Square Appointments Review
All you need is a Square account and a mobile device to get started with Square Appointments, a full-featured booking software app.
Square Appointments

Total Rating | 4.5 |
---|---|
Pricing | Good |
Features | Excellent |
Customer Service | Good |
Contract Length & Early Termination Fees | Excellent |
Integrations & Add-Ons | Good |
Reviews | Excellent |
Pros
- Easy to use
- Excellent mobile app
- Free for individuals
- Includes a free online store
Cons
- Limited customization
- Some integrations missing
Square Appointments Overview
Despite its name, Square Appointments is much more than just booking software. It’s also a fully-featured POS that not only lets you schedule and manage appointments but also allows you to take payments, create discounts, accept tips, and more. Best of all, Square Appointments is free for individuals/independent contractors. All you need is your phone (or any internet-connected device) and a free Square account.
Although Square Appointments is part of Square’s larger integrated platform that’s meant to address a broad swath of business needs, it’s still possible to sign up specifically for the booking features without using the entire Square platform. However, as with many of Square’s other features, Square’s booking solution doesn’t make much sense unless you use Square for payment processing.
On the other hand, if you already use Square or are considering using it, Square Appointments may well be the best scheduling software for you since it works seamlessly with the rest of Square’s services.
What Is Square Appointments?
Square Appointments is a scheduling and online customer booking tool that comes free (for one user) with every Square account. Automatic appointment reminders are included with the free plan. The paid plan includes multi-staff appointments and split tipping so customers can book more than one service.
Table of Contents
Square Appointments Pricing
Plan Name | Cost | When To Use |
---|---|---|
Free | $0/month, 2.6% + $0.10 processing fee | For single businesses that are just starting out or have basic appointment needs |
Plus | $29/month, 2.5% + $0.10 processing fee | For multilocation businesses wanting additional features, such as no-show protection |
Premium | $69/month, 2.5% + $0.10 processing fee | For multilocation businesses detailed reporting and commission tracking |
There are three plans, each of which offers a complete suite of scheduling features. The lower-tiered plans cap the maximum number of staff who can access the account, and the higher-tiered plans offer a slight discount on Square’s credit card processing.
- Free: $0/month, 2.6% + $0.10 per transaction
- Plus: $29/month, 2.5% + $0.10 per transaction
- Premium: $69/month, 2.5% + $0.10 per transaction
The free plan comes offers some generous features, including:
- Square assistant
- Automated reminders
- Square Online
- Instagram integration
- SEO tools
- Team management
- Time tracking
- Permissions
- Sales history
- Low-stock alerts
That should be enough to get your small booking business off the ground and may even be all a larger establishment needs as well. But if you’re looking for some more advanced features, Pro offers:
- Multiple locations
- No-show protection
- Daily appointment limit
- Google calendar sync
The Premium package unlocks even more at a still relatively low price point and, among other things, you get access to:
- Resource management
- Custom permissions
- Sales vs. Labor reporting
- Commission tracking
Square appointment pricing is competitive with many other booking software platforms. However, most other booking software with free plans has some feature limitations. By contrast, Square Appointments has a fully-featured free plan for individuals. If you’re operating from multiple locations you’ll need to at least sign up for the Plus plan and, if you’re needing detailed reporting and commission tracking, Premium might be the way to go.
It’s also worth noting that if you already have a Square-powered business in need of booking software that can accommodate multiple employees, the price for Square Appointments will likely be worth it — and not just for the seamless payment integration. You can also sign up for a 30-day free trial to get a sense of whether Square Appointments is worth the price of admission.
Square Appointments Features
Square Appointment features are undeniably strong, even if they are a little bit basic in terms of appearance and options for visual customization.
- Integrated Payments & POS: Square Appointments integrates with Square payment processing and functions seamlessly alongside the Square POS system and the entire Square suite of business products. That’s a huge plus if you already use Square’s payment processing, inventory management, staff management, or other products. You can check out customers right from the Square Appointments app. Since Square allows unlimited devices, you could potentially have a main POS at the counter and check out customers from their seats using your phone or an iPad. Checking out customers and collecting their payments after their appointment couldn’t be easier. Add any retail items to their total and swipe, dip, or tap their credit card (you can also accept cash or check). The first time you accept a customer’s credit card, you can store their card for future use.
- COVID-19 Features: Square Appointments has some features that have proven useful during COVID-19. It’s easy to add a temporary message related to COVID-19 at the top of your booking site and configure it to limit the number of appointments a location or staff member can accept per day or add a buffer after each appointment for cleaning. Contactless selling features include NFC payments, a QR booking code for your website and/or shop window, and digital gift cards. You can also require prepayment for appointments (with the option to add a tip during prepayment), which can help free up cash during slower times and prevent the need for in-person payments.
- Tipping: You can choose whether to offer preset tip suggestions in percentages or whole amounts. The Smart Tips option provides tip suggestions in whole amounts for transactions of less than $10 and percentage-based tips for larger amounts. Customers can now add a tip when prepaying for their appointment, which removes the need for any in-person checkout or tipping transactions — though you can still allow the option to tip in-person if you so choose.
- Online Booking Site: On the customer’s end, your free online booking site automatically displays your services and availability, and it allows them to book or reschedule appointments. It also integrates with Google, Facebook, and Instagram, allowing new customers to instantly book an appointment from their social media apps or right from Google. Booking from the client’s perspective is extremely simple: They simply select a type of appointment or specific service, choose an available time slot, and enter their contact information.
- Square Assistant: This is a newer feature in Square Appointments that handles confirmations and rescheduling via automatic responses to customers. Using this digital messenger, customers can reschedule appointments any time of day or night. Responding to your customers, canceling appointments, rescheduling appointments, and updating your calendar all take up time and resources, and Square Assistant saves you those resources.
- Mobile App: Square Appointments is available as a standalone app for iOS and Android. Both apps are highly reviewed on their respective platforms and provide a seamless experience whether you’re accessing Appointments from a web browser or the mobile app. The ability to take mobile payments is a game-changer for any independent service professional who wants to accept credit cards and not just cash or check.
- Commission Tracking: Square Appointments now allows commission tracking. This feature lets you assign a commission to each sale or service provided. The commission rate is adjustable per employee. The feature also allows you to assign commissions for retail sales.
- Resource Tracking: This feature lets you create resources — such as rooms, beds, chairs, stations, etc. — and assign them to your services as needed. When those services are booked, the resources are booked as well, making sure you don’t book more services than there are sufficient resources available at any given time.
- Square Contracts: Use this integration to email digital contracts to your customers after they book an appointment. You can create custom contracts or use Square’s contract templates. Some templates include a COVID-19 agreement, service agreement, and credit card authorization form. Once the customer digitally signs the contract, you’ll be able to see that they signed it on their customer profile.
- Team Management: Square offers free timekeeping and basic employee management tools as part of its feature-set. If you need advanced features, you can upgrade to Team Management Plus for $35/month.
- Customer Directory: Square users should take advantage of this SaaS’s intricate customer management tools to track loyalty, satisfaction, and feedback. This feature is free with your Square account.
- Square Marketing: Send customers coupons, welcomes, and announcements to clientele based on criteria, such as the frequency of their visits. Your template selection is limited, and you can edit the elements of the template, but it’s limited to adding and subtracting elements, swapping out images, and changing text. This feature costs $15/month/500 contacts to send unlimited emails (there are also higher price tiers for more contacts).
- Square Invoices: If you want to allow your customers to pay for their appointments later online (rather than in-person at the appointment), this is the feature that will suit you perfectly. Square invoices are free to send; you just pay 2.9% + $0.30 per invoice when customers pay with credit or debit online. You can also accept payments for invoices in-person using a card reader to qualify for the 2.6% + $0.10 rate.
Customer Service & Support
Square offers its merchants, including those using Square Appointments, a few options for customer service. It isn’t always super easy to reach a live person, but overall, Square’s support channels are respectable:
- Phone Support: Available Monday through Friday from 6 AM to 6 PM, you can call to speak to a human. However, you’ll need to enter your product code to get through, and the phone number isn’t prominently displayed anywhere on the website.
- Support Center: Like most online support centers for software, there is a lot to sort through here, especially since one knowledgebase services all of Square’s numerous products. Fortunately, performing a simple search for “appointments” brings up plenty of material to help you suss out any issues you might be experiencing.
- Square’s Support Robot: This is automated chat support that, while not as good as real live chat support, can help direct you to the right resources.
Square Appointments also offers customer support to your customers in the form of Square Assistant. Granted, this is automated support that wouldn’t be able to handle nuanced requests, but it’s free, and it’s 24/7. Your customers can mostly just use it to cancel and reschedule appointments — which is probably all they would need to use it for anyway. Note that, while customers can change appointments in Square Assistant (if you enable this feature), you as the business owner will not be able to view the conversations between your customer and Square Assistant.
Payment Processing With Square Appointments
If you’re planning to take payments through your booking software, you’ll be able to leverage Square’s considerable expertise in that area. Though Square is the only payment processor you can use with Square Appointments, the seamless integration is a big plus for Square users. There’s no additional monthly fee for using the payment processing services, but Square charges 2.5% to 2.6% + $0.10 per transaction, depending on your plan level.
Of course, if you use a different credit card processor and are happy with them, you’ll probably pass up Square Appointments for a different booking software program that integrates with your preferred processor.
Contract Length & Early Termination Fees
Square allows you to purchase its services on a month-to-month basis so there is never any long-term obligation and you can also set up a free trial.
Square Appointments Integrations & Add-Ons
As feature-rich as Square is, it’s also quite expandable. As a result, all software that’s compatible with Square is compatible with Square Appointments as well. However, depending on the program, the software may only interact with the Appointments feature in a limited way or not at all if the software performs an unrelated function. In any case, some of the more popular Square integrations include:
- Vend
- Wix
- TouchBistro
- WooCommerce
- BigCommerce
- Lavu
- 3dcart
- Zoho Books and Zoho Invoice
- QuickBooks Online
- Xero
- Stitch Labs
- Google Calendar
- And many others
Square Appointments also integrates with all of Square’s other add-ons, including Square Marketing, Square Team Management, Square Payroll, Square Invoices, Square Loyalty, and others.
It’s also worth noting that Square integrates with other popular booking software programs, such as Acuity, Appointy, Bookeo, Booxi, and others. Square users may also want to investigate these options to see if they may prefer to use one of those programs with, or instead of, Square Appointments.
Square Appointments Reviews
Overall, Square Appointments enjoys an overwhelmingly positive reputation online.
Negative Square Appointments Reviews & Complaints
As Square Appointments lives inside the broader Square framework, it’s a bit harder to isolate reviews of its functionality, e.g., in terms of customer support or payment processing, which apply to the entire Square framework. It’s difficult to find many purely negative reviews about Square Appointments specifically, but most of the negative or mixed reviews mention one or more of the following limitations:
- Limited Customization Options: If you want to customize every aspect of your booking website’s appearance and workflow, this program does not provide the nuanced controls to perform such customizations.
- Somewhat Basic Features: Some users feel Square Appointments is overly simple and wish it had a more expansive feature-set, such as more finite client management or the ability to book classes.
- App Integrations: A few customers noted that they wished there were more apps specifically designed to work with Square Appointments.
Positive Square Appointments Reviews & Testimonials
Square Appointments is a well-liked program, garnering an impressive 4.4/5 stars on G2 Crowd. The latest version of the Square Appointments app has also been well-received at 4.9/5 stars on the App Store and 4.4/5 stars on Google Play.
- Free For Individuals: Many customers praise Appointments for being a fully-featured free booking software solution for individuals.
- Integrated Functionality: Most reviewers who also take advantage of the payment processing systems and other features that Square offers consider Appointments to be a good value.
- Easy To Use: Considering just how much Square can do, it’s remarkably easy to use and super fast to set up.
- Portable: Square was initially designed for mobile devices, so just about everything it offers is available on the go as an app or a peripheral.
Final Verdict Of Square Appointments
As part of a larger, integrated merchant services platform, Square Appointments can provide established small businesses with just about everything they need to book and manage appointments online as well as accept payments as a mobile POS, with the bonus of working harmoniously with all the other numerous Square products. On a less substantive note, Square brings a high degree of polish to its products. If you like clean, visually pleasing UIs, you’ll like what Square has to offer.
Square Appointments accommodates both self-employed users who only need to manage their appointments as well as larger teams that need to manage appointments across multiple staff members and locations. If you already use Square’s free POS, Square Appointments may work out perfectly for you. Businesses using Square Appointments to manage multiple employees’ booking schedules will even receive a small discount on Square’s processing fee. On the other hand, businesses looking for advanced booking software with more customization, multiple payment processing options, or intricate functionality may find Square Appointments too limited or overly basic.
Square Appointments: FAQs
The Merchant Maverick Seal of Approval 🏆
Square Appointments ![]() |
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After hours of in-depth research and evaluation, we can confidently recommend this brand to our readers. Get started today and see Square Appointments for yourself.
The Merchant Maverick Seal of Approval 🏆
Square Appointments ![]() |
---|
After hours of in-depth research and evaluation, we can confidently recommend this brand to our readers. Get started today and see Square Appointments for yourself.
I would give it zero stars if I could. Their software does not put appointments scheduled by customers onto our Square Appointment calendar and it does not notify us of any new customer requests. This is the absolute antithesis of what it means to be a scheduling software, but as bad as that is, their customer service is even worse. Atrocious, does not even begin to describe it.Do yourself a favor and find another provider before they put you out of business.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I agree Lewis, horrible experience for me as well.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
How unfortunate an experience we’ve had with Bookfresh. I consider them to falsely advertise their ability. For example, their group scheduling ‘algorithm’ isn’t an ‘algorithm’ at all. It simply selects an employee calendar at random. If that one person isn’t available, it says the whole group is unavailable.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Book fresh is the worst company Ive ever dealt with and their customer service is useless. If you need an answer to a question, they respond promptly but never with an answer to your question and of course they wont talk to you, so you have to do all of this timely follow up to hopefully pin down a correct answer. They use to have a 15 min “secret” set up call (they wont tell you about the call) but doesn’t matter, and they took that away. Do you self a favor and use eventbrite or schedulicity
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have been using Bookfresh for years. When it first came out I liked it better than anything else on the market. Lately, not so much. Here are the reasons: When a client schedules, a call is made to my phone, bookfresh tells me who the client is and time requested and asks me to push “1” to accept, this feature has not worked for months and bookfresh is not letting us know when it will be working again. A very frustrating experience, especially because I paid for a year in advance. When I contacted the company, their response was to give me one month credit – which doesn’t help me much. Shame on Bookfresh for getting worse instead of better. I will soon take my business elsewhere.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
BookFresh has been a giant headache from day one. However, being a small business owner and more or less running the show, finding another online scheduling system did not take precedence. BookFresh does work, but it has so many glitches that I would constantly be cursing it and thinking that I have to find something else. Then I found Acuity! What a life saver and business changer. They have been nothing but phenomenal. Customer service is top notch. I NEVER got a response from BookFresh when I made an inquire. Ever. I can’t say enough good things about Acuity. They are the best!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
This program is very rigid and is not flexible for multiple bookings. Whatever business you have, this is only good for booking one event at a time, if you are a barber with multiple chairs and need to book multiple times, good luck, and the fact that you cannot speak to them in person is very unprofessional. I would not recommend this service unless it was for a single booking type business.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I had been using BookFresh for a few months up until recently when we started noticing that certain times were not available that should have been. I tried reaching out to their customer support, and got no response. I kept following up and eventually got a message back linking to some help article that didn’t answer my questions at all.After searching for alternatives, I came across FlexBooker (www.flexbooker.com) and after using them for the last few weeks will never look back. It’s been like night and day honestly, the system is more flexible for me and the customer support is just awesome, I can’t say enough good things about them. Just wanted to add my experience to the mix here.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Horrible tech support :I signed for the trial and canceled 2 weeks later because I found something better, The company has charged my credit card for two months now, I can’t get anybody to respond to my multiples emails , there is not voice mail or tech support person.I can’t believe that, the company doesn’t have a live person to respond to questions or cancellations, please call the number just out of curiosity and you will see.I am going to keep trying to get my money back.Please be aware of the poor customer service.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hey Bianca,
Nice history of the company. You should mention that Bookfresh was purchased recently by Square. I did a video review of Bookfresh that might be useful for your readers. Feel free to include it in your post if you’d like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-K02HYLvl4
I used Bookfresh on a client site and didn’t like the overall function of it, similar to some of the CONS you mentioned above. It’s not as flexible as some of the other options out there. I used Bookeo recently and it’s much better.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for the heads up on the acquisition! We have Bookeo on the upcoming review roster; I’m excited to find out more about it.
And thanks for the link to your review. Anyone reading this post should see the link and be encouraged to hear a new perspective (though we seem to agree on many things!).
Best,
Bianca
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I also signed up for the 30 day trial of the Business package. My credit card was charged on March 27th (before the end of the 30-day trial) for $19.95 and it said the billing cycle ended on April 27th. I immediately downgraded my membership to “freebie” and lost ALL my “business” benefits (also IMMEDIATELY). I contacted customer service and the representative confirmed that I was no longer eligible to use the business package. I replied back and stated that this seems to be an antiquated way of doing things, and that I should have access to the business package until the end of my billing cycle. Now after reading this post and the comments, I’m thinking they charged my card on the incorrect date also. I will be looking for another online appointment booking system. So long BookFresh.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I set up a BookFresh demo using my credit card to secure the free 30 day trail membership. This membership was cancelled within the first 2 weeks of the trial, though 2 weeks later my credit card was charged $19.95. Upon calling BookFresh, the phone number is inactive. I have disputed this charge and caution anyone who is considering trying BookFresh too look elsewhere.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I have never signed up for Bookfresh and had a 24.90 charge to my card. I tried finding a number to call, no luck, so i emailed them and the woman said she couldn’t find an account for me. I told her I didn’t have one but they carged me for it, she then went on to say that I must have set up an appointment with a company and they charged my card and I need to contact them….I did no such thing, and the charge CLEARLY says: BKF*BOOKFRESH, 888-7869589 -$24.90
I sent pictures of my card statement to the support email people and they stopped responding……REALLY??
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
I’ve just discovered the exact same situation. We’ve been charged $24.95 since Sept 2014 and I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t discover it until today. I thought it was my husband buying books which is normal for us. We’ve never even heard of this account. I plan to contact the company tomorrow but based on your comment I’m concerned I’ll get no where. I also plan to contact our credit card. Any advice on how to approach this? Did you end up getting your money back and new charges stopped?
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Did you find any other software you would recommend instead? Any that are private label that could be used in consultation with clients? Thanks for the great article.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Hi Gabe,
Thanks for reading!
My recommendation has to depend on what you’re looking for. If it’s private label, check out ScheduleOnce. Our review describes its pros and cons, while this site explains its private label option.
Hope this helps. Best of luck!
Bianca
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.