SimplyBook.me Reviews

Incredible tool. So many features. Build epic booking systems.

It seems to be something that they do not actively work on, which seems crazy to me. Customer support ([SENSITIVE CONTENT]!) is dire. She sits on her little throne of customer support power/possession and then acts as a mindless, droning, and passive-aggressive gatekeeper for SimplyBook. It makes working with the company a chore, and I would seriously not want to pay money every month with her as our Account Manager. She makes the process of this (incredible!) application, seem hopeless, limited, and dire. You need your first point of contact to laude the company, and care about it deeply! To inspire its customers, and to show them how much of an incredible booking system can be built with SimplyBook.

They have a very wide set of features for users that are using their scheduling interface. The API seems to be quite robust as well handling many of the core scheduling features in it.

The pricing is based on features and number of bookings which is very scalable for our use case that has lots of people that require a calendar but may never use the booking features that are provided by this integration.

They claim that their product is HIPAA compliant. However, turning on the HIPAA compliant features shuts down access to their API, which is the only thing we are using them for.

Their API support is very poor. Most of the time they just say they cannot help and their answers are very abrupt and unhelpful answers most of the time (you have to keep nagging to get a decent response). There are bugs here and there in the API. The documentation for their API, though large, is incomplete and lacks thorough/clear explanations and neglects things like how call backs work etc.

It looks like their feature set is growing but the API capacity is not.

For companies and service providers, SimplyBook.me has a number of benefits. Customers may quickly book appointments online thanks to the software's user-friendly design and straightforward booking system. It provides fully configurable booking forms, automated reminders, and notifications, which lower no-show rates and boost client engagement. Businesses can maximize their resources thanks to SimplyBook.me's robust calendar management tool, which guarantees effective scheduling. Online transactions can be made securely and conveniently thanks to the software's support for interfaces with well-known payment gateways. SimplyBook.me additionally offers thorough reporting and analytics, including information on appointment trends, revenue production, and customer preferences. SimplyBook.me improves consumer satisfaction, business processes, and booking efficiency overall.

Even though SimplyBook.me has several advantages, there are a few things to take into account. To fully leverage the software's customization options for particular business needs, some technical know-how or assistance may be needed. The amount of time and work required to set up the program will depend on how complex the scheduling requirements are. Although the program integrates with payment gateways, there can be additional costs depending on the amount of transactions or the payment processor. It's also crucial to keep in mind that some sophisticated capabilities, such as advanced reporting or extensive customization choices, might only be accessible through more expensive pricing tiers. However, the overall value and usefulness that SimplyBook.me offers outweighs these restrictions.

It has some really great features that we needed - multiple locations, the ability to take appointment deposits, customise notification emails and having a questionnaire for clients to fill in at the point of booking. The ability to download our daily appointments as a CSV file is really useful - generally speaking, the amount of data we're able to extract from it for our monitoring is fantastic. The customer service is fast and helpful.

The interface took a bit of getting used to (but once you're used to it, it's fine! We have some single appointments for one person and some workshops with multiple spaces, but they have to be set up in the same way so the workshop booking interface is quite clunky from the customer's perspective. Some of the info (for example the service description) isn't viewable on mobile devices which is a shame. The recent price rises were a bit of a shock when it came to renew our subscription and unfortunately it has now become unaffordable for us to keep using.

I searched for software that I could add to my Wordpress site that would allow for multiple locations (service providers), allow for different pricing, coupons, easy booking and more. This also has a simple Facebook integration, marketing tools and so much more.
It took me a few days to figure it out as there are many features that are weaved together. But once I did, it now takes just minutes to add or edit classes and services.

The add-ons are expensive and may not make sense for my business in the long run as we scale up. We shall see.

I love how you can basically create your own website for your booking system and customize it to suit your brand. I love the added custom features. The fact that you can choose what to enable and what to disable based on your business’s needs is amazing! And the annual price for the Basic plan so great! Definitely most cost effective than other scheduling systems I’ve used in the past.

I feel like they should include more than just 3 custom features on the basic plan. “Accepting payments” & “Accepting deposits” are 2 main features that most businesses require, & without a doubt should be included for free. It’s kind of a no brainer. Or both of these features should be 2 in 1 because they go hand in hand. Having to enable both of them then leaves you with only 1 more custom feature to select.

Other than this, everything else is great!

I love how user friendly this software is! I found the video tutorials very helpful and the customer service was prompt and friendly. I appreciate how they would always send article links to refer back to after the chat and would email me when we got disconnected. I also love the booking site themes to choose from, they are all very well designed.

If I had to give one improvement it would be to allow users to get more than three custom features with the first upgrade tier. I would have loved to get five to test it out, and would have definitely upgraded once my business bookings began. The jump from three to unlimited is a big jump, maybe offer a tier in between for new subscribers. Other than that the software itself is pretty amazing.

The booking calendar allows my clients to book my services directly via the calendar, linked from my site. This is a handy feature and a selling point in my business, where people want easy ways to make appointments at times of their choosing. I can customise the forms to suit my own specific needs.

The features are not always intuitively set out, so it has taken a while to find out what can be done. When I get a mail infpoming me of a booking, it would be good to get either, 1. a direct link to the new booking or the day of the booking, or 2. all the details of the booking in a mail. I would also like to be able to synchronise the booking calendar with the offline calendar in my mail client, but I have not found out how, if it even is possible.

Incredible amount of features for the $.
HIPAA compliance / encryption
SOAP notes
Versatility
Complete customization of confirmation emails to both service providers & Services
Very easy for clients to navigate
Clients can track their own packages
Ability to force pre-pay
Intake form option

Seriously, I could list a ton more amazing features plus the fact that they continue to add more.

Realizing this was initially designed to serve salons, not health care providers, I hope to see improvements in the following areas:

SOAP notes are the only therapy note option. Woud be nice to have a simple progress notes option.

Ability to tender in person payments directly thru the platform would be a really big deal for us. Right now, a transaction is only tendered if they pay when they book thru the website. In person, we can create invoices and mark them as paid, but need to use a separate platform to capture cc payment.

It would be nice if we didn't have to go thru a 3rd party for video calls. Gruveo has been good so far, but it's still extra steps to move from appt to video. Ideally, the ability for the practitioner to enter the video call directly thru their appointment calendar would be grt.

A mobile app for clients to manage appts & take video calls would be excellent.

I think these r the biggest things that affect us, but even with these, the simplybook platform has been grt.

The ease of implementation to outside apps. The facebook and website integration ease is well done.

Editing the booking landing page. Fortunately, I have web builder knowledge and that is helping but your system is not user friendly nor provide helpful items such as best size of banner image for templates.

I've never had an issue with the site being down, and customers have found the booking process easy to use. I love the custom translation features which allow me to set the exact terminology for my specific business.

I've use this for about 5 years, and we love it.

When we set it up, it definitely took some learning to work out how to make it work for us (special day schedules only). But now that it's up and running, it hasn't skipped a beat. I can keep adding and changing things as I go and as our business grows and changes.

I would like to be able to set the date that follow up emails go out requesting a review to a later date, as our customers don't receive their final printed product for up to 2 weeks after their booking, so asking them for a review a maximum of 3 days after their sitting isn't very useful for us :-(
I'd also love some more flexibility in sending sms or email reminders (eg, email 3 days before booking, sms 1 day before).

Setting up our home page (especially images) has taken a lot of trial and error, but it's working for us now :-)

SimplyBook is very easy to install on a WordPress website, using an iFrame.

It's very easy to change the booking widget so it matches the style of the website.

Support is very friendly, quick and helpful.

There's a free version that has enough features in some cases.

It's VERY annoying that we have to renew the free version manually on a monthly basis. This was forgotten the first couple of months, which caused issues with the widget on the website. I have to set a reminder to do this manually. I get why they do this, but it's definitely not very user friendly and they should at least make it easier to renew.

Because the integration is with iFrame, this causes issues (which I did have multiple times) and it's slower than something that's built-in. These issues ultimately mean that I will personally not be using SimplyBook for my agency in the future. However, it's definitely a good software and for some people it will be the right solution.

The overall look and feel of the software is great. Inviting, educational, (for the most part) user-friendly. There are features of this software that are not offered anywhere else which is a plus!

The customer service is awful. You get generated responses and rarely does the team provide answers that actually fix or aid in the issue. There's also very little room for softwared update recommendations. Multiple times I have requested / suggested developers add options and received responses like 'this is not something our developers can manage at this time'. The parameters of features in the software are also almost TOO specific. Multiple times, we have had clients unable to book appointments because something on the backend didn't match up with availability. It's caused a few issues.

I like that I can mostly do what I want. The software doesn't exactly line up with my business model, but I have found enough ways modify my setup to get the results I need. However, I have found that traditional pen and paper results in better results in regards to scheduling.

The timezones are confusing. My company travels to locations in many different timezones for photoshoot appointments. We've found in some trips where the location is in a different timezone than our headquarters, clients will book with the wrong timezone. When we set up the appointment schedule, we have also found the timezones confusing because we always have to adjust in our heads the time. If we live in Central time and our clients/location are in Eastern Time, we shouldn't have to set up the Eastern Time Zone by using Central Time Zone as the base. When clients get reminders, they should get reminders in the proper timezone. To make it easier, we should have the option to turn timezones off. If we set up an open calendar from 3:00pm-9:00pm, it shouldn't matter what timezone we are in since both our people and the clients are experiencing the same time. There is never a time when it would matter what the timezones are.