As of October 2026, four scheduling tools can screen a lead on their answers before a calendar appears: Calendly with its forms, Cal.com with routing forms, Chili Piper for B2B sales teams, and Setupp, which checks every booker against your rules before a single time slot loads and scores each booking from 0 to 10. Acuity Scheduling, Microsoft Bookings and Google Calendar appointment schedules ask questions too, but they collect the answers with the booking rather than using them to decide who books.
That difference decides whether a bad-fit call ever reaches your calendar. The long version of why the order matters is in Qualify leads before they book, not after. This page is the shopping list.
The short answer
- Setupp for teams that sell to businesses and want a bad-fit booker stopped before the calendar loads, on one flat price for the workspace.
- Calendly if your team already runs on it, on a plan with routing forms: Professional, Teams, Teams Plus or Enterprise.
- Cal.com if you want open source, or to run the scheduler on your own servers.
- Chili Piper if you are a B2B sales organisation routing inbound leads from forms, chat and a CRM, with RevOps to run it.
- Acuity Scheduling, Microsoft Bookings or Google Calendar if you only need to collect answers, not act on them.
The tools, one at a time
Setupp
Setupp asks your questions first and checks the answers against rules you write, such as a minimum monthly budget. Clear them and real free time appears; miss them and the booker gets a polite decline with no slot to take. Turning people away like this starts at Pro, which is $19 a month for the whole workspace with three hosts included. Every booking on every plan, Free included, arrives with a 0 to 10 score and the reasons for it.
From Pro it also puts every host on your side of the call on one calendar invite, and it charges for the workspace rather than per person. The arithmetic on that is in what per-seat pricing costs a growing team, and the plans are on the pricing page.
Calendly
Calendly's routing forms ask screening questions and send each set of answers to an event type, an external URL, or a custom message for people who do not fit, so a bad-fit lead never reaches a booking page. Calendly's own guide to forms suggests sending personal email addresses to a thank-you page. Its help centre lists routing forms on the Professional, Teams, Teams Plus and Enterprise plans, and notes that feature access can vary with the plan, when the account was created and any add-ons.
Cal.com
Cal.com routing forms ask questions first and send each answer to the right event type or teammate, which Cal.com describes as screening leads before they book. Routing is part of its Organizations product. Cal.com is open source, which matters if you want to host the scheduler yourself.
Chili Piper
Chili Piper qualifies, routes and books meetings with inbound leads from web forms, chat, email and the CRM, so a qualified buyer reaches a rep before their interest fades. Its products include Concierge, Handoff and Distro. It is built for sales, marketing, RevOps and customer success teams, and it is the heaviest option on this list.
Acuity Scheduling, Microsoft Bookings and Google Calendar
- Acuity Scheduling, owned by Squarespace, is built for appointment businesses such as salons, therapists and consultants, with intake forms, payments and packages. Its intake forms collect details like referral sources and goals before the appointment.
- Microsoft Bookings can ask custom and required questions, and a booking cannot finish until the required ones are answered. Microsoft's documentation describes the answers as shown to staff on the appointment, not as a way to decline anyone.
- Google Calendar appointment schedules give one booking page with custom questions at no cost. Paid Google Workspace plans add more pages, payments, email verification and checks across several calendars. The answers are collected with the booking.
Four questions that decide it
- Do you need to decline people, or only route them? Routing sends everybody somewhere. Declining means some people get no slot at all, which is what protects the calendar.
- Does more than one person from your side join the call? If so, check that every host lands on the same invite rather than one host and a forwarded email.
- How does the price grow with the team? Per-seat pricing grows with every host you add. Per-workspace pricing does not.
- What arrives with the booking? Answers alone mean somebody still has to read them. A score with reasons tells you which call to prepare for.
When Setupp is the wrong choice
- You take payment at the moment of booking, the way a salon or a clinic does. Acuity is built for that.
- You run a large sales team with RevOps, territories and CRM routing rules. Chili Piper is built for that.
- Your company lives in Microsoft 365 and only needs people to pick a time. Microsoft Bookings is already there.
- You need one free booking page for yourself. A Google Calendar appointment schedule does it.
Sources
Checked on 21 October 2026: Calendly forms, Cal.com routing forms, Chili Piper, Acuity intake forms, Microsoft Bookings questions and Google Calendar appointment schedules. Calendly's plan list was rechecked on 22 October 2026 against its help centre article on creating a routing form. If anything here has changed, email support@usesetupp.com and it will be corrected.