Built for salons. Not for everyone.
Acuity Scheduling (now Squarespace Scheduling) was designed for anyone who sells time, accountants, coaches, photographers, personal trainers, and yes, salons too. That versatility sounds appealing, but it means the platform was never optimised for how salons actually work. There are no colour formulas, no salon-specific treatment menus, no walk-in POS, and no product inventory for retail upsells. You get a generic booking tool and adapt it as best you can.
Acuity gives you a hosted booking page at a Squarespace subdomain, not a real salon website. If you want your salon to appear on Google with your own domain and professional design, you need to pay for a separate Squarespace website plan on top of your Acuity subscription. That is two bills, two platforms, and two sets of settings to manage, just to have what other salon software includes out of the box.
Acuity prices by "calendars", the number of bookable team members. The Emerging plan covers one person at $20/mo. The moment you bring on a second stylist, you jump to Growing at $34/mo. At six stylists you hit Powerhouse at $61/mo. A growing salon pays more automatically, even if you use fewer features than before. DoTheBeauty charges a flat monthly fee, up to 8 staff on Growth, and unlimited on Pro.
Salon revenue does not only come from booked appointments. Retail product sales, walk-in clients, and on-the-spot billing are everyday reality in a busy salon. Acuity has none of this: no point-of-sale for walk-ins, no product catalogue for retail, and no inventory tracking for back-bar stock.
Mixed bookings, where one client books a colour service with one stylist and a cut with another, all in one visit, are a core workflow for many salons. Acuity is a single-slot scheduling tool. It can manage individual calendars, but it cannot intelligently coordinate a single appointment across multiple stylists and service durations the way a dedicated salon platform can.
$20–$61/mo (monthly billing) or $16–$49/mo (annual billing)
Monthly subscription priced by number of bookable calendars
Your client wants a cut with Bonnie and a keratin treatment with Lisa. Traditional booking systems make them book twice. DoTheBeauty handles it in one seamless flow.
Same 2.5 hours. Traditional booking: one client, one stylist blocked. DoTheBeauty: Emma's full multi-stylist appointment AND a second client in Bonnie's freed time.
Acuity Scheduling is a solid general-purpose booking tool. It handles appointments, intake forms, reminders, and payments well, for coaches, consultants, and solo practitioners. But a salon is not a generic appointment business. You have multiple stylists with different schedules, walk-in clients who need immediate billing, retail products to sell, and mixed-service appointments that span two chairs.
DoTheBeauty was built specifically for this. Mixed bookings let a client book colour with one stylist and a trim with another in a single visit. The reception dashboard handles walk-ins and barcode-scanned product sales without a second platform. And the AI website builder gets your salon on Google, with your own domain, in about 10 minutes, no Squarespace account needed.
Pricing is flat: €19.95/mo for Starter (up to 2 staff), €49/mo for Growth (up to 8 staff), €79/mo for Pro (unlimited). No per-stylist uplift as your team grows.
If you want the full picture on what Acuity charges at each tier, see our <a href="/blog/acuity-scheduling-pricing-salon-cost-breakdown">Acuity Scheduling pricing breakdown for salons</a>. For a broader look at salon booking software, our <a href="/blog/best-salon-booking-system">guide to the best salon booking systems</a> covers all the major platforms side by side.
Ready to try a platform built specifically for salons? <a href="/signup">Start your 7-day free trial</a> or <a href="/pricing">see our pricing plans</a>.
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