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The core difference here isn’t which tool books more appointments — it’s what kind of business sits behind those bookings. SimplyBook.me is built squarely around the scheduling workflow itself, layering on promotion tools, intake forms, membership sales, and multi-location service management. Square Appointments arrives as part of a broader Square ecosystem that spans payments, point-of-sale hardware, team management, and retail — scheduling is one piece of a larger operational picture. That shapes everything from how you’ll pay to which features actually matter to you.
One honest note upfront: SimplyBook.me publishes its pricing on its pricing page, but we weren’t able to capture the current figures this round, so check there directly. Square Appointments’ pricing is fully captured and transparent.
Pricing
Square Appointments offers three tiers, all billed monthly per location:
| Plan | Price |
|---|---|
| Square Appointments Free | $0/month |
| Square Appointments Plus | $49/month, billed monthly |
| Square Appointments Premium | $149/month, billed monthly |
SimplyBook.me does publish its plans on its pricing page — we just weren’t able to bind the current figures to plans this round, so head there directly to compare against Square’s numbers before making a decision.
What Square makes clear from the table above: you can start at $0/month and scale to $149/month per location as your needs grow. That transparency is a genuine advantage when you’re budgeting.
Features: Where Each Tool Focuses
Scheduling and Booking Core
Both tools handle appointment booking, but the surrounding features tell different stories.
SimplyBook.me’s captured features are heavily oriented around the booking experience itself: intake forms with custom fields (the example given is a birthdate field and a treatment consent checkbox), booking confirmations, appointment reminders, and cancellation notifications. It also supports reserve with Google, Facebook and Instagram booking buttons, and a client-facing app that lets clients book, reschedule, cancel, see booking history, purchase packages, and access tickets online or offline.
Square Appointments captures its feature set at a higher level — categories like “Manage your appointments,” “Attract new clients,” “Stay organized,” and “Automate and save time” are present, but the captured data doesn’t break these into granular feature items the way SimplyBook.me’s does. The honest read is that Square’s scheduling capability exists within a platform designed to serve many business types.
Promotions, Memberships, and Revenue Tools
SimplyBook.me’s captured features include coupons and gift cards, memberships, service add-ons, product sales upon client booking, promotions during low times, and automated “Come Back Soon” messages. There’s also a reviews collection feature that publishes to the booking page, and a business directory listing on booking.page.
Square Appointments’ captured features include categories like “Keep clients coming back,” “Add revenue streams,” and “Track performance,” but the specific mechanisms aren’t detailed in the captured data — so we can only say those categories exist, not what they contain.
Point of Sale and Payments
SimplyBook.me captures payment acceptance including cash, card, gift cards, pay later, tap-to-pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and payment links. It also captures on-site booking and sales management, barcode scanning for products, and a tips feature both upon booking and upon checkout.
Square Appointments explicitly names a dedicated Appointments POS, hardware readers (reader for contactless and chip; reader for magstripe), and a payments overview — reflecting Square’s established payment infrastructure. The captured categories also reference managing cash flow and scheduling and paying your team.
Integrations and Connectivity
SimplyBook.me captures specific integration touchpoints: Google Calendar sync, Mailchimp emails, Google Sheets, Slack and other messengers, Joomla/WordPress/Site123, Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft 365/Teams, and Reserve with Google. There’s also an AI Voice Booking category listed.
Square Appointments’ captured data references business types across beauty, home services, professional services, and food — but doesn’t enumerate specific third-party integrations in the captured feature items.
Multi-Location and Team Management
SimplyBook.me captures multiple locations as a feature category, along with the ability to “build your own system admin team with as many users as you want and decide who can do what” and connect service providers to services flexibly.
Square Appointments captures categories including “Schedule and pay your team” and references home & commercial, contractors, and professional services contexts, but team-management specifics aren’t in the captured feature items.
Who Each Tool Is Built For
SimplyBook.me’s captured positioning — “flexible features for service businesses” — combined with features like intake forms with medical-use examples, tickets for medical testing, QR codes for covid testing/vaccinations, reviews, a custom domain name, and a photo gallery suggests it’s designed for service businesses that want deep control over the booking experience itself: clinics, salons, studios, and similar appointment-driven operations that benefit from customizable client journeys and promotional tools baked into the scheduler.
Square Appointments positions itself around keeping “everything synced in real time” and names specific verticals in its captured data: beauty salons, nail salons, hair salons, day spas, tattoo and piercing, med spas, home and commercial services, automotive, professional services, pet services, cleaning, and landscaping. The presence of POS hardware, retail-adjacent categories, and team payment tools suggests it suits businesses that are already in — or want to grow into — Square’s broader operational stack.
Some users of SimplyBook.me report friction around scheduling and dispatch, worth keeping in mind if that workflow is central to your operation.
We don’t have third-party review data for Square Appointments this round, so we can’t point to any user-reported friction patterns there.
Choose SimplyBook.me If…
- You want a scheduler with deeply captured booking-experience features: custom intake forms, membership sales, coupons, gift cards, promotions, on-site POS, and client-facing app functionality all present in the feature data
- Your business involves intake or consent workflows (medical, wellness, testing)
- You want Reserve with Google, Facebook/Instagram bookings, and explicit social integrations as part of the scheduling layer
- You’re comfortable checking SimplyBook.me’s pricing page directly, since their current plan figures weren’t available in our capture
Choose Square Appointments If…
- You want fully transparent, published pricing — $0, $49/month, or $149/month per location — with no surprises
- Your business already operates in the Square ecosystem, or you want appointments, POS hardware, team pay, and cash-flow management under one roof
- Your vertical is one Square explicitly names: beauty, home services, automotive, professional services, pet services, or similar
- You’d rather start free and scale up by location than commit to a subscription before you know what you need
Both tools serve appointment-based businesses, but they approach the problem from different directions. SimplyBook.me puts the scheduling and client journey at the center; Square Appointments puts the scheduling inside a broader business-operations platform. The right pick depends on whether you need a specialist or a generalist — and SimplyBook.me’s pricing page will tell you whether the cost difference, once you can see it, makes that decision easier.