I Review Squarespace’s Acuity Scheduling Tool for 2025: A Step-by-Step Guide

Like every tool, Acuity Scheduling has its pros and cons which I’ve outlined below:

Who Do I Recommend Acuity Scheduling For?

Acuity Scheduling is an easy addition if you’ve already built your website with Squarespace since the two integrate effortlessly. For this reason, I highly recommend Acuity Scheduling if you’re a small to medium business. It’s a great well-rounded feature, particularly if affordability and ease of use are top priorities for you. And, if you own a medical-based business that needs a platform that’s HIPAA compliant, Acuity Scheduling’s got you covered with its top-end plan.

That said, if you need 24/7 support or are looking to build customer relationships through your bookings, Acuity Scheduling falls short. So, keep this in mind when assessing the scheduling tool for yourself.

Although Acuity Scheduling is affiliated with Squarespace, the two subscriptions are separate, so you’ll need to pay an extra fee to use the scheduling platform in addition to your monthly Squarespace costs. Below are the three different premium plans available:

• Emerging – $16 per month (billed annually)
• Growing – $27 per month (billed annually)
• Powerhouse – $49 per month (billed annually)

For smaller businesses run by one person, the Emerging plan is ideal because it gives you access to all the features you’ll need to take client bookings. However, because it’s the cheapest plan, it does come with some limitations. For example, if being able to send text message reminders or selling memberships is important to you, you’ll need to opt for the Growing plan instead. You’ll also have to go for the mid-tier option if you have more than one member of staff.

For any health-based businesses that need signed BAA (Business Associate Agreement) documentation for HIPAA compliance, you’ll have to choose the Powerhouse plan because this is the only one out of the three that offers this. This is also the case if your business operates across multiple time zones.

Is Acuity Scheduling Good Value for Money?

Acuity Scheduling offers a good number of features for the price you pay, giving you the tools and integrations you need to manage your client bookings. The fact that it works seamlessly alongside Squarespace is a major bonus too.

However, I wouldn’t recommend opting for the Powerhouse plan unless you specifically need HIPAA compliance, international time zones, or access to custom API or CSS for developers. The extra cost won’t give you anything that the cheaper Growing plan can’t.

I’ve tested Acuity Scheduling firsthand, putting it through its paces and building a booking website so I can give you a thorough and fair review of the platform. Below, I’ll take you through every stage of my set-up journey, highlighting the ups and downs of the process so you can decide if Acuity Scheduling is the right scheduling tool for your business.

Step 1: Sign Up and Account Creation

The first step to using Acuity Scheduling is an obvious one – signing up and creating your account. I did this using my Squarespace login which took me directly to the Acuity Scheduling dashboard. The tool outlines three important steps to complete in order to fully set up your scheduling page: create appointments, set availability, and design your scheduling page.

Step 2: Create Appointments

After signing up, I could then enter the details for my first appointment type. This included naming my services, detailing how long the appointments are, and how much they cost. I found this to be a really simple way to populate the app with services without having to leave the main dashboard.

Overall, I was very impressed with how smooth and simple the setup process was. It was complemented nicely by a clean and minimal user interface which then made it very easy to explore everything the app had to offer. If you’re familiar with Squarespace, the Acuity Scheduling interface will feel very familiar. It’s modeled after the same layout, which makes navigation simple.

Step 3: Configure Your Availability

The next suggested step in the setup checklist is to set your booking availability. This means that I didn’t have to go searching for the correct part of the app to do this – instead, I was invited to enter this as soon as I filled out my first appointment type.

I could set the days and times of the week I had available, and I could even add multiple blocks of time for each day.

However, I could easily amend my business hours at any point using the “Availability” tab in the left-hand menu on the main dashboard. This opened a calendar view displaying the standard hours I’d set at the beginning. If I wanted to make a blanket change, I could use the small day-by-day calendar along the top, but I could also make changes to specific days by clicking on the relevant date directly.

If you want to organize your hours on a more granular level, Acuity Scheduling makes this simple. At the bottom of the “Calendars” page within the “Availability” section, I found the option to “Set different hours for certain Appointment Types.” When I clicked this, a popup appeared where I then selected one or more of my services. I then switched tabs at the top of the pop-up to “Set Hours of Availability” – this let me set the exact times I wanted to offer for these specific services.

Within this pop-up, there was also a third tab which let me set calendar scheduling limitations. This meant I could define which actions customers could and could not take for this particular appointment type within a certain timeframe. For example, I was able to stipulate that clients couldn’t cancel this appointment type less than 24 hours in advance.

If some of your Appointments Types are reliant on specific resources being available, you can specify this in the “Resources” area of the “Availability” tab. During my testing, I could add additional resources – such as certain rooms – and select which services these resources applied to.

With the Squarespace Refresh 2024, you can now manage your Acuity Scheduling appointments on the go. This includes being able to drag bookings around your calendar to reschedule, or get in touch with customers from your cellphone.

Overall, I found configuring my business availability to be pretty straightforward. However, I was initially a little confused when setting hours for specific services. This is because when the pop-up appears, you’re first invited to select a service. Rather than automatically being directed to the calendar on the next tab, you need to select it manually instead.

This left me unsure if the changes I made to the calendar were for that specific service or all of them, because there wasn’t any mention on the new tab of the service I’d previously selected. This is only a small gripe, though! Generally, I found the process to be very easy.

Jordan Glover Writer

Step 4: Customize Branding and Communication

The final step in Acuity’s setup checklist is to design your scheduling page. Although your scheduling page might technically be a separate app to your main website, it still needs to reflect your brand to provide a consistent user journey. This is where customization comes in.

I found that there wasn’t a whole lot of modification available when editing my test scheduling page. That said, there were a few things I could alter, such as whether clients could view available appointments on a daily schedule or a monthly one.

Additionally, I was able to upload a logo and change the font style to one of 11 options. I could also set the color of the buttons, allowing me to tailor them to my brand’s color scheme.

If you want to make larger changes, Acuity Scheduling gives you access to its Advanced CSS. This is where you can add custom code to fully personalize your scheduling page. However, you’ll need a good knowledge of coding to make the most of this and I’d recommend leaving it alone if you aren’t already an experienced coder.

Customization options are a bit more exciting when it comes to booking emails, but only because Acuity’s drag-and-drop style builder let me move elements around until I was happy with them. The font choices were still limited, as were the button and background colors.

Overall, I was somewhat underwhelmed with the customization tools available, since there wasn’t much I could do to make the page feel unique. Having said this, I do appreciate that these customization boundaries keep the overall design looking clean, uncluttered, and visually appealing, albeit pretty boring.

Step 5: Customize Appointment Types

This step isn’t part of Acuity’s setup checklist, but it’s one I feel is important to include in this step-by-step guide. Your customers won’t be able to book an appointment with you if your Acuity Scheduling interface doesn’t display all of your different appointment types. Luckily, adding these to your app is super simple.

On the left-hand menu in the main dashboard is a tab called “Appointment Types.” Selecting this took me to a page where I could add different services by clicking the black button labeled “New Type of Service.” I then entered the details of our new Appointment Type, such as its name, duration, price, category, whether it’s public or private, and whether it was a group session or a one-to-one service. You can add a picture at this stage too.

If you’d like to organize your appointment types further, you can do so by creating different categories. I did this when adding a service, and once I saved my new appointment, it was displayed under the category subheading, separating it from the other service types.

When adding a new service, I particularly liked that I could include a post-booking message. This option appears underneath the “Name” field on the “Add New Service” page and gave me extra space to write instructions for clients about their appointments, or simply to thank them. This not only acts as a way to give clients important information but also makes your booking process more personable.

Step 6: Set Up Appointment Booking Preferences

Similarly to the above point, this step isn’t outlined in the onboarding process by Acuity Scheduling, but it falls under the process of creating your appointments.

Once you’ve added all of your services, it’s time to determine the different booking preferences that accompany them. By this, I mean the advance notice required for bookings, caps on the number of bookings that can be made, and cancellation policies.

To do this, I navigated back to the “Availability” app, and then selected the “Global Scheduling Limits.” This allowed me to set my preferences, such as the minimum number of hours required before booking an appointment or the minimum number of hours before an appointment that a client can cancel. I was also able to decide whether clients could reschedule their appointments without my approval.

The Global Scheduling Limitations will apply rules across all of your bookings. However, you can assign certain rules to particular appointment types, as discussed in Step 2. I really like the level of customization this brings to your booking system, allowing you to organize appointments to suit your business and customer needs.

Setting up these limitations is pretty simple, but if you plan to run a business where you need the option to approve or reject booking requests, things get a little more complicated. Because Acuity is designed to be a hands-off booking management system, there isn’t a checkbox that lets you do this. Instead, you’ll need to use a manual workaround.

This involves making two different appointment types. You’ll need to name one of these something like “Request” and then set it as a public appointment type, while the other will be set to private and will be called “Confirmed.” Your client will be able to book the public “Request” service, and then you’ll have to edit their booking and either cancel it or swap it to the “Confirmed” appointment type. You’ll also need to customize the emails that’ll go out to your clients so that they match this new approval system.

So, although it’s possible to set something like this up, it’s not the easiest thing to do. For some business owners, this kind of juggling will be frustrating and time-consuming, especially if you need to approve every single appointment request. In the future, it would be nice to see Acuity make this process more hands-off so that it’s simpler for businesses to manage.

Step 7: Add Staff Members

If you have others who work for you and your businesses, being able to add them to Acuity Scheduling is vital. Thankfully, it’s easy! Although, the process depends on how you log in to your scheduling dashboard:

• If you log in using an Acuity account, click “Manage Users” and then click “New User.” You’ll then be prompted to set their access level, choosing from “View Only,” “View & Edit,” and “Admin.” After this, select “Add User” to confirm.
• If you log into Acuity using Squarespace, you’ll need to follow a different set of steps. Open the “Permissions Panel” in your Squarespace dashboard. Enter the new user’s name and email address and then choose their permission level – “Scheduling View Only,” “Scheduling View and Edit,” or “Scheduling Administrator.”

For scheduling administrators, you can invite them to your scheduling page immediately, but for the other permission levels, you’ll have to click “Next” to select which calendars they can access and decide whether they can export appointments and client information. Once this is done, you can send them an invite to join your scheduling page.

Within its “Payment Settings,” Acuity offers integrations with three different payment processors – Stripe, Square, and PayPal. Although these are all well-respected and popular processors, I was surprised to see other major players missing, such as Google or Apple Pay. A greater number of payment options would encourage more customers to complete a booking, so three processers feels limited.

Plus, limited payment options can be frustrating for businesses, especially if your business is already using a payment method that Acuity doesn’t offer. Changing to one of the three listed above and then learning your way around it will take precious time.

At this stage, I could also decide the rules I wanted to establish around payments. There were a good number of options to choose from, letting me specify whether I wanted to use a deposit scheme, collect and save card details, or take full payment in advance. Acuity also let me know which of these options was most likely to avoid no-shows, which was very useful in helping me decide the rules to select.

Connecting my account to one of the payment processors was pretty straightforward. I chose to test Stripe, since this was the processor recommended by Acuity, and I was immediately taken through the set-up process via a pop-up. The process was incredibly simple and quick – it hardly required any effort on my part.

But, be warned. Although you can integrate Stripe and PayPal or Square and PayPal at the same time, this isn’t the case with Stripe and Square. You’ll need to choose one or the other.

Integrating with any of the processors is free, and neither Squarespace nor Acuity will charge any transaction fees. However, the individual payment providers listed above will have their own processing fees. You can find details of these fees in the table below:

Regardless of their fees, all of the payment processors offered by Acuity are well-respected and trusted by customers. There are a few limitations to be aware of, though. For example, if you choose to connect with PayPal, not only will your clients be directed away from your scheduling page, but they’ll only be able to pay the full amount upon booking, rather than paying afterwards. Additionally, Square is the only one of the three that supports payment via a card reader.

One area Acuity Scheduling performs particularly well is its integration and compatibility with other apps and platforms.

This is especially true when it comes to Squarespace. You can use Acuity Scheduling separately, but the two platforms have essentially been designed to work together.

If you choose to use Acuity with your Squarespace site, you can use the scheduling block within the Squarespace editor to manage your scheduling page. This minimizes the need to constantly flick between two different interfaces which is very convenient and saves a lot of time.

Acuity also integrates with a whole host of other apps, covering everything from accounting and invoicing to email marketing, CRM, and analytics, as well as social media. This makes it ideal for anyone who uses a variety of platforms to manage their business and wants to consolidate it all in one place.

If you log in to your scheduling page with an Acuity account, the number of support options available is disappointingly limited. The primary method of contact is email, with customers required to fill out a support form that will then be queued. Not only is this pretty restrictive, but it means you could be waiting for a while during busy hours.

When I tested Acuity’s customer support, I received a response in two hours. While this isn’t the fastest turnaround, the response I received was very friendly and answered my query perfectly.

If you log into your account via Squarespace, you’ll have more options available to you. Squarespace still doesn’t provide telephone support, but it operates 24/7 support via email, Facebook Messenger, and X (formerly known as Twitter). Live chat is also available, but only during weekdays and between the hours of 4:00 AM to 8:00 PM ET.

Overall, I found the support on offer to be inconsistent and a little lackluster. I was left waiting for my answer, which I found to be irritating and inconvenient. However, if there were a bright spot in this it would have to be Acuity’s knowledge base, which is full of tons of useful articles. This answered any queries I had much faster than my experience with the email team.

When it comes to booking appointments, clients often have to disclose personal details during the process. Making sure that this information is kept private and secure is vitally important to building trust and will help to encourage clients to use your business again. So, how secure is Acuity Scheduling?

Because it’s part of the Squarespace suite of products, it’s covered under Squarespace’s privacy policy, which means it takes data collection very seriously and safeguards it as rigorously as possible.

For those on the Powerhouse plan, Acuity Scheduling is also HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant, which is vital for businesses that take bookings concerning personal health.

And, thanks to its links with Squarespace, Acuity Scheduling is PCI-DSS compliant. This means your payment details will be secure. All of the payment processors that Acuity Scheduling works with also follow the most up-to-date payment security standards.

Marlie and Tim Cochrane use Acuity Scheduling to manage bookings for their cosmetic injectables clinic, Golden Injectables. Torn between Acuity and Timely, they eventually opted for Acuity because of its ability to enter patient notes against bookings.

Since using the platform Marlie and Tim say it has helped support their business and day-to-day work tremendously. Acting as a “front end” for clients and a “back end” for patient notes, it’s given their clinic a much-needed sense of cohesion and helped them manage their resources better.

In addition, they spoke highly of the support Acuity offers its customers. No matter how many questions they have, Acuity always gets back to them within 24 hours, and in the meantime, they’ve been able to make use of the extensive knowledge base.

However, there are things they feel could be improved. They’d love to see Acuity introduce Google or Apple Pay to help reduce abandoned bookings. They’d also like to see a follow-up message feature so they can get in touch with and retarget clients they haven’t seen in a while.

Despite this, they’ve been impressed with Acuity and how well it’s suited their business, especially with its extra medical industry needs.

Acuity Scheduling is a popular choice for a reason. Simple to use and pretty affordable, it offers businesses a reliable option for managing their bookings.

During my testing, I found Acuity Scheduling easy to set up and the process of creating my scheduling page was incredibly straightforward. For this reason, Acuity Scheduling is the perfect tool to help small to medium-sized businesses manage their client bookings. Although customization is limited and customer support could be more robust, the pros of this platform outweigh the cons.

Acuity Scheduling offers a 7-day trial, so why not test it out and explore the platform for yourself? Don’t forget to come back and let us know how you got on in the comments!