Some businesses don’t sell single appointments — they sell a standing spot: the same client, the same service, on a repeating schedule. This page covers what “recurring appointment scheduling” actually requires from a booking tool, and where Bookafy and its four main competitors genuinely stand on it, checked directly against each vendor’s own current documentation.
A one-off appointment is easy: client picks a time, shows up once, done. Recurring is a different job entirely — a therapist seeing the same client every Tuesday, a personal trainer booked three times a week, a cleaning service on a biweekly cycle, a tutor meeting a student every Thursday for a semester. The business isn’t selling a single slot, it’s selling a standing commitment. If the booking tool can’t hold that commitment on its own, someone on your team ends up re-booking the same person by hand every week — which is exactly the manual work scheduling software is supposed to remove.
This is also where “included vs. missing” gets confusing fast, because a few vendors quietly bundle recurring appointments in with something bigger — packages, memberships, class passes — and gate the whole bundle behind a higher tier. Others don’t support it at all and just point you at a workaround. Here’s where each one actually stands.
Recurring Appointments is a listed Bookafy feature in Capterra’s vendor-verified feature data (“schedule repeating appointments based on a duration of time”), and it’s not something the company’s own marketing pages spell out in detail — the specifics of which plan it requires and exactly how many occurrences you can set aren’t published on bookafy.com the way they are on, say, the pricing matrix for SMS reminders or calendar sync. If a recurring schedule is the reason you’re evaluating Bookafy, the honest move is to confirm the exact mechanics — how many occurrences, whether the client or only the admin can set the recurrence, and which plan it sits on — on a live walkthrough before you commit, rather than assume it works a specific way.
One thing Bookafy is clear about, directly on its own features page: it does not do class packs, memberships, or class-pack billing. If your version of “recurring” is really a 10-session package a client pays for up front, that’s a different product category (Mindbody, Momence, Punchpass) — see what Bookafy actually does for the fuller honest-limits breakdown. Plain recurring appointments — the same service, the same client, repeating on a schedule — is the thing Bookafy’s feature list covers. Bundled packages and membership billing are not.
| Vendor | Recurring appointments | What it actually takes |
|---|---|---|
| Bookafy | Listed feature (Capterra-verified) | Exact plan tier and occurrence limits not published — confirm on a demo. No packages/memberships (confirmed absent). |
| Calendly | Not supported, natively | No recurring booking at all — a multi-year, still-open request in Calendly’s own community forum. The only workaround is editing the first booked event on your own calendar to repeat manually; Calendly never sees those later occurrences, so there are no automated reminders, confirmations, or cancellation handling on them. |
| Acuity Scheduling | Yes, tier-gated | Recurring appointments ship with Packages/Memberships/Subscriptions, which start on the Standard plan ($27/mo billed annually, $34 month-to-month) — not the base Starter plan ($16/$20). Clients booking themselves can set up to 24 recurring appointments; an admin booking on their behalf can set up to 52. |
| Setmore | Yes, Pro only | Daily, weekly, monthly, annual, every-working-day, or custom recurrence — but it’s a Pro-plan feature ($5/user/mo billed annually, $12 month-to-month). Not available on Free. |
| Cal.com | Yes, Team plan | Recurring event types aren’t on the free individual plan — they start on Team ($12/user/mo), the same tier that unlocks round robin and shared availability. |
Calendly not supporting recurring bookings natively isn’t a minor gap — it’s one of the longest-standing, most-requested features in Calendly’s own community forum, still unresolved. If your business runs on standing appointments (therapy, training, tutoring, maintenance visits), that single limitation is worth knowing before you build a booking page around Calendly and discover every third client needs to be manually re-booked every week.
Bookafy lists recurring appointments as a supported feature, but the company’s own site doesn’t publish whether the client sets the recurrence at booking or whether it’s admin-only — confirm this directly before assuming either way.
Not natively. The workaround is manually setting the first booked event to repeat on your own calendar, but Calendly won’t know about those later occurrences — no automated reminders or confirmations on them.
Standard or above ($27/mo billed annually). The base Starter plan doesn’t include packages, memberships, or recurring appointments.
Not necessarily. A recurring appointment repeats the same booking on a schedule. A package or membership is a bundle of prepaid sessions billed together — Acuity bundles the two, Bookafy explicitly does not do class packs or memberships.
Whether the client or only an admin can set the recurrence, whether there’s a cap on occurrences, whether reminders apply to every occurrence, and which plan tier it actually requires.
Keep reading: setting up booking for a multi-location business, reducing no-shows with reminders, taking deposits and payments at booking, or the full buyer’s guide.
