SimplyBook.me

Pluspunten

SimplyBook.me is the ONLY "booking engine" which had the capability to integrate "same day book & play" online booking with our in-house "walk-in's" ticketing system. Not only does it "work", but it's a "near perfect fit!" (Largely due to the custom feature "add-ins.") I had done extensive research & tried them all.... Simplybook.me is in a class of it's own. Surprisingly, customer support is also truly "world-class!" Having a fair amount of coding & web design experience, I dug in a lot deeper than the average user. In doing so I uncovered several bugs. Not only was the support phenomenal, but most of the fixes came FAST!

Booking is fast, easy & designed to work well with smart phones. (Really well for the most part with proper setup, selecting the right "timeline" & adding the CSS custom feature add-in.)

Minpunten

"Power comes at a price": Monthly fees are based on "custom feature add-ins." IMO, their tiered pricing needs more flexibility. Pricing model is also based on # of bookings & # of SMS messages (if you use them.) This is not a big deal and actually favors "low volume users." (There is even a 100% free plan that comes with 1 custom feature of your choice.) BUT: If you need more than 3 custom features, monthly fees triple to get to the next tier which is 8 features. (So for a business that only does a few bookings a month but need more than 3 features, SimplyBook.me may be too expensive to use.) ~ However: If you do enough volume", your bringing in enough sales to "more than justify" using the best booking system on the planet!

"Custom CSS" custom feature: Had to use the "Weekly Classes" timeline ALONG with this custom feature ("CSS custom feature) to avoid/minimize potential user mistakes in booking. The combination of these two work OK. With a few "simple" modifications to the other timelines, those should work well too. Hopefully the engineers will make two (2) very slight "navigational" & "display" modifications to correct these issues when using the other timelines.

"Group Bookings" custom feature: When using "group billing custom feature" (one booking for a group of participants): A default quantity of 1 always displays. (Making it too easy for user to forget to select the correct quantity. And on the review screen, this quantity does not appear.)

Pluspunten

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.

Minpunten

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.

Pluspunten

The booking system has many options, easy to fill and clear. Exporting the bookings is an added value so that the info easily affects all employees. Both the layout and the possibilities look professional to our users.

Minpunten

It was a quest to know how all the settings had an effect on the page. The videos are a handy help. I can use the app to track the bookings, but I can't make adjustments to the settings, or at least I haven't found them yet. The e-mail address on our main page also gets emails from the firm, although it is not an admin.

Pluspunten

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.

Minpunten

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.

Pluspunten

I can't say enough about SimplyBook.me. Their platform allowed my small cocktail catering business to pivot during the COVID crisis. We are now able to offer online cocktail classes and have started earning revenue again.

I researched a bunch of different companies and SimplyBook.me has the most flexible and user-friendly platform. I felt that most of the other options were built for those who offer standard weekly classes. SimplyBook.me was the only software I found that fit my business model and allowed me to create online group classes for 10 or more!

I would recommend it to any business going virtual in this new environment!

Minpunten

There are a lot of very cool bells and whistles in this software. It's really easy to customize. Because I am using this a bit out of the box, I run into issues with some of the functionality. But, there is a custom CSS feature that may help with that. Other than that, the user experience could use an upgrade. It's good and gets the job done, but it could be sleeker.