Best Scheduling App for Small Business Owners: Our Top 6 Picks

Originally published in October 2024. Last updated on June 18, 2025.

Tired of playing phone tag to book appointments? Drowning in texts and emails just to organize your team’s schedule?

If your current scheduling system relies on spreadsheets, paper, or a messy chain of messages, you’re likely wasting time and losing opportunities to grow your business. 

There’s no one-size-fits-all scheduling app, but the right tool can simplify scheduling and give you more time to focus on your clients. 

To help you out, we’ve rounded up the best scheduling apps for small business success so you can save time, stay organized, and serve your clients better.

How we chose the best small business scheduling apps

To find the best scheduling apps, we took a hand-on approach. We researched dozens of scheduling apps designed for small business owners across different home service industries. 

This included:

• Watching product demos and tutorials to evaluate how easy each app is to set up and use.
• Reading customer reviews across platforms like G2 and the App Store to understand real-world user experiences.
• Comparing features such as calendar syncing, task management, time tracking, automated reminders, and employee scheduling.

The result is these seven contenders for the best scheduling app for small business success

Jobber is the top scheduling app for field service businesses that need to book new leads, schedule visits to customer properties, and assign staff to those visits.

Jobber’s online booking helps you quickly and effectively book customers into your calendar. New leads can request work through your website or social media, or book directly from Google search when you connect Jobber to your Local Services Ads or use a Jobber Website.

Once those new customer visits are scheduled, here’s how you can reclaim time spent managing schedules with Jobber as your job scheduling software: 

• Choose from five different views to get a clear visual of crew availability to avoid overbooking, underbooking—or the dreaded double booking.
• Personalize your calendar with color coding and filters to quickly see what’s important—like visits assigned to certain team members or job status.
• Easily reschedule jobs or reassign jobs to a different team member. All you have to do is click, drag, and drop.
• Send automated text or email reminders to customers to ensure that they are ready for your arrival.
• Generate the fastest, most fuel-efficient routes to fit more work in the day.
• Track your crew’s progress and location throughout the day with fleet management tools and assign last-minute services to the closest crew member.
• Empower your employees to submit hours in the field, then download timesheet reports to measure team productivity and simplify payroll.
• Leverage AI tools to get instant insights. You can prompt Jobber Copilot to see if staff are logging their time accurately.
• Access from anywhere. The Jobber mobile app lets you schedule work from the field as soon as a request comes in.
• Track tasks, events, and reminders to keep your team organized. Task reminders will show up in your team schedule, so you’ll always remember when to invoice for a job or send a quote follow-up email.

Who should use it: Mobile home service businesses (i.e., plumbers, landscapers) that manage several different jobs in a day or week.
Check out Jobber’s website for pricing.

Calendly is one of the best appointment scheduling apps because it quickly integrates customers into your calendar. 

When you send a Calendly scheduling link to someone, they’ll see available times in your calendar and can book a meeting time that works for both of you.

The simple look of Calendly’s booking tool allows for a quick, painless appointment scheduling experience for customers and team members. 

These other features make Calendly a great choice for scheduling appointments:

• Send meeting polls to find the most popular times for team meetings
• Create simple rules around your availability so your calendar books up the way you want
• Connect up to six calendars to automatically check available times
• Decrease no-shows and do less admin work by automating reminders and follow-ups

Who should use it: Businesses that have frequent customer and team meetings, and that want a simple solution. 

It’s important to note that Calendly works best if you don’t need to collect much information before making an appointment booking, as the app doesn’t let clients add details to their booking requests. 

Check out Calendly’s website for pricing.

Clockify is an appointment scheduling and time tracking app that helps you schedule employees, view calendars, and track where your team spends time. It’s also the best free scheduling app for small businesses, making it a great option if you’re on a budget.

Combined with its clock-in and clock-out timer, Clockify’s employee scheduling tools make it a great scheduling app for teams that work on multiple projects simultaneously and need to manage employee time accurately.

Here’s how Clockify helps you schedule internal work and manage your time better:

• Visualize your workload for the day, week, and month
• Add and edit blocks of work time to your calendar for you and your team
• Drag and drop time blocks in a calendar to shift around which employees are doing what work and when
• Add descriptions of work to your timesheets
• Allow team members to request time off, approve it, and see upcoming absences
• See reports on where time is spent across your company by time period, task type, team member, and client

Who should use it: Business owners on a budget who need to track time, projects, and improve productivity.

While Clockify’s time tracking is great for field service management, Jobber takes time tracking accuracy one step further with GPS waypoints to help you see a team member’s exact location when they clock in and out. 

If you outgrow Clockify’s free plan, they have paid plans with additional features. Check out Clockify’s website for pricing.

YouCanBook.me is a free appointment scheduling app that helps customers book time with you easily. 

YouCanBook.me provides a free online booking page template that you can customize for your business. You can also add service descriptions, availability rules, and buffer times to help simplify scheduling your team.

Here’s how YouCanBook.me helps you keep control of your schedule

• Link to Apple, Google, and Microsoft calendars to create one synced schedule and prevent double-booking
• Separate booking options by appointment types to better integrate them into your schedule
• Use tentative bookings to allow you to approve requests to confirm the appointment booking

Who should use it: Solo or small field services on a budget that need a simple scheduling tool.

YouCanBook.me also has paid plans with advanced features. However, even with paid plans, the scheduling app lacks key scheduling features such as service area controls or route planning.

Check out their website for pricing.

Sling is an employee scheduling app that helps you create, update, and manage shift schedules. 

Its intuitive design and powerful time tracking features help small business owners optimize their schedules and improve productivity. 

Here’s how you can use Sling to build the smartest shift schedules around your staff’s availability:

• View your staff’s availability by employee or by day, week, or month
• Drag and drop employees on your calendar to the shift you want them to work
• Receive real-time employee availability updates to avoid scheduling conflicts
• Get notifications of overlapping shifts or double-bookings
• Let employees sign up for shifts they’d like to work by scheduling available shifts
• Save schedule templates and load them when you need to recreate an employee schedule

Who should use it: Small businesses that need to track employee schedules and overtime.

Sling has a free plan, but field service businesses would best benefit from their paid plans that include mobile time tracking and calendar sync. 

READ MORE: The Top 9 Field Service Apps to Boost Efficiency 

While Sling is a good tool for employee scheduling, the app lacks online booking features that allow clients to book their own appointments online. 

Check out Sling’s website for pricing.

Connecteam has integrated features such as task management and team communication to help small business owners manage their scheduling.

Once you schedule your employees, you can assign them tasks to complete on the job. You can also send task reminders and get access to real-time task tracking to ensure that everyone stays on schedule. 

Here’s how Connecteam keeps your scheduling on track:

• Set up recurring shifts for your team on a specific project
• Quickly assign and reassign shifts by dragging and dropping
• Let your team claim open jobs as they become available
• Create separate schedules for each team member to keep jobs organized 

Similarly to Sling, Connecteam lacks online booking capabilities, so you still have to coordinate with clients to book jobs. In contrast, Jobber serves as an all-in-one scheduling and booking tool to streamline job scheduling.

Check out Connecteam’s website for pricing.

How to choose the best scheduling software for small business needs

Your online scheduling app should be easy to use and fit the type of jobs that you normally schedule.

The specific features you need will depend on the type of clients you have, what services you offer, the size of your team, and how you work together.

Here are some key features to look for in appointment scheduling software:

• Customizable calendars you can personalize with different views and color coding so it’s easy to understand at a glance.
• Drag-and-drop blocks to easily move around jobs when staff or client availability changes.
• Convenient booking portal for customers, whether that’s an online work request form you can add to your website or a simple date picker.
• Automated messages and reminders that get sent to your customers once an appointment is booked.
• Team push notifications that alert employees of schedule changes instantly.
• Recurring appointment options for clients you need to see on a regular basis (e.g., weekly, quarterly, or on the third Tuesday of each month).
• A mobile app that lets you access scheduling on the go.
• Customizable availability rules that limit when customers can book appointments and when they can cancel.

Choosing the best scheduling app for small business success comes down to finding a tool that fits your unique workflow, team size, and client needs. The right app can save hours of admin time and help your business run more smoothly. 

Getting started is as easy as trying out a few free plans. From there, you can invest in the solution that supports your long-term growth.