Outlook sync and automatic Teams links
Short version: Bookafy does native two-way sync with Microsoft 365 — Outlook Calendar and Exchange — and can auto-generate a Microsoft Teams link for every booking. If your company runs on Microsoft, you do not need a Google account anywhere in the process.
Both work with Microsoft 365 business accounts and with on-premise Exchange.
Microsoft Bookings ships free inside Microsoft 365, and for a simple single-service booking page it is fine. The friction shows up in three places, and it is why Microsoft shops come looking:
| Microsoft Bookings | Bookafy | |
|---|---|---|
| Everyone who takes bookings needs a Microsoft 365 licence | Yes | No — contractors and part-timers just need a Bookafy seat |
| Google Calendar people on the same team | Not natively | Yes — Google, Outlook, Exchange and iCloud side by side |
| Take a payment or deposit at booking | No | Yes — Stripe or Authorize.net |
| SMS reminders | Limited | Included |
| Skill-based routing and round robin | Thin | Yes |
To be fair to Microsoft: if every single person who takes appointments already has an M365 licence, you never need to collect money, and your routing is simple, Bookings is free and you should keep it. We wrote that argument out properly on our Microsoft Bookings alternatives page.
It is an OAuth sign-in from the Bookafy dashboard — you authenticate with Microsoft, approve access, and pick which calendar Bookafy reads from and writes to. No API keys.
Worth doing on day one: set buffers between appointments, set a minimum booking notice, and check that the time zone on your Bookafy profile matches your Microsoft account. Mismatched time zones account for most “the sync is broken” support tickets, and they are not a sync problem.
This is the case Bookafy is genuinely good at. A five-person team where two people are on Outlook, two on Google and one on iCloud can all connect their own calendar, and Bookafy routes bookings across whoever is actually free. Nobody has to migrate. Nobody needs a licence they do not otherwise use.
Bookafy is a published Zapier app, and Zapier connects to the Microsoft stack — Outlook mail, Excel, To Do, Dynamics. The Bookafy triggers and actions available today:
Two limits to design around: Zapier polls Bookafy (every 15 minutes on Zapier’s free plan, so it is not instant), and there is no cancellation trigger. For real-time events, use Bookafy’s webhooks and open API.
Yes — Bookafy syncs with Outlook, Exchange, Google and iCloud.
No. That is the main reason Microsoft-heavy teams move off Microsoft Bookings — Bookafy charges per user, and your contractors do not need an M365 seat.
Yes, and you can set it per appointment type, so internal calls can run on Teams while client calls run on Zoom.
No. They see open and closed slots only — never event titles or details.
Bookafy also connects to 3,000+ apps through Zapier and Make, and offers an open API and webhooks for anything custom.
If you’re weighing up appointment scheduling software, these go deeper:
