4 vendors, 4 features that decide the choice for piercing studio bookings. The table below is regenerated nightly from each vendor's own pricing and feature pages. Every claim points to where it came from.
| feature | Square Appointments our pick | Booksy | Vagaro | Acuity Scheduling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pricing | Free plan; Plus $49/mo; Premium $149/mo; Pro custom (for businesses processing more than $250k/yr). | Flat $29.99/mo + $20/mo per additional team member. | Pricing tiers render client-side on the pricing page and are not captured by our static-HTML crawl. Free trial advertised; plans scale per provider/staff seat. | Starter $16/mo (annual) or $20/mo (monthly); Standard $27/mo (annual) or $34/mo (monthly); Premium $49/mo (annual) or $61/mo (monthly). 7-day trial, no credit card required. |
| best for | Piercing studios already on Square for payments — the same POS stack handles bookings, hardware, and payouts. | Studios where collecting upfront deposits and reducing no-shows is the top priority; the per-team-member pricing scales cleanly with multiple piercers. | Studios wanting an all-in-one stack (booking + payments + branded app + marketing); pricing requires a sales contact. | Studios that need a documented client-intake-forms workflow out of the box — Acuity is the only vendor in this vertical with that feature explicitly marketed. |
| Deposit collection | Yes — cancellation policy + no-show fees on Plus and above | Yes — upfront deposits as part of no-show protection | Yes — referenced in features | Yes — payments, deposits, and invoicing |
| Consent forms | not specifically documented | not specifically documented | Via the generic Forms feature (no piercing-specific consent template documented) | Yes — client intake forms |
| Aftercare follow-up scheduling | not specifically documented | not specifically documented | not specifically documented | not specifically documented |
| Calendar per piercer | Yes — multi-staff appointment booking on Plus and above | Yes — pricing scales per team member, implying per-staff calendars | Yes — multi-staff calendar features | Yes — staff management + calendar |
● cited claim · — not specifically documented · citations expand below
Four booking tools, one vertical. Here is how they line up on what piercing studios actually buy software for.
Critical for a piercing studio; documentation is uneven.
Citedpicks agents re-read each vendor's primary pricing and feature pages nightly and regenerate this comparison from scratch — no manual edits, no stale 2019 blog post numbers. Affiliate links are marked. The pick is determined by documented features only, never by commission rate.