Acuity Scheduling vs Sesami

Acuity Scheduling and Sesami overlap more than most pairs on this page. Both let a customer pick a service, pick a time and pay. The difference is what the booking is connected to.

Acuity, part of Squarespace, is a scheduler you can attach to almost any website. It handles services, durations, intake forms, packages and payments, and it is deliberately light: quick to set up, and independent of whatever platform your site runs on.

Sesami is a modern booking platform for the same businesses: salons, spas, studios, clinics and retailers. The difference is how you get started and what happens once a booking exists. You install it yourself and take bookings the same day, and when you charge for one it settles through the checkout and the counter you already use.

Side by side

	Sesami	Acuity Scheduling
Where it lives	Your storefront, or anywhere you paste the Sesami Experience snippet: WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow, Framer, plain HTML	Alongside your site, embedded or hosted
Checkout	Your own Shopify checkout, taxes, discounts, gift cards	Acuity’s own payment integrations
Sold with other things	A booking sits in the same basket as products	Bookings, packages and gift certificates
In person	Rung up through Shopify POS with the rest of the sale	Not a point-of-sale tool
Resources	Staff, rooms and equipment, several per service	Staff and service availability
Locations	Separate calendars, staff and hours per branch	Supported, with per-calendar setup
Intake forms	Through the Forms app	Built in, and a strength
Build on it	Public API, SDK, an app platform, and agent access	An API for integrations

Where Acuity is the better answer

Acuity is quick. You can be taking bookings in an afternoon, and for a solo practitioner, a consultant or a small studio that is often exactly right. Sesami would be more machinery than the job needs.

Its independence used to be the clearer difference, but it is not much of one any more: the Sesami Experience configurator on sesami.dev generates a snippet you can paste into WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow, Framer or plain HTML.

Its intake forms are also genuinely good, and its pricing starts lower.

If your bookings depend on collecting detailed information beforehand, that is a strength worth weighing.

Where Sesami is the better answer

The case for Sesami starts when a booking involves more than one person’s calendar.

If you already run a store, a separate scheduler means a second checkout, a second customer record and a second set of numbers to reconcile. Sesami removes that by not being separate. The booking is a product: it checks out with the payment methods, taxes, discount codes and gift cards you already use, a client can add a retail item to the same basket, and it reports next to the rest of your revenue.

It also covers the counter. A walk-in booking can be rung up on Shopify POS alongside whatever else the customer is buying, and it lands in the same ledger as an online booking. That single view of what bookings actually earn is hard to assemble when scheduling lives outside commerce.

Resource handling goes deeper too. A service can require a specific person and a specific room, and only be offered when both are free.

There is also a difference in kind, not just in scope. The others are software you run your business on, and their APIs exist so other systems can talk to them. Sesami is a platform you build on: the same booking engine the app runs on is public, with an SDK, an app platform, and access for AI agents that can book, reschedule and answer on a customer’s behalf. If you want a booking experience nobody else has, or you expect agents to be doing the booking before long, that is the difference that matters most.

Modern software, and the difference it makes

The clearest difference is one nobody puts on a comparison table. Most of these were built for a world of sales calls, onboarding fees and multi-week implementations, and they still work that way: you book a demo, you get quoted, someone configures it for you.

Sesami installs from the app store. You set up your services and take your first booking the same day, without speaking to anyone. If you outgrow the defaults there is a public API and an SDK underneath, but nothing about getting started requires a developer.

A fair summary

Acuity is the stronger choice if one person’s availability is the whole problem, and you want something quick and inexpensive.

Sesami is the stronger choice when bookings are part of a wider operation: several locations, staff and rooms and equipment to coordinate, a brand you want the experience to sit inside. Payment is optional in that picture. Plenty of Sesami customers charge nothing at all — test drives, viewings, clinics, consultations — and use it because a booking there still needs a car, a room and a person, at one of several sites.

Sesami runs deepest on Shopify, where a booking becomes a product in your catalog. It is not limited to it: the Sesami Booking Button embeds in WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow, Framer or plain HTML, and a hosted Sesami page takes bookings and payments on its own. Those are rolling out through early access now.