Appointment Scheduling API

Spurwing

Spurwing is like Stripe but for appointment scheduling. Our API makes it easy to add robust appointment booking and calendaring features to any application. We power millions of appointment bookings for thousands of companies, from marketplaces to SaaS and healthcare. We help software teams save time, money, and resources on the development of scheduling solutions, including through our free, open-source GitHub marketplace solutions.

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Scheduling Roadblocks

At first blush, implementing scheduling functionality in your application or website looks like it would be the simplest thing in the world to pull off. Beneath the surface of that super user-friendly experience, however, is something far more complex.

Scheduling can be so complex, in fact, that a lot of developers learn (relatively early on in the development process) that it makes a lot more sense to use scheduling API services to overcome common obstacles than trying to build something from scratch – reinventing the wheel along the way.

Integrations

While almost all popular calendar platforms operate similarly as far as functionality is concerned, the code, API, and “hooks” running under the hood couldn’t be more unique. Google, Outlook, Exchange, and the Office 365 calendar systems all have their own unique API that makes integration possible. But integrating all of those APIs together with outside APIs as well can become a real spaghetti situation in a hurry.

Everything starts to “tangle” pretty quickly and before you know it it’s almost impossible to keep your scheduling solution tight, organized, and well optimized. By using API scheduling services that act as a single point of contact for multiple calendar APIs, however, you’re able to smooth things out and streamline your app or service significantly.

Syncing

If you combine the unique complexity of multiple calendar applications with the fact that they treat event/appointment creation directives as second-class objects it’s not hard to see how things can spiral out of control when you have unified scheduling across multiple calendars.

By using a single API service to manage all second-class objects (even transforming them into first-class objects) across multiple calendar platforms everything smooths out significantly. Less resources are used, event creation requests are handled much faster, and at the end of the day managing events across multiple different calendar platforms becomes almost effortless.

Time zones

Dealing with scheduling across multiple time zones (and daylight-saving times) is one of those things that often goes overlooked by new developers working with calendar and scheduling APIs for the first time – at least until everything breaks under real-world testing, anyway! Any applications that are going to be responsible for managing events that span across multiple regions and multiple time zones need to be engineered to “normalize” time.

With scheduling API services, time isn’t just normalized on the user end of things – always displaying the right time for each user depending on their specific time zone while keeping things synchronized. But they also make it easy to manage, update, and instance the timing of events across multiple time zones on the backend, too.

Multi-user availabilities

One of the core functionalities that a scheduling solution needs to include is the ability to find schedule availability across multiple users, allowing end-users to schedule appointments and events in “open space” shared by everyone using that calendar specifically.

Standard calendar API solutions take advantage of “free/busy resources” to handle this on their own. And while that does a solid job for single users on one calendar application, things break down pretty quickly when you’re trying to manage multiple calendars and multiple users at once – all with their own unique schedules. Top-of-the-line scheduling API services eliminate this obstacle by synchronizing schedules in real time across multiple user and multiple calendar instances. This keeps everyone on the exact same page with limited potential for overbooking or mismatched schedules to pop up later down the line.

Full customization

Face it. Remote work is here to stay. It's opened up a treasure trove of benefits to companies and workers alike. So the new frontier of work after the world more or less goes back to normal, will be maximizing efficiency even though the team may never be in the same room ever again. Custom solutions built on a Scheduling API can bring a level of organization and time management to your team so that it will seem like you're always in the same room together. Building scheduling from scratch can take many weeks or months, and will very likely contain bugs and unforeseen issues in the long term as well.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, scheduling API services shortcut development time significantly, overcome the obstacles highlighted above (and more) and should be leveraged at every opportunity rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and building this functionality from scratch.

Scheduling API

The backbone of Spurwing is our advanced yet easy to use REST API. You can consult the documentation at https://docs.spurwing.io/ But before you start coding away and reinventing the wheel, we have several official SDKs available:

SDKs / Libraries
JavaScript
NodeJS
Python
Java

If your project requires an SDK for another programming language/stack let us know.

The Spurwing API is a premium service https://www.spurwing.io/ - schedule a demo or request a trial account on our website.

Notable features

Our API has higher degree of freedom and provides more flexibility than that of our competitors, allowing engineers to tackle complex scenarios with ease.
We provide more unique features than some of our competitors: multi-user calendars (ideal for large corporate teams), two-way syncing, built-in CRM for client management, advanced time zone management, availability blockers, group meetings, advanced availability and booking slot settings.
We are an API-first company, our mission is to support software engineering teams by being supportive, flexible and scalable on both a business and technology level.

Open-Source Marketplace

Spurwing has invested plenty of resources in providing its clients with a free and open-source marketplace. Our marketplace offers tools and resources for booking, calendar, and scheduling related performance such as: Chatbots, Widgets, Management Dashboards, Collaboration and Availability tools, Integrations to Payment, ERP, CMS and CRM systems. Our engineering team is continuously improving and innovating.

Here are a few highlighted repositories:

Project	Link
Simple and basic embeddable scheduling widget for 1-on-1 bookings	Scheduling Widget
Voice Control enabled scheduling widget	Voice Control Scheduling
Group/team availability solution	Team Availability
Calendar Events with RSVP Emails (iCalendar protocol)	RSVP emails
Simple Discord Bot for scheduling 1-on-1 meetings	Discord Scheduling Bot
Appointment scheduling integration for Facebook Messenger	Facebook Messenger Bot