Which Booking App Do You Recommend?

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visioncraft
visioncraft Member Posts: 151 Learner
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I'd like to add a booking widget to our website, to allow prospective visitors to book an initial consultation with us — which is done via video conferencing. Features we're looking for:

  • must integrate with Apple Calendar
  • must be able to complete booking without leaving the website - i.e., we do not want the visitor to have to leave the site and go to a 'booking page'
  • must be able to customise appearance of booking widget enough to (somewhat) fit with our brand guidelines

Things that would be nice to have:

  • integration with an open-source, free video conferencing tool like https://meet.jit.si/ rather than just the usual commercial offerings (Zoom, Teams, etc.)
  • ability to 'look busy' - i.e., fill the calendar with 'dummy' appointments when times are slow…
  • integration with social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) so that bookings can also be made directly from the social media page
  • SMS reminders (to customers in Australia)

As far as I can tell, Duda offers two apps atm that we could integrate directly into the site: Book Like a Boss and Bookafy. It seems to me that Bookafy comes pretty close to fitting what we want, but as we have no experience with either, I thought I'd ask here…

Do you have any experience with these apps? Can either of them do what we need? Would you recommend either? Or something else entirely?

Answers

  • courtneyquaresimo
    courtneyquaresimo Member Posts: 184 Leader
    edited September 2023
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    @visioncraft Will this only be used for booking consultations?

  • visioncraft
    visioncraft Member Posts: 151 Learner
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    @courtneyquaresimo in our case, yes - we don’t plan to accept payments through the booking system, or do classes, events or any type of group booking.

  • visioncraft
    visioncraft Member Posts: 151 Learner
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    Still struggling to find a booking solution. The main stumbling block seems to be the lack of ability to customise the colours and fonts of the embedded widget. All of the solutions I've looked so far, including the über-popular Calendly, allow only for very limited customisation: you are often limited in what colours you can choose, where they are applied, and can only select fonts from a preset list…

    Unfortunately, not being able to properly customise the colours and fonts of the widget is a deal-breaker — our brand guidelines are strict.

    Does anyone know a solution that would allow us to fully customise the appearance of the booking widget? It's not a problem if we have to hand-code the styles with CSS, as long as we can actually get the widget to fit in with our brand…

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