Square Appointments vs Acuity: which scheduling tool fits your business

A service business, a consultant, a clinic, a coach, a small salon, needs the same three things from a scheduling tool: a booking page a client can use without calling, reminders that cut down no-shows, and a way to take payment at or before the appointment. Square Appointments and Acuity Scheduling both build toward that job, and both plug into a website rather than replacing it.

The two companies price that job differently. Acuity's structure scales around the number of calendars, a proxy for the number of practitioners taking bookings, with a flat published price at each of three steps. Square's structure scales around team size and processing volume instead, with its Free tier aimed squarely at a single provider and its paid tiers unlocking features tied to headcount and marketing needs rather than calendar count.

Which model suits you depends on your business shape. A single practitioner adding one more part-time associate fits Acuity's calendar-based jump cleanly. A shop that already runs its payments through Square, and wants scheduling under the same login, may find Square's team-based tiers a more natural fit even without every dollar figure spelled out in plain text on the page.

Acuity's pricing page (acuityscheduling.com/pricing, accessed 2026-09-26) shows a dollar amount next to each of its three named plans. Starter runs $16 a month on annual billing, or $20 a month billed monthly, and includes a single calendar. Standard runs $27 a month annually, or $34 a month monthly, and expands to as many as 6 calendars. Premium runs $49 a month annually, or $61 a month monthly, and scales up to 36 calendars, a range built for a larger multi-practitioner practice.

All three tiers include unlimited services and appointments and client self-scheduling, along with email reminders. Text reminders and an appointment waitlist are named as Standard and Premium features, not part of Starter. Selling memberships, packages, and gift certificates is also gated to Standard and above. Payment processing on the page names Stripe, Square, PayPal, and Venmo as supported options, and video meeting integrations name Google Meet, Zoom, and GoToMeeting.

Premium adds two features not available below it: custom API and CSS access for developers who want to reshape the booking page, and the ability to remove the Powered by Acuity branding shown on lower tiers.

Square's pricing page (squareup.com/us/en/appointments/pricing, accessed 2026-09-26) names four tiers: Free, Plus, Premium, and Square Pro. As fetched, the page's static content named the tiers and their features clearly but rendered the dollar figures for Plus and Premium through the page's own script rather than in the page text captured, along with per-transaction processing rates. Square Pro is described on the page as a custom pricing tier for businesses processing over $250,000 a year, requiring a conversation with Square's team.

Across every tier, Square names an online booking site with integrations, appointment reminders, and unlimited staff calendars as included features, a broader calendar allowance than Acuity's Starter tier offers at its lowest price point. Plus and Premium add a cancellation policy with no-show fees, multi-staff appointment booking, and a waitlist. Premium adds a future bookings report, service cost tracking, and resource management on top of everything below it.

Because the exact monthly cost for Plus and Premium was not present in the page's static content as fetched, confirm the current number directly on Square's own pricing page before comparing it dollar for dollar against Acuity's published rates.

The biggest gap in this comparison is that Square's own page did not surface a plain dollar figure for its Plus and Premium tiers in the content fetched on 2026-09-26, even though the tier names and included features were clear. Anything you read elsewhere quoting a specific Square Appointments price should be checked against the live page, since only the page itself is the authoritative source.

Acuity's calendar-based pricing has its own limit: a practice larger than 36 calendars, the top of its Premium tier, is not addressed anywhere on the page, so a large multi-location operation should contact Acuity directly rather than assume the model keeps scaling in a straight line.

Neither page, as fetched, detailed what happens to a client's existing booking history if they cancel or downgrade, so confirm data export terms with either company directly before you move an active client list onto one platform or the other.

Choose Acuity when you want a fixed, published monthly number tied clearly to how many practitioners are taking bookings, and you value features like custom API access or removing the platform's own branding once you reach Premium.

Choose Square when your business already processes payments through a Square account and you want scheduling under that same login, your team is small enough to start on the Free tier, or unlimited staff calendars from the entry tier matters more to you than Acuity's per-calendar pricing model.

Before committing to either, pull up both pricing pages side by side and confirm today's exact numbers, especially Square's Plus and Premium rates, since dynamically rendered pricing changes without necessarily showing up in a cached or summarized version of the page.