Acuity Scheduling alternative with euros and iDEAL

Acuity Scheduling is a US appointment tool, still usable as a standalone product since Squarespace's acquisition. It's built for service providers like coaches, therapists and consultants who want to open up their calendar to clients. Functionally it's mature, but anyone based in the Netherlands or the EU quickly runs into practical friction that simply doesn't exist with ReserveBee.

Three key differences at a glance

What Acuity Scheduling does well

Acuity has a mature payments stack: Stripe, Square and PayPal, with point-of-sale functionality including tap-to-pay, deposits, invoicing and tipping. Plans range from Starter ($20/month) through Standard ($34/month, up to 6 calendars) to Premium ($61/month, up to 36 calendars), plus an Enterprise option on request. From the Standard plan, group classes and workshops are possible alongside 1-on-1 appointments, and the Premium plan offers HIPAA compliance, relevant for US healthcare providers, plus custom API and CSS access and the ability to hide Acuity branding. Multi-location and multi-staff management with per-location timezone handling is well built out, and it benefits from Squarespace's scale and support infrastructure. Even the Starter plan includes automatic timezone conversion and customisable client intake forms, handy for practices with international clients.

Where ReserveBee makes the difference

For a Dutch or European organisation, dollar pricing and the absence of iDEAL is a real hurdle: your customers pay with a method barely used in the Netherlands, and the price fluctuates with the exchange rate. ReserveBee, by contrast, is priced in euros, excluding VAT, with iDEAL as a default payment method. Acuity's trial is also shorter (7 days) than ReserveBee's (14 days), and with no permanent free plan, you pay at least $20 a month from day one at Acuity, regardless of your booking volume. The "resource restrictions" mentioned at Acuity are also a limitation, not a feature: it prevents overbooking a calendar slot, but offers no system to rent out or bundle, say, equipment or rooms as separate objects the way ReserveBee does.

A worked pricing example

Say you're a practice with 15 appointments a month.

In a quiet month, Acuity still charges the full entry price in dollars, with no iDEAL for your Dutch customers. ReserveBee costs nothing in that same situation, in euros, with iDEAL available by default.

Grow to 150 appointments a month across multiple calendars, and Acuity quickly pushes you onto the Standard plan ($34/month, up to 6 calendars), a flat amount regardless of your exact volume. With ReserveBee's Professional plan, you pay €18 a month with 100 reservations included, plus €0.10 for every reservation above that: at 150 appointments, that comes to €23 a month, statistics and priority support included.

Switching from Acuity Scheduling to ReserveBee

Practices switching from Acuity Scheduling usually bring an extensive customer base and calendar settings with them. We're happy to help you migrate that to objects and, where relevant, bundles within ReserveBee for free. If you use multiple calendars at Acuity for different staff or locations, we carry that structure over so nothing changes for your customers, other than a booking page in euros with iDEAL as a trusted payment method for Dutch customers. Prefer to start yourself right away? You can: start a free trial and you're live within minutes.

Built for the European market

Beyond price and currency, there's a difference no comparison table quite captures: ReserveBee is a Dutch company, so you talk directly to the small team that builds the system, not a US support desk working in a different timezone. Questions, feature requests and bug reports go straight to the people actually building the next version, with Dutch-language support available if that's more comfortable. ReserveBee also runs on European infrastructure, aiming for full GDPR compliance: your data and your customers' data stay within the EU, rather than with a US company under US law. For organisations in healthcare, education or the public sector, where data protection is a hard requirement, that matters just as much as receiving invoices in euros instead of dollars subject to exchange-rate swings.

Who should choose ReserveBee?

Are you based in the United States, or don't mind dollar pricing and payment without iDEAL, and specifically need HIPAA compliance? Acuity Scheduling is functionally a strong choice. Are you in the Netherlands or the EU and would rather have euros, iDEAL and no minimum cost in a quiet month? Then ReserveBee is the logical choice. Still weighing purely on features? Look closely at what you actually want to make bookable: just your own time, or rooms and equipment too. We help you migrate your services, calendar and customers for free.

Also worth a look: ReserveBee vs Calendly or ReserveBee vs Setmore.