Two excellent schedulers. Neither runs your whole business.
$33/mo
Service providers who need intake forms, packages, and payment collection
$12/mo
People who need simple meeting scheduling with clean UX
$279 once
Service businesses who need scheduling + CRM + jobs + invoicing in one
Acuity Scheduling ($33/mo) and Calendly ($12/mo) are both established tools with real user bases, and for most people the honest answer is that either will do the job — the difference shows up in fit, not quality. Over three years the running totals are roughly $1,331 for Acuity Scheduling and $484 for Calendly, because subscription pricing compounds. Read the section below on which one suits your work; the cost table further down shows where the bill actually differs.
| Feature | Acuity Scheduling | Calendly | Nexa |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $20–$61/mo (typically $33) | $0–$33/mo (typically $12) | $279 once |
| Scheduling | Excellent with forms and packages | Excellent with clean UX | Good with full operations context |
| Crm | Basic client list | No | Full CRM |
| Job management | No | No | Yes |
| Invoicing | Basic with Square | No | Full invoicing |
If you are choosing between these two, this is the part that matters. Both are established products and neither is a mistake — the question is which fits how you actually work. We have left ourselves out of this section entirely.
Headline prices rarely survive contact with a real invoice. These are the parts of the bill that move: where the ladder starts and ends, what an extra seat adds, and what comes off the top of money you take through the tool. A dash means we do not have that figure recorded — not that the fee is zero.
| Acuity Scheduling | Calendly | |
|---|---|---|
| How it is priced | Monthly subscription | Monthly subscription |
| Entry price | $20/mo | $0/mo |
| Top published tier | $61/mo | $33/mo |
| Plan people typically land on | $33/mo | $12/mo |
| Per extra user | $0 (calendar limits per tier) | $12/mo per seat (Standard) |
| Payment processing | none (use your own processor) | none (Stripe/PayPal fees for paid events) |
| Free tier | No | Yes, but reduced over time |
| Three-year total | $1,188 | $432 |
| Five-year total, with increases | $2,540 | $924 |
Both of these are real products that a lot of businesses run on happily. If a comparison page only tells you what is wrong with the tools it is comparing, it is selling you something. Here is the honest case for each.
Acuity Scheduling charges more ($33/mo against $12/mo) and tends to offer more depth for its target market. Calendly at $12/mo is the accessible option, though it still reaches $144/year. Recurring pricing compounds, so the multi-year figure is the one that decides it.
There is a third shape to consider, and we should say plainly that it is ours: Nexa is a one-time purchase at $279 covering scheduling, invoicing, CRM, time tracking and job management. It suits people who want to stop paying monthly and can do without staffed support and a large integration ecosystem. If those matter to you, one of the two tools above is the better answer, and we would rather you bought the right thing.
Acuity and Calendly are great at scheduling. But service businesses need more: CRM, job tracking, invoicing. Nexa does all of it for $279 once.
For reference, since we are one of the three options named on this page: Nexa is $279 once, with no monthly fee and no per-seat charge. Whether that beats a subscription depends entirely on how long you would keep paying one.
This section is deliberately one-sided: it collects what operators complain about, which is only useful once you have read what each tool does well above. These are opinions from our own research notes — 125 assessments across 9 business categories — not audited findings or review-site ratings. We show the trade beside each one because most of these are conditional: a complaint about progress billing is decisive for an iron worker and irrelevant to a hair stylist. Where a complaint cites a price, it is the price that operator was quoted at the time.
No herb-passthrough billing or panchakarma multi-session protocol.
No body-double session-type. Generic appointment block only.
No project lifecycle — you can book the consult but not run the actual 18-month planning arc.
No partner-matching or package-tracking. You're tracking leads vs follows by hand on a notepad.
Scheduling for consultations only. No intake form management, no project tracking, no invoicing.
No multi-visit-per-day workflow per client.
No supervising-vet linkage or species-specific intake.
Built for one-on-one appointments, not group class registration with supply fees and enrollment tracking.
Just scheduling — no skin notes, no product tracking, no intake forms. Need three apps to run one facial studio.
Even more basic than Acuity. Can't manage packages, can't take payments properly, can't track anything a trainer needs.
No no-show rebooking automation for the population that no-shows the most.
$144/seat to book ballroom lessons. Seat-based pricing is for sales teams, not dance studios.
12 client check-ins/month doesn't justify paid scheduling.
$12/month for annual recall scheduling on a customer list of 200 is dumb math.
No rating-level tagging or game-analysis attachment.
No equipment-rental passthrough or seasonal pricing.
$12/month just for scheduling. Doesn't do CRM, doesn't do invoicing, doesn't handle compliance notes.
A 6-week class series isn't a "booking." Wrong unit of work.
Assessments are recorded per trade, so the same tool reads differently depending on the work — a complaint about progress billing matters to an iron worker and not to a hair stylist. 16 trades are represented above; we add more as we record them.
Comparing "$X per month forever" against "$279 once" is not a fair fight unless we say what the monthly fee is buying. It buys real things:
Where we think the trade goes the other way: those benefits are priced as rent, they compound every year you keep paying, and you stop having them the month you stop. Which side of that is worth more depends on your business, not on our opinion — run the numbers below on your own tool list rather than taking ours.
30-day money-back guarantee. Replaces both subscriptions.
Pricing verified March 2026.