Apptoto vs GoReminders: Which Does Client Reminders Better?

Choosing the right appointment scheduling software is key to getting customers to show up.

GoReminders and Apptoto have a lot of great things in common. For one, we both help you schedule and send reminders so that your clients show up for their appointments. We also integrate with Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar and more, allowing you to see your appointments within the calendar app of your choice.

However, you probably don’t want to go for a higher-priced appointment booking app that’s potentially more complicated to use, and also offers features that you don’t need—which is the case for Apptoto.

GoReminders, in comparison, is designed for simplicity and affordability, making it ideal for physical and online businesses of any size.

Here’s what we mean:

Simple, Easy-to-Use Interface

Your appointment booking app should provide a smooth, stress-free experience.

Perhaps you’re looking to create and manage appointments, set up recurring appointments or reminder schedules, or enable self-bookings. GoReminders makes these easy, with all of the appointment settings prominently listed in the dashboard. With our simple interface, you’ll encounter almost no learning curve as you effortlessly create appointments to get clients to show up.

On the other hand, business owners have commented that the Apptoto platform can be fairly complex to use, stating that important features aren’t always easy to find, being buried within submenus or not obvious to the eye.

(When we tried Apptoto for ourselves, for example, it took us a while to locate the button for adding a new appointment.)

Apptoto provides a $299 white-glove service for onboarding your business to its platform. However, we’ve built our own client reminders app to be so simple to use that you’ll be able to set it up yourself. If you do need help, though, you can reach out to our friendly support staff, who will sort things out for you—free of charge.

As Elizabeth of Best of Breed Dog Grooming writes:

“GoReminders has been an excellent addition to my business! It has never caused me a problem, & clients never forget their appointments, thanks to GoReminders! I can’t tell you how nice it is to work with a company with such customer service! You guys are GREAT! I’ll definitely be recommending GoReminders to everyone I know!”

Fully Customizable Client Reminders

We understand that information such as service, staff member and location are crucial to the success of your appointments, so we’ve made reminder messages fully customizable. This is thanks to our template tags, which will dynamically insert the relevant client or appointment information into your messages before they’re sent out.

When you first join the GoReminders platform, you’ll get access to our “starter kit” of template tags. This includes essential placeholders such as your client’s first name, their appointment date, the service they’ve booked and the staff member who will be attending to them, to help you start sending customized reminders right away.

Apart from these, you can also create your own template tags suited to your business’ unique needs. If you run online classes, for example, you can easily add a template tag for your client’s username, or one for a virtual meeting link.

However, Apptoto isn’t as focused on serving physical businesses, so you won’t find default placeholders for services and staff members in its platform. While you can manually add custom fields for these, the process isn’t intuitive. Instead, you may find yourself spending a significant amount of time just trying to hunt down the right settings.

Schedule Automated Text Messages Effortlessly

With GoReminders, creating reminder schedules for text and reminder schedules for email is straightforward: set your first reminder to be sent out X hours or days before the appointment, and up to two more reminders that will be sent out Y hours or days after that. 

Would you like to send a combination of text reminders and email reminders to the same client? The GoReminders Message Sequence feature does exactly that, without any fuss. 

While you can also automate your text messages in Apptoto, the process is more complicated. In particular, you may need to know how to interpret programming languages. Here’s a real example from the Apptoto platform to illustrate what we mean: “‘If client requested a reschedule’ exists, then ‘change event date.’” 

If this sounds confusing, then you’ll be glad to know that we’ve built GoReminders to be used —and understood—by humans. Not machines.

Personalize Your Text and Email Blasts

Add a touch of personalization to your messages by addressing your clients by name.

Sometimes, you’ll want to send blast messages to customers to inform them of new promotions, early store closures and more. Use our convenient Message Blasts feature to send such messages via text or email to all your customers at once—and it’ll take only a few clicks.

If needed, you can also choose specific recipients for your messages. However, mass-messaging doesn’t mean sending out generic “Dear Customer” messages, because you can personalize your email or text blast to address each customer by name.

Apptoto has a similar message blasts feature, but you won’t find it labeled as such in your dashboard. (See our previous point about Apptoto being complicated to use.) Instead, you’ll need to select your various appointments and compose a message to be sent to the relevant customers.

If you need to message all your customers at once in Apptoto, we imagine that manually adding everyone to the “To” field of your message will get tedious pretty fast. While you could use Apptoto’s campaigns feature to get the job done, using it for your message blasts is a little overkill if you’re looking to send just one message, as opposed to a multi-message marketing campaign.

Plans and Prices for Every Business Size

Apptoto’s plans start at $29 per month, which includes features such as unlimited appointments, 400 message credits, integration with various calendars and other features.

In this regard, it may sound great to be able to send up to 400 messages per month. However, you might be overpaying for a feature that you won’t come close to maxing out if you have a small customer base. The same goes for being able to add unlimited appointments: amazing in theory, but will likely be underused in practice.

In contrast, GoReminders is a much more affordable appointment-booking app, with our Starter plan costing just $12 per month. This plan is less than half the price of Apptoto’s cheapest plan, and offers essential features such as text and email reminders, message blasts and more.

Then, as your business grows, you can upgrade to schedule more appointments, send more reminders, and unlock other premium features to help ensure that your customers show up on time, every time.

Apptoto vs GoReminders: The Verdict

From adding appointments to scheduling reminders, Apptoto shares many great features with our GoReminders platform. As a result, deciding which to use can be difficult at the start.

However, we know that reminding customers about appointments isn’t your main business. With this in mind, we’ve made it simple to schedule and send reminders using our intuitively designed interface, and then be on your way.

This makes GoReminders the clear winner if you’re looking for a client reminders solution that not only contains everything you need to get clients to turn up for appointments, but is also a breeze to use.

Using Apptoto, on the other hand, might involve spending more time trying to understand the platform. It may also end up being a larger financial investment if you realize that you need Apptoto’s white-glove onboarding service to get the platform up and running for your business. However, all this potential complexity, and extra monetary cost, can be avoided by picking GoReminders’ easy-to-use platform as your appointment scheduling software of choice.

Ready to experience the simplicity of GoReminders for yourself? Sign up for a free 14-day trial here (credit card not required).