NexCal is a free, self-hosted appointment scheduling platform for teams with multiple providers, such as clinics, salons, consulting firms and studios. Customers book by selecting a practitioner, service and time slot. Teams can manage providers with OWNER and STAFF roles, and patients can review booking and payment details, pay invoices, access meeting links, and reschedule or cancel up to 24 hours before an appointment. Payments use a Midtrans plugin and can be set for full payment or service-specific down payments; payment functions can be disabled when keys are absent. Administrators can confirm bookings that then generate Google Meet links. The dashboard presents revenue, 30-day trends, top services, staff performance and operational metrics. Scheduling includes per-service buffer times, filtering of past slots and reuse of cancelled slots. NexCal integrates with WhatsApp through MultiWA, Google Calendar, Google Meet and Midtrans. It is MIT-licensed and free forever, with self-hosted deployment requiring Docker and Docker Compose. The project says data stays on the user's server, with organizations isolated by default. Recurring bookings, multilingual support, a progressive web app and shared multi-tenant SaaS are listed as future features.
Who it is for
NexCal suits multi-provider businesses that can host and deploy their own scheduling system. Its booking and payment features serve teams that want customers to manage appointments and invoices through a patient portal.
What is good
- Free forever under the MIT License.
- Patients can reschedule or cancel up to 24 hours ahead.
- Supports full payments or service-specific down payments.
- Dashboard reports revenue, trends and staff performance.
What to know first
- Production deployment requires Docker and Docker Compose.
- Recurring bookings are listed as a future feature.
- Multilingual support is listed as a future feature.
Verdict
NexCal combines provider-aware booking, payments and patient self-service in a self-hosted application. It is free, but teams need to deploy it themselves, and several planned capabilities are not yet available.
NexCal plans and pricing
All plansCompared on salon appointment scheduling software
- Free plan
- Yes
- Online self-booking
- Yes
- Automated reminders
- Yes
- Cancellation controls
- Yes
- Staff calendars
- Yes
- Appointment payments
- Yes
- External calendar sync
- Yes
