The 7 best free appointment scheduling apps in 2024

• Buffer time: This feature allows you to add a break between appointments to rest or prepare for the next meeting. This time isn't shown to the customer. Appointy doesn't have buffer time as a feature. You’ll need to make your customer slots larger to accommodate your buffer time. Then, you’ll have to choose another setting to hide he slot duration from the customer. It's not straightforward, but you can do it. In other apps, you can add buffer time without making it part of the appointment slot duration.
• Last minute booking window: This lets you set a time window between the appointment date and the booking date where customers can't book your services. This will help you avoid last-minute hassles and be fully prepared for the appointment. All apps have included this feature in their free plans, due to the importance of this functionality.
• Cancellation window: This allows you to limit the time window during which customers can cancel their appointment. This helps to prevent last-minute cancellations, which cost you time and money. This feature is present in all apps.
• Add time-off: You can mark a day off or a vacation on your schedule with the time-off feature.
• Automatic time zone conversion: This lets you show your availability and booking page to customers in the local time zone. This is another fundamental feature, and except for Picktime, it’s included in free plans of all the other apps.
• Embed a booking page on your website: All apps allow you to embed your booking page on your website. This provides a seamless booking experience to your customers.
• Add custom fields to the booking form: Except for Appointy and Picktime, all of the other apps allow you to add custom fields to your intake form. With custom fields, you can ask customers specific questions to qualify and prepare for your appointments.

All apps stand fairly equal in terms of features that add convenience. Picktime and Appointy miss out on one or two, but they have workarounds available. Whereas Simplybook.me has two features under their custom feature section; with the free plan, you can only opt for one of those features.

Each app has placed a limit on one or more features. Zoho Bookings offers everything unlimited, except for the number of users, event types, and calendar connections.

Calendly has more restrictions. The calendar connections and the event types are limited to one each. This makes it difficult for people who use multiple calendars—as most people do—to keep personal and professional appointments separate. Perhaps you want to have separate calendars for the different services you offer. In Calendly's free plan, you can only sync one external calendar, which doesn’t include any calendars shared with it.

SimplyBook.me doesn’t have restrictions only on the event types that you can create. They allow up to five staff/users. However, they've capped the maximum bookings to 50. For anyone taking 10 appointments a day, this will be depleted in five days including the 50 reminders that’s included with the free plan.

Picktime allows unlimited bookings and event types in its free plan. It sets a restriction by allowing only three users and one calendar connection per user. Email reminders cannot be sent in the free plan.

Setmore offers unlimited bookings, up to four staff, one calendar connection, and unlimited event types. However, they have an unusual limit on reminders. That's an indirect way of limiting the maximum bookings to 100 or less. Any bookings made without reminders are mostly no-shows.

Appointy limits bookings and reminders to 100, staff to one, and event types to five. When compared to the other five apps, there are more limits in Appointy.

Square Appointments doesn’t have any limit on services, appointments, or staff. They charge only for the number of locations. However, they don't have calendar sync or email reminders.