Best scheduling software for a Quebec FMG: 7 tools compared in 2026.

What separates a scheduling tool in an FMG

Most scheduling-software roundups compare products built for hourly-paid employees. That model does not apply to an FMG. There is no time clock, no overtime and no labour cost to optimize. The schedule produces coverage first, and that coverage has to look fair to a team whose manager has no hierarchical authority over anyone.

Three things therefore decide the ranking. The walk-in block, which needs a name on it before the doors open and which then counts toward the fairness math. The on-call shift, whose value changes with when it falls, a night over the holidays weighing differently from an ordinary Tuesday in April. The shared office, because an FMG almost always has more professionals than rooms. A tool that handles none of them leaves the manager arbitrating by hand, every week.

The seven tools, one by one

They are ordered by the size of organization each one assumes, from the spreadsheet that assumes none to the institutional platform.

1. Excel and Google Sheets

The starting point for nearly every FMG, and the hardest tool to dislodge. Free, flexible, already installed, no training to give and nobody to convince. Its cost is measured in hours. In our pilot FMG, which has about thirty users, building the schedule and fixing it after publication takes roughly 7.5 hours a week, so about 30 hours a month. At $30 an hour loaded, that comes to $900 a month and $10,800 a year, before counting the appointments to rebook. Redo the calculation with your own hours.

What Excel does not do gets paid for later. It does not calculate fairness, does not refuse a double office assignment, keeps no record of decisions, and it rests on the one person who knows the file. The detailed calculation is in the Synchro and Excel comparison.

2. Doodle and availability polls

Doodle answers one precise question and answers it well: who is available when, for five to fifteen people, with no account to create for respondents. The free plan covers that easily.

The limit arrives right after the poll. Doodle collects ticked boxes, it assigns nothing. Nobody there decides who takes Saturday call or who gets office 4 on Tuesday, and every period means recreating a poll while an FMG runs 52 weeks a year. Transposing the answers into the real schedule then happens by hand, in Excel. The Synchro and Doodle comparison separates the poll from the schedule.

3. The shared calendar: Outlook, Google Calendar, Teams

The shared calendar wins the last mile. Everyone sees their blocks on their phone, reminders work, and the team stays in a tool it already opens daily. It is the right place to distribute a schedule, provided the schedule was built somewhere else.

No conflict detection, no fairness calculation, no notion of a block that has to be covered: the calendar displays decisions already made. An FMG that stops there keeps its master file alongside and enters everything twice. A team calendar becomes useful once it fills itself from the assigned schedule.

4. Agendrix and shift-based HR tools

Agendrix comes out of Sherbrooke, has been around since 2015, and was acquired in June 2024 by the UK-based Citation Group, which kept the brand and the platform. Voilà!, Emprez and Skello occupy the same ground. These tools are built for people paid by the hour, and it shows throughout the product: the time clock, the timesheets, the replacements, the payroll export.

On the front desk, the clerical team and salaried nurses, these tools do the job better than a medical product. The model gives way when you try to fit physicians into it: the on-call shift becomes a shift like any other, fairness shrinks to a head count, and the shared office does not exist. Their pricing bills hourly employees too, and a clinic quickly counts dozens of them, while the medical schedule touches a far smaller group. Many clinics keep both, each on its own group, an arrangement the Synchro and Agendrix comparison describes.

5. Synchro

Synchro handles all three in one place. Walk-in blocks, weighted on-call shifts and shared offices are assigned at the same time, so a double office assignment is refused as it is made rather than discovered on Monday morning. Each physician writes their constraints in plain French, which are converted into recurring absences, dated absences, quotas and time windows. The on-call fairness counter is open to the physicians themselves, and a peer transfer keeps a record of who accepted and at what time.

The price is public and works out without talking to anyone, all of it on the Pricing page. Configuring a team of 30 users takes about 45 minutes, and building on-call lists is free during the hospital beta.

What Synchro does not do: no patient data, no replacement for the EMR, no hourly payroll. The company was founded in 2025, and the management hours cited above come from its pilot FMG and are self-reported.

6. Mesh AI

Mesh AI comes from Kingston, Ontario, spun out of Queen's University research, and has been scheduling hospital departments since 2018. Its client list includes SickKids, CHEO and The Ottawa Hospital, and the company publishes a SOC 2 Type 2 certification along with announced HIPAA compliance, which answers the procurement process of a large institution.

Two things stop a Quebec FMG. Billing counts bundles of five daily shifts rather than physicians, so you have to translate your schedule before you even know what you would pay. And no French version appears in its public documentation, for a product physicians open every week and that would say shifts where the team says gardes. Walk-in distribution and shared offices are not documented there either. The Synchro and Mesh AI comparison goes through the list line by line.

7. Petal

Petal is the established Quebec vendor, launched in 2010 and used by tens of thousands of physicians, including inside CISSSs and CIUSSSs. Its platform reaches well beyond scheduling, with clinical communications, billing and care access in the same bilingual range.

Prices are not published and come from their team, as does onboarding. That fits its customer base, which has an IT department, a procurement process and several departments to cover. An FMG of 25 professionals whose manager builds the schedule in person arrives with none of it, and the difference in scale shows from the first contact. The Synchro and Petal comparison covers how the two divide the ground.

And what about the EMR?

Ofys, Omnimed, Medesync and Kinlogix come up often in this question, so let us be clear: they manage the patient record and patient booking. They consume your schedule, they do not produce it. If a block shows up in the EMR, a decision was made upstream about who holds it. That decision lives today in a file, an email or a hallway conversation, and it is the decision you are looking to equip.

The comparison table

Tool	What it produces	Walk-ins, weighted call, offices	Price, as of 2026-08-19
Excel, Google Sheets	A file you fill in yourself	None of the three	Included in Microsoft 365. The cost is in management hours.
Doodle	A list of availabilities to transpose	None of the three	Free. Doodle Pro around $9 per month.
Outlook, Google Calendar, Teams	Distribution of a schedule decided elsewhere	None of the three	Included in the office suite.
Agendrix, Voilà!, Emprez, Skello	An hourly-employee schedule, with time clock and payroll	None of the three for physicians	Essential $3.25 CAD per user per month ($2.93 annually), Plus $5.25 ($4.73), Enterprise on quote from 250 employees. Time and Attendance +$2.25, Bonuses +$1.
Synchro	An assigned and published medical team schedule	All three in the same model	$10 CAD per user per month annually, $15 month to month. First month free, no add-on modules, no setup fee.
Mesh AI	A hospital department schedule, in English	Call covered, the other two not documented	$250 to $450 CAD per month depending on plan, roughly 10 percent less annually, billed per bundle of five daily shifts. Implementation fees case by case. Harmona plan on quote.
Petal	A broad health platform, scheduling included	Not publicly documented	Not published, on request from their team.

Third-party prices and features come from their public pages, consulted between 2026-08-14 and 2026-08-19. "Not documented" means the feature does not appear on those pages, not that it would be impossible.

Which one to choose for your situation

The ranking shifts depending on who you are scheduling. Here is one answer per situation, including the cases where the answer is not Synchro.

• An FMG that manages its own schedules, with no IT department and no project team. Synchro is the only one of the seven that places walk-in blocks, weighted on-call and offices in the same model, at $10 CAD per user per month you can work out in advance. The FMG scheduling software guide lists the features to check in a demo.
• A GMF-U pairing residents with supervisors. None of the seven covers the university layer in full, so the demo question is about rotation periods and the academic calendar rather than the feature list. Our page on scheduling software for teaching FMGs says what Synchro does today and what it does not do yet. Ask each vendor what it supports today rather than what is on the roadmap.
• A single physician or a group of two to five, one site, little on-call. A shared file and some discipline are enough, and paying for software at that stage buys little. The threshold is crossed once call gets weighted, a second site appears, or post-publication fixes take longer than building the schedule itself.
• A private medical clinic where several physicians share the same rooms. Synchro again, because the office becomes the tipping point as soon as several physicians share the same rooms, and that is exactly what generic tools ignore.
• A hospital department whose main need is call. Mesh AI if your institution requires a SOC 2 certification and English is not a problem. Synchro if you want French and only the on-call list, free during the hospital beta, or the obstetrics on-call schedule page for round-the-clock coverage.
• Hourly-paid staff, from the front desk to the clerical team. Agendrix, or Voilà!, Emprez and Skello on the same ground. They handle the time clock, timesheets and payroll export, which no medical tool does. Many clinics keep them alongside a medical tool, each on its own group.
• A multi-department organization with an institutional procurement process. Petal, whose platform covers clinical communications and billing on top of scheduling, and whose sales model matches that kind of structure.

Where to start this week

1. Count your users before comparing prices. Ask each vendor who counts as a user: the part-time physician, the resident, the receptionist, the read-only account. A $3 gap per person matters once that definition widens.
2. Open your last published schedule and count the fixes that followed it. That number separates tools better than the length of a feature list.
3. Have a full schedule generated in front of you during every demo, with your real constraints, and watch what is left to correct by hand.
4. Trigger a withdrawal during the trial and follow the replacement all the way through, notifications included. That is the scene that replays every week, and the one where tools resemble each other least.

The full evaluation method, with the eight criteria and the questions to ask in a demo, is in the guide on choosing a tool.

Where Synchro fits

Synchro covers the operational scheduling of a medical team in Quebec, in French: walk-in blocks, weighted on-call, shared offices, constraints written by each physician, transfers between colleagues. When someone changes something, the whole team sees it right away, which targets post-publication fixes rather than the initial build. The full list is on the features page and the price on the Pricing page.

A few limits, since the point is to compare honestly. The company was founded in 2025, and Synchro holds no patient data, does not replace your EMR, and does not run hourly payroll. If your organization has specific procurement or hosting requirements, our security and compliance page answers the technical half, and the best move is to raise it early in the conversation rather than after the trial.

Further reading

• FMG schedule management: which tool to choose
• The 27 real constraints in an FMG schedule
• Is there an open source medical scheduling software?
• Quebec's Family Medicine Groups in numbers
• All Synchro comparisons
• FMG scheduling software: the complete guide
• Pricing
• Book a demo