Setmore vs Square Appointments Comparison 2026
Both cover scheduling & booking. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Free appointment booking for a small team
Booking and payments in one account
At a glance
- Setmore starts cheaper, at $5.
- Both have a genuinely free tier.
Side by side
Setmore | Square Appointments | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $5 | From $49 |
| Pricing model | Free plan, paid tiers | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | 30 days |
| API | Yes | Not stated |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Setmore
Free appointment booking for a small team
Setmore gives away more than most booking tools charge for: unlimited appointments, a booking page and reminders on a plan that costs nothing. Paying adds recurring bookings, two-way calendar sync and the integrations a busier calendar needs. Its own admin is plainer than the newer tools, which is either restful or dated.
Our note
Free covers unlimited appointments and a booking page, which is more than most free tiers in this category give. The $5 upgrade is mostly two-way calendar sync. The question is whether a double booking has cost you anything yet.
Square Appointments
Booking and payments in one account
Square Appointments runs a booking site, staff calendars and reminders, and takes the payment through Square rather than through a separate processor. The free plan covers one location with no monthly fee at all, and the processing rate is where Square earns instead. Paying lowers that rate and adds the scheduling controls a team needs. Anybody who only wants a calendar link and never takes a payment is paying attention to the wrong half of this product.
Our note
Do the arithmetic on the processing gap rather than on the features, because the $49 plan pays for itself somewhere around $12,000 a month in online bookings and is a straight loss below that. The free tier is not a stripped one: it is the same booking product at a higher card rate.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.