An Apntly alternative when you outgrow a solo setup
Apntly is popular with solo practitioners for its low entry price and simplicity. Booking Slot starts free too, but is built for the moment you hire a second person, open a counter, or start running classes.
Apntly and Booking Slot side by side
Competitor details are taken from public listings at the time of writing and can change. Always check the current App Store listing before deciding.
| Apntly | Booking Slot | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | Very low, check listing | Free, then £14.99 |
| Staff scheduling | Check listing | Per-person hours, time off, auto-assign on every plan |
| POS | Check listing | Growth and Pro |
| Group classes | Check listing | Growth and Pro |
| SMS | Check listing | Allowance included on paid plans |
| Deposits | Yes | Starter and above |
The app you outgrow, and the moment you outgrow it
Apntly, formerly Appointly, is popular with solo practitioners and deservedly so. A low entry price, a simple setup, and enough booking capability for one person selling their own time. For a sole trader that is often exactly the right amount of software.
The question this page is about is what happens next. Most service businesses that survive hit one of three moments: they hire a second person, they open a counter, or they start running something for groups. Each of those changes the shape of the problem rather than its size.
Booking Slot also starts free for one person. The difference is what is already in the product when one of those three things happens to you.
Software for one person and software for three are not the same product at a different price.
The second person
Adding staff is where a solo-shaped booking app shows its design. Suddenly you need hours per person rather than opening hours, holidays that block one person and not the shop, services attached to the people who can actually deliver them, and a rule for what happens when a customer does not mind who they see.
In Booking Slot all of that is on every plan, including the free one. Each resource has its own weekly hours with split shifts and alternate weeks, its own time off, and its own list of services. A customer picks a named person and sees only their genuinely free times, or picks any available and the app assigns the first free qualified person, which spreads new customers rather than loading them onto whoever is listed first.
What the plans limit is headcount, not rules: one resource on Free, two on Starter at fourteen ninety-nine, eight on Growth at thirty-nine ninety-nine, unlimited on Pro at seventy-nine ninety-nine.
Resources are not only people. A room, a chair, a court or a piece of equipment is a resource too, and a service can require more than one, so a treatment that needs both a practitioner and a room is only offered when both are free.
- Per-person hours, split shifts and alternate weeks
- Time off blocking one person, not the shop
- Services linked to the staff who deliver them
- Any available assignment, spreading load automatically
- Rooms and equipment as resources alongside people
The counter
The second moment is a till. As soon as bookings come in from two places, the question is whether those two places share one calendar or keep two that agree most of the time.
Booking Slot's POS screen calls the same availability and hold endpoints as the product page, in the same second, with no reconciliation step. Your front desk cannot take a slot the website is mid-checkout on. Several bookings go through one transaction, which covers the parent booking three children. If the connection drops, the till errors rather than completing a sale on stale data.
Booking at the counter is on Growth at thirty-nine ninety-nine, alongside group classes and Google Calendar, and works with both POS Lite and POS Pro. Check Apntly's current listing for how theirs is handled, as App Store listings change.
The first class
The third moment is selling something to a group rather than a person. A workshop, a class, a session with eight places.
That is a genuinely different kind of booking: a shared start time with a seat count, where the risk is overselling rather than clashing. Booking Slot decrements seats inside a transaction that re-checks capacity at the moment of writing, so two people taking the last place produce one success and one immediate refusal. Seats are shared only between bookings with exactly the same start time, so a six o'clock and a six fifteen session never bleed into each other's capacity.
The Calendar shows the attendee list per session for marking people off at the door. Group bookings are on Growth and Pro.
Which to pick
Choose Apntly if you are one person, intend to stay one person, and the entry price is the deciding factor. There is nothing wrong with the cheapest tool that does the job.
Choose Booking Slot if you have staff on different hours, a counter as well as a website, or classes to fill. Its free plan covers one person and twenty bookings a month with every scheduling rule on, so you can start in the same place and the product does not need replacing when the second chair arrives.
Either way, compare both current listings before deciding. Prices and plan contents move, and these pages are written at a point in time.
Questions about Apntly alternative
Is Booking Slot free for one person?
Yes, up to 20 bookings a month.
Can I move up later?
Change plan in-app any time.
Do both add a picker to the product page?
Yes.
Zoom?
Roadmap.
Try Booking Slot free on your store
Install in a few minutes, link one product and take a test booking. Free for one resource and 20 bookings a month, then flat pricing from £14.99.