The setting that matters most is duration
Cliniko, Jane, Zanda, Power Diary and Nookal are the common choices for podiatry, and all five will run the diary. The thing that decides whether the diary actually works is duller than any feature: whether appointment types carry the right lengths.
Nail surgery is not a routine appointment. A diabetic foot assessment is not a nail trim. A system where everything defaults to the same slot will let a patient book an hour of work into twenty minutes, and you will find out on the day.
So the first thing to do on any trial is set up your real treatment list with real durations and try to break it.
Can a treatment carry its own price as well as its length?
Patients booking a specific problem want to know what it costs before they commit. Check whether price can attach to the appointment type and appear in the booking flow, rather than living only on the website where the two can drift apart.
How does it handle home visits?
Domiciliary work needs different treatment from clinic work. Check the system can hold travel time either side, capture a full address rather than a phone number, limit which areas are bookable, and — if you charge differently — carry that.
If it cannot do this natively, a request form on the website feeding into the diary manually is a perfectly reasonable answer. What does not work is treating a home visit as a clinic appointment with a note attached.
Can a course of treatment be booked as a block?
Verruca treatment and some orthotic pathways run over several visits. Check whether a block can be booked in one go, and whether a patient dropping out partway triggers anything, rather than the gap simply appearing in the diary.
Is the booking flow usable by an older patient?
This is a real evaluation criterion for this specialty and it is never in a feature list. Open the booking flow on a phone and look at it properly: text size, contrast, how many steps, whether anything depends on precise tapping.
If the flow is genuinely hard work, the answer is not to abandon it — it is to keep the phone number visible on every screen alongside it, so nobody is forced through a form they cannot complete.
What is the export, if you leave?
Ask early. Patient records, notes, treatment history. Health data obligations differ by country, and a practice that cannot leave a system ends up building around its limits.
What the embed does to the page
Test on a phone, on mobile data. Watch for the layout shifting as the widget arrives, and keep the widget on the booking page only — the problem pages are what bring patients in, and a site-wide script slows every one of them.
Where this sits
Every podiatry website we build embeds whichever system you already run, with durations set per treatment, at a fixed price. For what the build costs, see what a podiatry website costs.