Square Appointments vs TidyCal Comparison 2026
Both cover scheduling & booking. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
At a glance
- TidyCal starts cheaper, at $29.
- Both have a genuinely free tier.
Side by side
Square Appointments | TidyCal | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $49 | From $29 |
| Pricing model | Free plan, paid tiers | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing (they differ) | Monthly or annual | One-time purchase |
| Free trial (they differ) | 30 days | None |
| API | 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.
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.
Only on this side
- Covers monetization & payments
TidyCal
Booking pages you pay for once
TidyCal does what Calendly does for a single payment instead of a subscription, which over two years is the difference between $29 and several hundred. Paid bookings, recurring meetings and a free plan with unlimited booking types are all in. Polish is thinner and the integrations list is shorter, which is what you are trading for the price.
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.