t want to be available, and they can fit in around the rest of your schedule.
A bonus of Calendly is that it integrates well with other software such as Zapier and Stripe. It has a Basic version for free and costs just $8 per month if you need a additional features and unlimited event types.
SimplyBook.me
Moving away from platforms designed solely with home services in mind, you’ll find more simple solutions that mainly center around online booking. SimplyBook.me is one of those software providers.
Key features include booking functionality that integrates with Facebook, email and SMS confirmations and reminders, the posting of client reviews, and the acceptance of payments through popular processors like Stripe and PayPal.
SimplyBook.me focuses on marketing and promotion to grow your brand. Promotional features include rewards and referrals, coupons and gift cards, Instagram photo sharing, and the opportunity to sell products or promote service add-ons.
Pricing includes a free plan for up to 50 bookings plus one custom feature; $9.90 per month for 100 bookings plus three custom features; $29.90 per month for 500 bookings plus eight features; and $59.90 per month for 2000 bookings and unlimited custom features. If you pay annually, you will also receive two months free.
Appointy
Appointy may not specifically identify itself as a home service appointment solution, but its flexibility allows any business to use it. It’s good for companies relying heavily on appointment setting and repeat business, like landscaping, cleaning, pest control, pool maintenance, auto detailing, or pet sitting.
There are four service tiers, including a free option with a cap of 100 monthly appointments. Unlimited booking starts at $19.99 per month, and increased services are available at tier 3 for $49.99 per month and tier 4 for $79.99 per month.
Simplicity is Appointy’s major selling point. Along with online appointments, the service includes client notifications and social media and Google calendar integrations.
Don’t have a website
? No problem. Appointy has a sub-domain option where you can create a booking page for your business.
BookSteam
BookSteam is another service that can cater to a number of different business types and needs. The core product includes online appointment setting, SMS and email notifications, and online payment with the ability to keep credit cards on file.
BookSteam’s feature set goes well beyond basic scheduling to include client database and review management, marketing and promotional tools, inventory tracking, and client accounts.
BookSteam does not offer a free option but has a 14-day free trial. Pricing is based on users and runs from $19.95 for one user, $29.95 for 2 to 5 users, $39.95 for 6 to 10 users, and $69.95 per month for 11 to 50 users.
Bookly
This is another fair-play plugin. That means that the free version has premium-like features. As the name suggests, this plugin is perfect for booking. Whether you are doing it from your laptop or your mobile phone, its responsive user interface can switch back and forth seamlessly. Bookly is also known for several other things, which are:
- No excessive data input. The booking process is relatively fast.
- The customizable booking form lets you manage your bookings more effectively. You can classify them into different categories and assign different employees to each category. Searching and sorting your bookings is also possible.
- It supports WPML plugin, so you can translate your user interface and notifications into 40+ different languages.
Considering its highly customizable nature, Bookly is suitable for a wide range of businesses: accommodation services, medical support, and consultancy. You can upgrade to the premium version, which comes with several additional features: payment methods, an unlimited number of staff members, and the flexibility to install more add-ons.
SuperSaaS
The definition of customizable, SuperSaaS accommodates for home service booking needs. Of course, this platform includes the essentials, like real-time booking, automated SMS and email reminders, integration with Facebook, and the ability to accept customer payments. There is even a solution for equipment rental services.
Much like the service, pricing is incredibly flexible, with 11 different packages. There is a basic free version with a cap of 50 appointments. The paid tier starts at $8 per month for 100 appointments and increases to $186 per month for 15,000 bookings.
SuperSaaS provides a high comfort level for its users. Everything from your schedule, booking, and registration are customizable to fit your branding. Plus, you can control your sync settings.
BookedIN
BookedIn is a straightforward, yet feature-rich product. It certainly helps that you have 30 days to test out the software before making a commitment.
Your customers can set appointments from your website (including all major platforms), a promotional email, or social media channels like Facebook and Instagram. Capture as much or as little client data as necessary with custom onboarding forms branded specifically to your business.
Apart from the free option, plan pricing is $24, $39, $54, or $69 per month based on the number of calendars that require management.
Square Appointments
If the name sounds familiar, Square Appointments is the online booking tool of the payment processing giant Square. The same innovation that users love with the payments goes into their scheduling software, which features a free booking website, automated reminders, and, of course, payment integration.
Square Appointments also emphasizes robust prepayment and cancellation fee options to help you guard against no-shows. Pricing is as simple as the solution itself with a free option for single users, a $50 per month tier for 2 to 5 users, and $90 for 6 to 10 users. If you need more users, you can contact their sales team for an enterprise-level package.
YouCanBook.me
YouCanBook.me is an automated scheduling tool that can be set up and working in minutes. It’s extremely similar to Calendly, but works in something of a reverse order – where you tell the software when you’re available and it allows people to book appointments in that time (rather than fitting things in around when you’re already busy).
People who are fans of the software rate this as a “silver bullet feature” as it means you don’t have to block your calendar off to protect your time. Highly customisable emails and texts can be personalised and scheduled to remind the person that they have an appointment with you. This is a great feature as it reduces the number of missed appointments you get and since it handles the reminders for you, it’s something else that you don’t have to think about.
Integrations are available for many of the main software including Stripe and Zapier. There’s a free forever version for small businesses, and once you outgrow that you can get their paid version for just $8 a month. YouCanBook.me supports a massive range of languages so if you work with personal training clients online, and you need a range of diverse languages supported, this could be worth exploring in more detail.
Acuity Scheduling
Acuity Scheduling allows your personal training clients to view your real-time availability, select the date and time that works best for them, pay in advance via Square, Stripe, or Paypal, and even cancel or reschedule all on their own.
The features include the option to sell fixed-term or a fixed number of sessions as a package. You can set up a basic printable gift certificate which could be a brilliant feature for a personal trainer who wanted to incentivise buying on behalf of someone else or had a robust referral system in place.
You can also schedule and provide a way for people to sign up for a one-off workshop which could be a fantastic way to generate leads in your personal training business if you had a particular skill that you wanted to offer.
The scheduling options are very similar to the other software options in this top 5, but the language support is limited to English. Users consider it highly intuitive and highly customisable if a little bit more expensive to use than comparable platforms.
Doodle
Doodle is a great app for personal trainers that offer small group sessions and need scheduling software that can find time to train for multiple people.
Users of doodle appreciate the easy to use interface that allows scheduling among teams. There’s a website and an app available, with fantastic online support. However, some people report that the mobile version can be difficult to navigate with a lot of clunky scrolling.
If used in connection with the team scheduling feature, the volume of emails generated for the person who is trying to schedule the meeting is substantial and may be offputting for some people. The pro version of doodle is available at just $6 a month.
Conclusion
This articlehas provided you with a list of best free booking system that can be used on websites.