Acuity Scheduling vs PepoSmart: Which Platform Delivers True Meeting Value this year?

Introduction: Beyond Basic Appointment Scheduling

Acuity Scheduling has been a staple in the appointment booking space for years, particularly popular among service-based businesses, coaches, and consultants. With its robust booking features and payment integrations, Acuity carved out a strong position in the market.

But the world of business meetings has evolved dramatically. Today's professionals don't just need to book appointments—they need to extract maximum value from every conversation, track relationships over time, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks after a meeting ends.

This is where PepoSmart fundamentally reimagines what a scheduling platform should be. While Acuity Scheduling excels at getting people booked, PepoSmart transforms every meeting into actionable business intelligence through our Meeting Intelligence platform. Let's explore exactly what this means for your business.

Understanding Acuity Scheduling

What Acuity Does Well

Acuity Scheduling, now part of the Squarespace family, has built a solid reputation for appointment-based scheduling. Its strengths include comprehensive booking customization with intake forms and questionnaires, robust payment processing integration with Stripe and PayPal, timezone-intelligent scheduling with automatic conversions, calendar synchronization with Google Calendar, Outlook, and iCloud, client self-rescheduling and cancellation options, and package and subscription booking for recurring services.

For businesses that primarily book client appointments—think therapists, personal trainers, photographers, or consultants billing by the hour—Acuity provides a mature, reliable solution.

Where Acuity Falls Short

Here's the critical limitation that Acuity users discover over time: the platform treats each appointment as an isolated transaction. Book the appointment, conduct the session, and you're done until the next booking.

There's no intelligence layer connecting your appointments. No automated capture of what was discussed. No relationship tracking across multiple sessions with the same client. No AI-powered follow-ups based on meeting content. And certainly no cross-meeting analytics to understand patterns in your business conversations.

For many Acuity users, this means maintaining separate systems for notes, follow-ups, and client relationship management—creating friction and increasing the chance that important details slip through the cracks.

PepoSmart: The Intelligent Evolution of Scheduling

Complete Meeting Lifecycle Management

PepoSmart approaches scheduling from a fundamentally different angle. Yes, we provide all the booking functionality you'd expect—customizable event pages, seamless calendar integration, team scheduling, buffer times, and payment collection. But we view booking as just the starting point.

Our platform manages the complete meeting lifecycle: before, during, and after. This holistic approach ensures you capture maximum value from every interaction, not just the logistics of getting it scheduled.

AI-Powered Meeting Intelligence

The heart of PepoSmart's differentiation is our Meeting Intelligence system. Here's what happens when you have a meeting with PepoSmart:

Our AI meeting bot joins your video call automatically, creating a comprehensive transcript without you lifting a finger. But transcription is just the beginning.

Our AI analyzes the conversation in real-time, extracting sentiment indicators to understand emotional tone, buyer intent signals for sales conversations, key topics and themes discussed, action items with assigned owners and implied deadlines, and questions raised that need follow-up.

This intelligence is immediately available after your meeting ends—no manual note-taking required, no risk of forgetting critical details.

Smart Follow-Up Generation

One of the biggest productivity drains in business is the follow-up email. You know you need to send it. You know what you promised. But crafting that email takes time, and often gets pushed down the priority list until the momentum from the meeting has faded.

PepoSmart solves this with AI-generated follow-up drafts. Based on your meeting transcript, our system automatically creates contextually appropriate emails. If you discussed pricing, the draft includes your pricing template. If you committed to sending resources, those are referenced. If there's a next meeting to schedule, the draft includes your booking link.

You review, personalize the placeholders, and send. What typically takes 15-20 minutes now takes 2-3 minutes of review.

Cross-Meeting Relationship Intelligence

Here's where PepoSmart truly separates from appointment scheduling tools: we connect intelligence across all your meetings to build comprehensive relationship profiles.

Every time you meet with a contact, our system updates their profile with new topics discussed, sentiment trends, engagement levels, and mentioned interests. Over time, you build a rich picture of each relationship that helps you prepare for future meetings and understand where to focus your attention.

The Meeting Intelligence Dashboard visualizes this data across your entire meeting portfolio. You can see which contacts you meet with most frequently, what topics dominate your conversations, how sentiment trends over time, and which relationships might need attention.

Natural Language Meeting Search

Perhaps most revolutionary: you can ask questions about your meeting history in plain English.

"What did Sarah mention about her budget constraints?" "Which clients have expressed interest in our premium tier?" "Show me all the action items from meetings with Acme Corp." "What concerns have come up most frequently this quarter?"

Our RAG-powered chat interface searches across all your transcripts and delivers precise, sourced answers. It's like having a research assistant who attended every meeting you've ever had.

Feature-by-Feature Comparison

Booking and Scheduling

Acuity Scheduling offers customizable booking pages, intake forms and questionnaires, service packages and subscriptions, group classes and workshops, client self-management, and multi-location support.

PepoSmart provides customizable event pages, team scheduling with role-based permissions, round-robin and collective availability, buffer times and daily limits, event co-hosting for team meetings, and advanced timezone handling.

Winner: Depends on use case. Acuity has stronger service-business features like packages and group classes. PepoSmart excels at team collaboration and B2B meeting scenarios.

Payment Processing

Acuity Scheduling includes built-in Stripe and PayPal integration, packages and memberships, gift certificates, tips and gratuity, and coupons and discounts.

PepoSmart supports payment collection for events, team billing management, and subscription handling.

Winner: Acuity for service businesses needing complex payment scenarios. Tie for basic payment collection needs.

Meeting Enhancement

Acuity Scheduling has no meeting intelligence features—appointments are standalone transactions.

PepoSmart delivers AI meeting bot with automatic joining, complete transcription and summarization, sentiment and intent analysis, topic extraction and categorization, and automatic action item identification.

Winner: PepoSmart by a significant margin. This category doesn't exist in Acuity.

Post-Meeting Automation

Acuity Scheduling offers automated confirmation and reminder emails, follow-up email sequences, and basic thank you messages.

PepoSmart provides AI-generated contextual follow-up drafts, action item tracking with owner assignment, CRM synchronization for action items, and smart templates based on meeting content.

Winner: PepoSmart. While Acuity has basic follow-up emails, they're generic templates, not AI-generated content based on actual meeting discussions.

Relationship and Analytics

Acuity Scheduling includes basic appointment analytics, revenue reports, and client history in profile view.

PepoSmart offers cross-meeting intelligence dashboard, contact relationship tracking with engagement scores, topic trend analysis over time, sentiment tracking across meetings, relationship health indicators, and natural language chat with meeting history.

Winner: PepoSmart decisively. These capabilities represent an entirely different category of functionality.

Real Business Impact: Use Case Analysis

For Coaches and Consultants

Coaching relationships depend on continuity. Your clients expect you to remember what you discussed in previous sessions, what challenges they're facing, and what commitments were made.

With Acuity, you're managing this through separate notes systems or relying on memory. Sessions feel disconnected, and clients notice when you can't recall details from previous conversations.

With PepoSmart, every session is automatically captured and connected. Before a client call, you can review AI-generated summaries of all previous meetings, see sentiment trends, and note unresolved action items. Clients feel genuinely heard and supported because you have complete context at your fingertips.

For Sales Teams

Sales conversations are filled with signals—interest indicators, objection patterns, buying timeline hints, competitive mentions. Traditional scheduling tools capture none of this.

PepoSmart's Meeting Intelligence transforms every sales call into structured data. Our AI detects buyer intent signals, tracks objections raised, identifies decision-maker concerns, and surfaces competitive intelligence. Sales managers gain visibility into what's actually happening in customer conversations, enabling better coaching and more accurate forecasting.

For Customer Success

Customer retention depends on proactive relationship management. You need to know when accounts are thriving and when they're at risk—before the renewal conversation happens.

PepoSmart's relationship tracking provides early warning indicators. If meeting sentiment with a key account is declining, or if they're raising more concerns than usual, you'll see it in the data. This enables proactive intervention rather than reactive damage control.

For Service Businesses

Even traditional service businesses benefit from meeting intelligence. A personal trainer can track client goals mentioned across sessions. A therapist can note recurring themes without manual documentation. A financial advisor can ensure all client concerns are addressed and followed up on.

The time saved on manual note-taking alone often justifies the switch, but the relationship insights deliver long-term value that compounds over time.

The Transition: Moving from Acuity to PepoSmart

Many of our users come from Acuity Scheduling, and the transition is straightforward. You can run both platforms simultaneously during migration, gradually moving your booking flows to PepoSmart while maintaining continuity for existing clients.

The key steps include setting up your PepoSmart account and connecting your calendar, recreating your event types in PepoSmart, updating booking links on your website and in your communications, and enabling Meeting Intelligence for your meetings.

Most users complete the migration within a week, often faster. The immediate benefit of AI-captured meetings and smart follow-ups makes the transition feel worthwhile from day one.

Pricing Considerations

Acuity Scheduling pricing runs $16/month for the Emerging plan, $27/month for Growing, and $49/month for Powerhouse with more customization and multiple calendars.

PepoSmart offers a free tier for getting started, Personal Premium at $19/month for individual professionals, and Team Plan at $79/month for up to 15 team members with full Meeting Intelligence. See our complete pricing page for details.

For individual users, pricing is comparable with slight advantages either way depending on specific feature needs. For teams, PepoSmart's flat team pricing becomes economical while delivering vastly more functionality. Compare this with Calendly pricing if you're evaluating multiple options.

The real value comparison isn't about monthly cost—it's about the time saved through automated meeting capture, the deals closed through better follow-up, and the relationships strengthened through comprehensive intelligence.

Making the Right Choice

Choose Acuity Scheduling If

Your primary need is service-based appointment booking with complex payment scenarios like packages, memberships, and group classes. You need gift certificate functionality. Your business model doesn't involve extended client relationships where meeting continuity matters. You're comfortable maintaining separate systems for notes, follow-ups, and relationship tracking.

Choose PepoSmart If

You want to extract maximum value from every meeting, not just book it efficiently. Your success depends on relationship continuity and remembering what was discussed across multiple interactions. You're tired of manually typing meeting notes and crafting follow-up emails. You want data-driven insights into your meeting patterns and relationship health. You need team collaboration features for scheduling and meeting intelligence.

Conclusion: The Future Belongs to Intelligent Platforms

The appointment scheduling market has matured significantly. The core problem of getting meetings booked has been solved multiple times over by various platforms including Acuity, Calendly, and Cal.com.

But solving the booking problem isn't enough anymore. The real competitive advantage comes from what happens during and after meetings—capturing insights, ensuring follow-through, and building relationships that compound over time. Learn more in our complete Meeting Intelligence guide.

PepoSmart represents the next evolution of scheduling platforms. We've taken everything that works about traditional scheduling and added an intelligence layer that transforms every meeting into a strategic business asset. If you're also evaluating other tools, check out our Calendly vs PepoSmart comparison.

Acuity Scheduling remains a capable tool for basic appointment booking. But if you're ready to move beyond simple scheduling into true meeting intelligence, PepoSmart offers a path forward that no traditional booking platform can match.

Your meetings are full of valuable information. The question is whether you're capturing it. With PepoSmart, that capture happens automatically, and the insights are available whenever you need them.

Start your free trial and experience the difference meeting intelligence makes. Your future self—walking into every meeting fully prepared with complete context—will thank you. View pricing to find the plan that's right for you.