To tell it sweet and short
Appointy is a bitter-sweet deal. It gives a feature set matching SimplyBookMe and Acuity Scheduling, however the Appointy user experience(UX) needs improvement.
Appointy has the width and depth of features to cover a variety of scheduling needs which spans industries and usecases. One of the examples: the domain restriction feature to receive bookings only from a domain of your choice. Another example: you can map your staff to designated area codes. This feature is very handy if you offer services at a customer’s place and want the staff nearest to the place to perform that service.
They have multi-location feature for businesses with multiple branches. Each location can have an admin, a login, a view, and staff.
These kind of unique features differentiate Appointy. However, you can offer too many features in a complex way or in a compact way. And, the choice you make defines the user experience you offer. Appointy is working towards improving that, we believe.
Appointy review: who is it ideal for ?
Appointy is a good choice for anyone with scheduling needs. However, Appointy’s pricing also matches its feature set. So, Appointy is ideal if you are going to use all the features in the plan you choose. If you are in the service industry and reasonably large, Appointy is an app that you should consider.
Appointy, compared to other schedulers, offers more support to services performed at customer location. Examples: Cleaning, handyman services, beauty treatments at home. Their area code feature, Google map driving directions, mobile apps are useful in such cases.
Appointy will be very good if your customers are regulars who have a membership with you. The features they have to limit bookings according to rules will result in very high quality appointments.
Appointy review: Who will find it limiting?
Appointy can solve many use cases in scheduling. They are integrated with Square POS. Beyond that, if you’re looking for a system with an inventory module, its own POS, payment terminals – as is needed in salons with product sales – you will find Appointy limited. Also, there is no staff roster to mark attendance and billing.
Appointy’s customer module cannot match a CRM, and they do not have a direct integration with a CRM.
As I mentioned earlier, if you are looking for a great UX, you might find Appointy a bit lagging. UX is subjective though.
What is their business model?
Appointy have freemium and paid plans. On the marketing side, they focus on SEO, social media engagement, online reviews and ads. They offer a 15-day free trial during which customers can try all the features. During the trial, Appointy tries to engage and onboard the customer to a paid version with emailers, live chat and customer support.
Viability of the company
I read a 2014 newspaper article which quoted their revenue as 33K USD per month. There is no recently published revenue report about the company. However, we can see that Appointy is alive and kicking with its marketing and product efforts. Customers and reviewers are generally happy about the company. We can be sure of betting our money on them.
Appointy review: how do they fare on the basic features of a scheduler?
- Calendar sync – Appointy integrates with Google, O365 (Outlook.com) and iCal calendars. You can choose for one-way or two-way sync. However, you cannot add more than two calendars to Appointy. The two has be different too – not two Google Calendars or two O365 calendars. This takes away some flexibility because there are appointment scheduling apps which allows more than one calendar. Your can check availability from one and mark new appointment on another, or use one calendar for both.
- Availability – In Appointy, you set availability for the staff which is then mapped to a service. There are two ways to set availability for staff: regular hours and irregular hours. In regular hours, you can set your week days. Appointy allows you to select different times for each day, if needed. When you want to add one-off availabilities to accommodate any special service or meet additional demand, you can use irregular hours. This can be a few minutes, a day, or a few days. Irregular availability can be kept open irrespective of staff availability, anyone who is available can jump on to attend it. You can block the staff’s availability for a few hours or a few days when they have other engagements. One of the tabs under Staff module will give you an idea of the blocked hours. Appointy offers another cool feature here to set the staff availability based on the postal codes. Note that Appointy doesn’t have the buffer time feature. They will suggest you a workaround though.
- Appointment types – Appointy does things differently. Rather than calling services one-on-one, recurring, classes etc, they allow you to create a service by setting the duration and number of people allowed to book. If the number of people (capacity) is set to one, it is a one-on-one. If it is more than, one it is a one-to-many meeting. You can edit the settings to allow customers to book it for more than one time, or for their group or book more than one service at a time.
- You can also make a service dependent on another. That means, Appointy will look for slots when both services are available, and put the parent service to be performed before the dependent service.
- You can map resources to services and not allow bookings if the resource is unavailable.
- All services can have their custom intake forms, add-ons (products for sale or to be consumed) and booking page URL
- You can keep the service, inactive – to disallow bookings – or, internal – bookable only by admin.
- Sharing – Appointy has
- Booking pages – There are separate pages for the business, the service, and the staff. Customers can book appointment from these URLs either via a browser or from your emails. You can customize the appearance of booking pages with coding. You can upload your business logo and enter basic description about your business, but you can’t choose a color scheme or choose a different layout or theme.
- Embed codes – There are three options: Full page widget, Overlay widget, and Button widget. You can embed the respective code in your website.
- Facebook and Instagram – There is a FB plugin to add a Boon Now button on your page. On Instagram, you can add Book Now as an action which opens your booking page.
- Online meeting – You can choose the appointments where online meeting has to enabled. Appointy has Zoom integration offered from the Free plan itself.
Appointy review: the Differentiating features
Appointy has a tonne of features that differentiate them from the competition. My favorites are
- Domain restriction – you can specify the domains form which you want to take bookings and block others.
- Assigning area codes to staff – makes it easier for customers and you to have a staff closest to the service location.
- Booking limits – limit the number of appointments that can be booked by a customer in a set time frame.
- Setting min interval between two appointments from the same customer.
- Internal staff – customers cannot book with this staff. Only the admin can.
- Internal Service – customers cannot book this service. Only the admin can.
- Enable/Disable log in for staff – You can enable staff log in if you want them to set up their availability and other settings.
- Dependent service – Only those times will be shown when the dependent and parent services can booked back to back. The parent service will get the earlier slot.
- Setting up irregular availability – you can add special time slots to day and repeat it in a number of ways:
- Daily, Alternate days, Weekly- Select days, Bi-weekly- Select days, Every month – select date and end date, Every Month on a day untill end date
- Giving customers a language preference on the booking page by having multiple languages as a dropdown.
- Features for business who perform services at client location
- Assign area code to staff
- Google Map directions to customer location
- Square POS
- Asking them to pick service consumables as add-ons
- Resource scheduling for that service.
- Disabling online appointments but displaying availability on the booking page when you want customers to check your hours but have to call you to book.
- Restricting bookings to verified (by email/SMS) customers and add an additional restriction via approvals.
- Multi-location – each location will get its log in, staff and setting. Admin can view and manage all locations from their account.
- Appointment allocation to staff algorithms – You can choose from more than four ways of how new appointments will be allocated.
- Customers can log in using Google, Facebook or using Appointy or as a guest.
- Striking out booked and blocked times to look busy – This is a cool way to subtly boast in front of your customers rather than just hiding slots 🙂
- Customer circles – You can open customer circles to see something like a Venn diagram to learn how many fall into categories like active, inactive, discounted, Facebook page liked, Left a review etc.
- Customer tags – Add tags to group customers
- Customer journey – a timeline view of customer’s activities like appointment booking, payments made.
Appointy review: the Niche features
- Reserve with Google – If you are not aware of this, here is a brief. When your customer searches for local businesses on Google, they can directly book an appointment with the business right from the Google Search Results Page. Google picks up your availability from your appointment scheduling app and displays it on their page, if the app is part of Reserve With Google. This is a great feature and Appointy has it.
- Customer portal – Customers can create an account with your business using this feature. They can log in, see their past and upcoming appointments, see their gift certificates and purchase new ones, update their profile and more. To enable this, you have to select log in options other than Guest log ins in your set up.
Mobile app
I checked the Android mobile app. It is a near-perfect replica of the webapp. As an admin you get most of the features on the web app and also with a similar UI and navigation. That is uncommon: most players give a mobile app which can be used only to view your appointments and some other basic details. On Appointy’s mobile app, you can go to settings that are more than three clicks away on the web app.
APIs
Appointy does not expose their APIs publicly. In the Enterprise plan, they give you access to ther private API.
Ease of use
Appointy has an easy-to-navigate interface. They have larger fonts, have vertical scroll, less pop-ups. There is a left pane that follow the tree-and-branch model for navigation. And, when you have doubts, there is the live chat support (in select plans) with whom you can interact. Where you might feel difficulty is in the UX – you will not always find the features where you expect it: Appointy’s ways are different 🙂
Appointy review: Booking experience for customer
- Appearance – The default booking page that Appointy offers is spartan. They allow to change it with custom code. You can embed it on your website also. The booking page is itself a small website with pages like Schedule, About Us, Location, Map and language options.
- Customer experience – Appointy allows to do choose between two booking flows: Select service, then staff and later, availability OR Select service, then availabilty and later, staff. You can choose to give a detailed booking process displaying the staff name, customer duration, add-ons and also by giving various log in options. Using the service booking and staff booking URLs, customers can directly book a service or a staff without visiting your business’ booking page. After an appointment is booked, you can redirect customers from the booking confirmation page to any URL of your choice, if you want it. You will get the confirmation email. The Zoom Meeting link, if it is an online meeting, is share both on the confirmation page and the email.
Help and support
Appointy supports customers by email, live chat and with the help documentation. I found the support team to be knowledgeable and is the best way to find features and learn how to use them. The help documentation is good and explains how a feature works but at many places, it doesn’t cover the use cases for that feature. The search works for exact terms but for related terms, it is not able to return relevant results. Also, there are duplicate pages because the same topic is covered in the help doc for their older and newer versions. I used to rely on the live chat support whenever I had doubts.
The live chat can be silent some times but you can see the status when they are away. You get replies when they are back online.
Bugs spotted
My experience with Appointy was bumpy. I would not all of the issues I faced as bugs but they are unusual user experiences from the SaaS apps that I have seen. I received more errors when using Chrome and the support team asked me to use Firefox after which the issues were lesser.
Privacy policy
You can read their privacy policy here.
Appointy review: Pricing model
Appointy follows a per user pricing. In the Growth plan, which the basic plan, you get one user for $19.99 and additional users at $5. The higher pricing plans are meant for larger organizations, the plans differentiated by features matching the size of the organization. The highest plan, Enterprise, offers multi-location feature and includes two locations by default. You add more locations at $29.99. In the same plan, they offer custom development at an additional cost. In the higher pricing plan, you can ask for a relationship manager at additional cost.
Total cost of ownership
The total cost will be based on the plan you choose, the number of additional staff, and locations you need. If you go for relationship manager and custom development, those will be additional costs. There will be Zapier’s subscription costs if you choose to integrate apps.
Appointy review: What will you get for FREE, for $10, for $50?
| Features | Free | $19.9 | $49.9 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Included bookings | 100 | 2000 per day. More on request. | 2000 per day. More on request. |
| Services | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Staff | 1 | 1. Add more at $5 | 5. Add more at $7.5 |
| Admin App | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Resources | No | No | Yes |
| Gift certificates | No | No | Yes |
| Deals and Discounts | No | Yes | Yes |
| GCal sync | No | Yes | Yes |
| O365 sync | No | No | Yes |
| Customer support | Email, Chat | Email, Chat, Phone. Relationship Manager at addl. cost | |
| Auto-reminders | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Square POS | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Payment gateways | No | Yes | Yes |
| Reserve with Google | Yes | Yes | Yes |
When pitted against the segment leader – comparison page and table
Appointy’s closest competitor is Acuity Scheduling. Here is a comparison of Appointy vs Acuity Scheduling.
Summary of other Appointy reviews
Appointy has lesser reviews online compared to their competition. People appreciate Appointy for the amount of features and the support they offer.
Rating
Appointy is a good appointment scheduling software if you are from the service industry but looking away from the bigger players that dominate that market, like Mindbody. They have the features, the affordability and a good support team.
Long term Appointy review
Often, you will find that the product that you started using with full conviction is not the one you need now, after a few years. The reasons could be that it is not able to scale, or the total cost of ownership goes enormous, the support is bad, there are no updates.
Our long term review is a way to observe how a product and the company behind it behaved in the last one year. This is an important read if you are buying the product for a longer term. Read our long term review about Appointy.