Are you looking for the best booking apps for your business in 2022? Our extensive guide and reviews will quickly help you out!
But first, some notable statistics to pay attention to:
- Business of Apps reports that people downloaded 142.9 billion apps in 2020
- Statista reports that the number of smartphones has steadily grown to surpass six billion
- A report by Technavio indicates that the appointment scheduling software market is predicted to expand at a CAGR of 19%, growing by 633 million between 2021 and 2025.
With so many available apps in a rapidly flourishing market, it quickly becomes nearly impossible to find the perfect booking platform for your business.
When you find the right booking app, your business can save time, money, and effort. You can also book more appointments and make more sales!
Suppose you want your booking-based business to succeed in an ever-demanding and competitive industry. In that case, it’s time to work smarter and not harder.
What Does a Booking App Do?
Years ago, it was perfectly acceptable to stick to an old-fashioned paper schedule or even a whiteboard.
Businesses had to coordinate with clients to find the best time slots, schedule appointments, and avoid those nasty double bookings.
Luckily, we live in the digital age. Online appointment scheduling software makes bookings a user-friendly, efficient experience.
You can save loads of valuable time and effort when using a booking app. While each booking app is different, they share some similarities.
A proper booking app will allow you to:
- Have an online portal where customers can book your schedule.
- Improve communication with your customers.
- Set specific parameters for available times.
- Reduce the number of no-shows.
- Process payments online
When you’ve got the best booking app, you’ll find that it’s easier to secure more clients. Gone are the days of rummaging through torn schedules to try and figure out who’s available and what needs to be done next.
With a booking app, you’ll do business faster, smarter and end up making more money.
Who Uses Booking Apps?
Successful, efficient, and productive companies make use of online booking tools. They do because these tools help them save time and money.
Some of the industries and companies that benefit from using a booking app include:
- Small businesses and solopreneurs. They use these apps to book appointments or meetings with important clients.
- HR agencies use them to keep track of interviews.
- Colleges, teachers, and educators use them to manage online classes and campus tours.
- Sales and marketing teams use them to convert prospects into sales.
- Health and beauty spas use them to book clients.
Most quality booking apps are so customizable that any shape or size business benefits from using these tools. Even HVAC companies and nursing caregivers use them to provide an efficient, reliable service.
The Five Best Booking Apps for Business in 2022
Regardless of the shape and size of your business, you probably have specific requirements for the perfect booking tool. We’ve arranged our ultimate list of the best booking tools according to their strengths and features.
If you’re not sure which booking app is the best for your business, go with our number one pick! You only need 17-minutes to create your first booking portal. It’s that easy!
1. Book Like A Boss
Book Like A Boss (simply called BLAB) has been around for years.
Our popular booking app comes armed with various excellent features, awesome customization, and probably the most effortless setup and integration tools we could find.
If you’re not a tech-guru, and you simply want an out-of-the-box solution that works for your business, then BLAB is it.
Overview
Our app allows you to quickly and effortlessly create high-converting booking pages. On these pages, you can customize and add various media-rich elements to turn visitors into paying customers.
Instead of customers contacting you to find out your availability or ask for quotes, you can set it all up online with BLAB.
The app will automatically take care of all your administrative tasks. Whether it’s sending reminders or follow-ups, BLAB will do it for you.
When our excellent booking software does this, you can be asleep, and your website will still be able to secure you an income. Yes, with Book Like A Boss making money is as easy as getting a good night’s rest!
Customization
Using BLAB, you can completely customize every aspect of your online booking portal. Whether you want your booking page to have an on-brand design, media-rich videos, customer testimonials, or display your calendar publicly - you can do it all on our app.
This customization is essential to give your customers a truly unique, on-brand user experience. Remember, the better the user experience is, the more loyal a client becomes.
Notable Features
Our platform has a wide range of excellent features to make your booking portal efficient, reliable, and unique. Some of our favorite features include:
- NASA-level analytics and reports to help you make data-driven business decisions.
- Several convenient online payment methods mean customers don’t even have to contact you to pay you.
- A variety of excellent integrations from YouTube to MailChimp and even Google Calendar makes it easy to create the ultimate high-converting booking page.
What We Like
There are plenty of reasons why BLAB is this year’s best booking app. When you choose it, you’ll also get to enjoy:
- Several excellent guides and resources to help you get the most out of your booking page.
- A quick and easy, 17-minute setup!
- 14-day free trial period.
Perfect For
Unlike some booking apps, a large selection of business owners, entrepreneurs, and online movers-and-shakers can use BLAB. Some notable industries include
- Service-based businesses of any shape and size.
- Online learning centers, colleges, and even universities.
- Entrepreneurs and online gurus.
- Medical practitioners, practices, and professionals.
With a vast arsenal of customizations, the only limit is your imagination.
2. Calendly
Calendly is a premium booking app that makes creating a dedicated online booking page quick and easy.
With Calendly, it becomes easy to manage your meetings professionally and efficiently. This handy software also eliminates the hassle of constant back-and-forth emails.
When a booking app helps eliminate those emails and phone calls, it becomes easier to focus on delivering exceptional service.
Overview
When you sign up for Calendly, you need to establish some calendar rules. You’ll also get a link to your scheduling page that you can share with your clients. They can use this link to book your services or schedule meetings.
On your booking page, clients will be able to view your available times, as well as the length of meetings you allow them to book.
Calendly will automate all the necessary administrative tasks, such as sending reminders and follow-ups to ensure that you or your customers never miss a meeting.
When it takes this administrative burden away from you, you can focus on building a successful business.
Customization
While Calendly doesn’t come with as many customization options as we saw with BLAB, you still get to tweak the look and feel to suit your business.
For instance, you’ll be able to choose the colors and upload a logo so that your booking page reflects the quality brand that your business has.
Notable Features
Some of Calendly’s more notable features will help make running your business easy. While it still lacks the excellent features we saw with BLAB, it offers enough to get the job done. Here are some of the top features found in Calendly.
- Several useful integrations, such as Zoom, Zapier, and Salesforce.
- Customers can pay online for your services using Stripe or PayPal.
- Automatically adjusts for a customer’s timezone, ensuring that nobody misses the meeting.
What We Like
Calendly has always been a reliable, trusted online booking tool. It may not boast the latest innovations or features, yet it gets the job done! Here are some of the top points that set Calendly apart from other booking platforms.
- Several different payment options make it easy to choose the plan and features you need for your business.
- Automated reminder emails will reduce the number of no-shows.
- Complex calendar rules to automate your scheduling and availability.
Perfect For
Calendly is a booking tool that appeals to various industries and businesses. Here are some people who frequently use Calendly to do better business.
- Sales teams and service representatives.
- Institutions providing online classes.
- Small and medium-sized businesses.
3. Acuity Scheduling
Suppose you’re looking for a comprehensive software tool to help manage your bookings and automate several business processes. In that case, Acuity Scheduling might be the platform for you.
While relatively more expensive than other booking tools, Acuity Scheduling offers a broad range of features to help automate and streamline your administrative tasks.
Those features include client management, invoicing, and customized onboarding forms.
Overview
Acuity Scheduling offers more than just a booking portal. We often find that Acuity Scheduling is best for medium to large businesses looking to reinvent their current administrative systems.
Nevertheless, Acuity Scheduling makes managing bookings pretty effortless. Like most popular booking apps in 2022, it will also automatically send reminder emails to ensure no one misses an important meeting.
It offers standard online payment options, in the form of Stripe and Paypal, along with several eCommerce business features. Savvy business owners can use some of these features to streamline their service-based business.
Customization
If you’re starting from scratch, or want to update your existing business administrative systems, then Acuity Scheduling is perfect for you. While it’s a premium software, the full suite of tools will provide you with excellent customizations.
Use these customizations to create a booking portal that integrates well with your other administrative systems.
Notable Features
It’s challenging to pinpoint Acuity Scheduling’s best features. It’s a great scheduling tool, yet, we find that the most notable features are in its other administrative processes. Here are some features to give you a better idea of what you can do with this booking app:
- Customized branding and templates to make your design unique.
- Syncing with popular calendar tools, such as Office 365 and iCloud.
- Various APIs and web forms to further customize your booking portal.
What We Like
Acuity Scheduling is undoubtedly a well-thought-out, comprehensive, and premium scheduling tool. While it may require some tweaking, preferably done by someone familiar with these systems, it can quickly streamline your business. Its better features include:
- Full suite of business administrative tools available.
- Several pricing tiers with varying levels of features.
- Unlimited appointments or meetings.
Perfect For
Acuity Scheduling is perfect for medium to large-scale operations. Today, the most popular uses are business owners redoing their administrative platforms and who want a premium booking tool that does it all.
- Businesses lacking a comprehensive administration system.
- Service-based companies.
- Medium and large-scale operations.
4. ScheduleOnce
If you’ve got a business with an extensive client pool, or a long list of potential clients, you’ll enjoy working with ScheduleOnce.
ScheduleOnce provides businesses with a way to connect prospects to the right staff or teams directly. This ability makes ScheduleOnce an excellent option for sales-driven groups and companies.
Overview
ScheduleOnce makes it easy for sales teams to secure new clients quickly and efficiently.
When a prospect indicates interest in a specific service or product, this booking tool will assign it to the right contact. It’ll automatically notify the responsible person about the upcoming appointment.
Your staff can simply show up and convert the prospect into a paying client. Instead of your sales team spending hours trying to book or confirm appointments, this handy booking tool will do it for them.
They end up saving time and can focus on sealing that lucrative deal.
Customization
ScheduleOnce doesn’t come with an incredible arsenal of customization options. Yet, it’s excellent for large-scale teams that need an efficient organization tool to help them secure deals.
If you plan on creating a booking portal for your business, you could use ScheduleOnce to customize the appearance, booking rules, notification periods, among other things.
Notable Features
ScheduleOnce works best in large organizations with several departments and limited resources. With ScheduleOnce you can:
- Create custom notifications to keep team members, managers and prospects informed.
- Monitor and manage leads with an automated pool of prospects.
- Host virtual meetings via Zoom, GoogleMeet, or Webex.
These features help sales teams focus on converting prospects into clients without managing appointments or ever-changing schedules.
What We Like
ScheduleOnce is a fantastic booking app, though it only truly shines when a large sales team uses it to book appointments. Some of the things we appreciate about ScheduleOnce are:
- Seamless integrations with several email clients, such as Outlook and Google.
- Fantastic documentation and video guides to help you through the setup process.
- Custom pricing is available for large sales teams.
Perfect For
While ScheduleOnce isn’t great for service-based companies, or small businesses, it’s one of the better booking apps for large sales teams. We find that ScheduleOnce is most often used by:
- Large sales teams.
- Corporations with various departments.
- Scheduling meetings internally in large enterprises.
5. Bookafy
Bookafy makes it easy to sync calendars between different people. It doesn’t matter what calendar they use. With Bookafy, you can choose to share your calendar with a client or view their calendar while keeping your own private.
This ability makes Bookafy a more hands-on booking app. Yet, it offers seamless integration and will make it easy to keep track of your schedule.
Overview
With Bookafy, you can set custom rules that’ll route new customers to the right staff. You can base these rules on skills, resources, availability, or specific knowledge.
By setting these rules, you automate the customer onboarding experience. Customers will get in touch with staff faster, with fewer administrative tasks to occupy their time.
Staff and customers don’t need to use the same calendar to set up meetings. Bookafy works across various calendars to provide one online portal where everybody is in the know at all times.
Customization
Bookafy makes it easy to customize your bookings with fonts, colors, and several messaging options. When you create an online booking page with Bookafy, it’ll be mobile-ready.
A mobile-ready page means it looks and works incredibly well on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This customization feature will make it easier for customers to book your excellent services online.
Notable Features
Bookafy comes with a limited, albeit useful, set of features to help streamline your online business. Some of the more notable features include:
- It’s easy to set a percentage of your calendar to be viewed by others.
- Quickly set buffer time between your appointments, making it easy to attend every call and meeting.
- You can limit the number of meetings per day, week, or month.
What We Like
With Bookafy’s set of features, it’s relatively easy to create your first online booking page. While it’s not as fast as the 17-minute setup time that makes BLAB so popular, it’s still a simple process.
Here are some other top features on Bookafy:
- Automated time zone detection keeps everyone on schedule, no matter where they’re located in the world.
- Bookafy integrates and syncs well with popular calendars.
- Automatically generates Zoom links for upcoming appointments.
Perfect For
Bookafy is great for businesses of any size. We find that the most notable users of Bookafy are service-based businesses and online tutors. Here’s who’s been using Bookafy:
- HVAC businesses.
- Online language tutors.
- Personal coaches.
What Features Should You Look for in a Booking App?
Now that you’ve gone through our list of the top booking apps in 2022, let’s teach you how to choose the right booking app for your business.
All of the best apps include a combination of the following valuable features:
- Customizability. Your business is unique, so it deserves a booking portal that reflects its current branding and corporate identity.
- Flexibility. No two businesses are the same, so you need a booking app that’s flexible enough to accommodate your particular needs.
- Calendar integration. Every booking app should be able to integrate with your calendar. When they do, you save time and effort.
- Business tools. The best booking app should have these features, from generating invoices to keeping customers and staff informed of upcoming appointments.
To find the best booking app for your business, ask yourself the following questions:
- Can I quickly and effortlessly create an online booking page for my business?
- Will this booking app allow my customers to schedule, pay for or reschedule appointments online?
- Can I set parameters, such as service types, staff members, buffer zones, and block-out periods for booking my services?
- Will this booking app automatically send messages to my staff and customers, reminding them about upcoming appointments?
If you’ve answered yes to these questions, then there’s only one booking app perfect for your business: Book Like A Boss.
Run Your Business Like A Boss
Having the best booking app for your business in 2022 is essential to succeed. You don’t want a system that will take even more time and money to manage.
It’s time for you to do business smarter and faster. When you do business smarter and faster, you end up making money like a boss!
