7 free booking software for small business (2025)

Whether you're running a tutoring service, counseling center, or a consulting firm, managing a small business is no simple feat. You have to handle multiple tasks, such as:

• Managing cash flow
• Addressing competition and staying updated on changes in your market
• Dealing with business uncertainties
• Managing customer acquisition and retention
• Working really long hours

With so much work and so little time to do it, why add manually scheduling meetings to your plate? Drowning in redundant manual work makes it harder to stay focused on what's crucial for business growth.

Do you really need an appointment scheduling app?

The following chart depicts the process flow of booking an appointment with and without a scheduling solution.

Without an online booking software, it takes hours, if not days to book a slot due to the amount of back-and-forths involved. You should also collect payments, send reminders, and share meeting links over an email, follow-up with clients, and more. Let’s not forget, getting all this done will require you to juggle a handful of other applications, adding to the complexity.

As a business owner who's short on time, why bear the burden when an app can do it for you in under three minutes? Now, that’s a win for everyone.

What to look for in a booking software for your small business

• User-friendly interface: It's vital to choose an app with a straightforward UI. The more complex the interface, the more time wasted trying to figure it out. More importantly, why transition from one complex scheduling system to another?
• Automated communication: Back-and-forth messaging is a time sink. Your appointment scheduling software should automatically send appointment notifications and reminders, saving you the hassle.
• Facilitate effective collaboration: Team management and collaboration are time-intensive tasks, especially for appointment-first businesses. Choose an app that allows you to oversee your team's schedule, facilitating effective management of your resources.
• Customization: As a small business owner, it's critical to leave a lasting first impression. Your scheduling app should enable you to customize client facing elements like your booking page, outgoing emails, and more to reflect your branding preferences.
• Affordability: Switching to scheduling software shouldn't break the bank. And expensive doesn't necessarily mean better. As a small business owner, you may already be troubled by competing financial priorities, and appointment scheduling shouldn't be one.

7 best online booking software for small business

With the above interests in mind, we've narrowed down seven best scheduling software solutions that might help your small business:

1. Zoho Bookings
2. Setmore
3. Simplybook.me
4. Doodle
5. Google Calendar
6. Reclaim AI
7. Bookeo appointments

Here's how the apps scored based on our internal ranking:

1. Zoho Bookings: Customizable and intuitive booking software for small business

Zoho Bookings greets you with its comprehensive calendar dashboard. It offers an array of meeting types to suit your various scheduling preferences. For example, use one-on-ones for initial client discussions, group bookings for hosting corporate wellness programs, or collective bookings to meet clients as a team.

Set your working hours, sync your calendars, and configure scheduling rules to showcase your availability–just the way you like it. Keep attendees informed with notifications and reminders via email and text. You'll be able to send five notifications and three reminders to both staff and clients for each appointment.

Here's a list of elements you can customize with Zoho Bookings:

Booking page: Change colors, background images, the booking page title and description, add your contact information or your social media profiles, remove default Zoho Bookings branding, and more.

Email notifications and reminders: Add logos, tweak the content with relevant information, or import your own HTML template.

Text notifications and reminders: Create your own concise content that communicates about the upcoming appointment.

Outgoing email address: Set a custom email as the default sender address for your outgoing notifications and reminders.

Booking page URL: Tweak the booking page URL to suit your preferences or add it to your domain.

Booking forms: Add or remove fields from your booking forms and collect client information with ease.

Booking UI: Change the default UI labels to suit your preferences and align Zoho Bookings with your business process.

And, that's not all you'll get! Here's a list of some of the top features in Zoho Bookings:

• User roles and customizable user permissions for effective team management
• Workspaces to manage multiple locations
• Collect appointments from your website with an embeddable widget
• Report generation based on appointments and revenue
• Integration with external apps (payment providers, video conferencing tools, calendars, and more)

2. Setmore: Do more with less effort!

With its distraction-free UI, scheduling appointments with Setmore is made simple. Create one-on-ones or group sessions and set them to repeat automatically, saving you time on scheduling.

You'll be able to send three email notifications and one reminder for staff, while your clients get the same with an added text reminder. Adjust booking policies and control how your availability is shown to clients.

Setmore offers a fair amount of flexibility on the customization front. You can change your booking page banner, URL, logo, and brand colors, remove Setmore branding, and add your contact information. Note that email notification customization is restricted to your sender name and signature.

Limitations in notification possibilities are compensated by its strong integration capabilities. Setmore integrates with a wide range of video conferencing tools, payment providers, social platforms, calendars, and more. One unique feature of the app is that it allows you to showcase staff reviews on the booking page or share them via a QR code.

3. SimplyBook.me: Loaded to the brim with features

Simplybook.me’s holistic dashboard presents you with important information like upcoming bookings, workload, and revenue—all in one place.

With robust customization capabilities, Simplybook.me allows you to switch between 18 different themes and multiple color options; you can even write your own CSS code based on your branding preferences. Translate booking pages to over 90 languages using the Google Translate feature or showcase your booking page in an RTL layout for Arabic and Hebrew languages.

In terms of features, Simplybook.me offers something for everyone:

• Autofill intake forms
• Collect appointments from various locations
• Add booking pages to your domain
• Issue gift cards and offer coupon codes
• Set up an approval based booking system

You can send up to three notifications and one reminder email or SMS to clients, which can be customized with variables. It also offers great flexibility in user roles, facilitating effective employee management.

Despite its numerous features and customization options, Simplybook.me might not be the best for everyone due to two major reasons:

1. Lack of unlimited appointments: Depending on your plan, you can collect 100 to 5,000 bookings per month. 100 additional bookings can be purchased for $4 and these credits don't expire until used.
2. Custom features: Unless you opt for Simplybook.me's premium subscriptions, you'll only have limited access to these features.

If you can clearly estimate the total appointments you'll need to book per month, Simplybook.me will be an irreplaceable tool in your arsenal. However, if your number of appointments per month exceeds what Simplybook.me offers in its plans, consider exploring apps like Zoho Bookings or Setmore.

4. Doodle: A no-frills approach to scheduling appointments

Doodle's simplicity and professionalism make it an easy-to-recommend scheduling solution for small businesses. Its comprehensive dashboard displays various event types, along with created and upcoming events. You can conduct meeting polls, create one-on-ones, and add a sign-up sheet that helps you host group sessions.

Doodle lets you customize the booking page's background image, brand colors, and logo. You can also enable automatic reminders for group polls and one-on-one invitations.

Doodle can integrate with most calendars and video conferencing tools, and it even allows you to book appointments right from your outlook dashboard. You can also use Zapier to integrate with over 1,500 applications.

If you're looking for casual scheduling software for your small business, Doodle is the one to go with. However, if you're building complex systems like a sales cycle with your CRM platform or customer support life-cycles with remote support software, Doodle just doesn't make the cut.

5. Google Calendar: Track events, tasks, and schedule, all in one place

With its minimal user-interface, Google calendar serves as a capable scheduling application. Drag your cursor across the calendar to create an event, task, or a schedule for appointments.

To create a schedule, simply set your appointment title, duration, and your working hours. You'll also be able to tweak your availability by setting up a buffer time, limiting the total number of bookings per day, and checking for conflicting reservations. Your clients don't need a Google account to book appointments with you.

Google Calendar offers limited customization possibilities, and all event participants receive a confirmation email with a calendar invitation. In addition, you can set up five notifications or emails for every event, be it days, hours, or minutes before an appointment.

With the free plan, you can create a schedule for only one of your service offerings. To create more schedules or to collect payments, opt for Google Workspace's premium plans and get access to the entire suite of Google apps.

If your business heavily relies on Google's suite of apps, Google Calendar is the perfect fit for your business. However, if you're looking to integrate with a CRM platform, an accounting solution, or email marketing software, Google Calendar falls short.

6. Bookeo appointments: Feature-rich scheduler without boundaries

If you don't mind the older-looking UI, Bookeo has a lot to offer. Create services, workshops with waiting lists, recurring meetings, or set up an approval-based appointment system.

Bookeo is packed with features. Here's a highlight of the most important ones:

• Offer memberships, packages, and gift vouchers.
• Generate in-depth reports.
• Collect reviews and showcase them on your website.
• Offer special pricing during certain seasons of the year.
• Integrate with an analytics platform, accounting software, email marketing software, video conferencing tools, and payment providers.

Bookeo offers multiple user roles: one account owner, super managers, managers with customizable permissions, and account users. On the customization front, you can tweak the booking page colors, font style, and other elements of the page like your business's name, logo, layout, and contact information.

You can set up one email, text, fax, or RSS notification for hosts, whereas clients can be set to receive one email and SMS reminder. Bookeo also offers you the option to send a thank you notification to clients with a custom message.

However, like Simplybook.me, Bookeo doesn't offer unlimited appointments and restricts the total number of appointments to 200 to 2,000 a month, depending on the plan you choose. If you've got a clear idea of your monthly appointment volume, Bookeo might suit you. Otherwise, we recommend picking another app from the list.

7. ReclaimAI: Managing your time with AI capabilities

Reclaim wears multiple hats, managing your tasks and scheduling with AI. Featuring a user-friendly interface, the planner dashboard gives an overview of all your events. The entire application is driven by the priority you assign to events and tasks.

To get a better idea of this, let's consider the following scenario. You create a recurring habit called Lunch, which by default is marked as a free event. The app collects how long you usually spend on lunch and the preferred time range for it. With this information, Reclaim allows you to collect appointments of higher priority during the same duration and still manages to schedule your lunch as you get close to the event.

When you create tasks and move them under the Up Next tab, Reclaim checks and assign the event to your schedule. Reclaim also offers two major roles, admin and user. Plus, you can integrate with Google, Zoom, Office 365, and other project management tools.

Create scheduling links and share them with clients to collect appointments. Customize your availability, booking URL, form questions, and limit the number of appointments per day. Note that Reclaim requires Google Calendar and uses its notification settings to send notifications to meeting participants.

Reclaim is your go-to appointment scheduling tool if you need AI's assistance to tame your schedule. However, if you would like to collect payments, build complex workflows, or personalize your customer-facing elements like the booking page or emails, Reclaim fails to earn the spot.

Here's all the important information about the above scheduling tools in a single table.

So what's your choice?

Choosing an appointment booking software for your small business boils down to your personal preferences. While some would like the flexibility of having unlimited appointments, others might lean towards customization or an AI-assistant.

Most apps featured in the list offer a free trial. We recommend you test out multiple apps before opting for one.

If Zoho Bookings seems to fit your needs, check out how you can implement Zoho Bookings for your small business.