Microsoft Places vs Clearooms: A Better Alternative? 

If you run Microsoft 365 across your organisation, Microsoft Places is the obvious first thing to try for desk and meeting room booking. It sits inside Teams and Outlook, the licences are already on the bill, and nobody has to learn a new tool. For a lot of teams that is enough to get started.

It stops being enough fairly quickly. Individual desk booking sits behind a separate space licence, the more useful scheduling features depend on Teams Premium, and the reporting most facilities teams want for space planning is thin. Add limited room-display hardware support and no visitor management, and the gaps start to matter once you are running a real hybrid estate rather than a pilot.

This article is for people who have already looked at Places and decided it does not quite fit. It covers what Places does well, where it falls short, the criteria worth using to judge any replacement, and how Clearooms measures up against those criteria. Places is a capable product for the right office, so the aim here is a fair comparison rather than a hatchet job.

What Microsoft Places does well

Microsoft Places is Microsoft's own desk and room booking product, built into the Microsoft 365 and Teams stack. Its strongest argument is that you almost certainly already use the surrounding software. Around 80% of Fortune 500 companies run Microsoft 365, so the booking layer lands in tools people open every day.

That brings some genuine advantages:

• Booking happens where people already work. Reserving a desk or finding a room sits inside Outlook and Teams, so there is little to roll out and not much to train.
• Single sign-on is automatic. Identity runs through Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), so there is no separate user directory to manage.
• Licensing can look free at first glance. If you are already paying for the right Microsoft plans, the basic functionality carries no obvious extra line item.
• It signals where colleagues are. Places can surface who is planning to come in on a given day, which helps teams coordinate office days.

For a smaller office with straightforward needs, no real reporting requirement, and an existing Microsoft estate, Places can be the sensible answer. The question is what happens when those conditions stop holding.

Where Microsoft Places falls short

Most of the friction shows up in two places: cost that arrives later than expected, and features that dedicated booking platforms treat as standard.

Desk booking and the better features carry their own licences

Individual desk booking is a premium capability that needs a separate space licence, according to Microsoft's own documentation. Several of the more advanced scheduling and workplace features depend on Teams Premium, which is priced per user. On a 1,000-person estate, per-user pricing climbs in a way that per-resource pricing does not, and the “it is already included” assumption tends not to survive a close look at which licences you actually hold.

Reporting and utilisation data are limited

Places gives you booking information, not the depth of utilisation analytics a facilities team needs to make space decisions. If you are trying to work out whether to give up a floor, which neighbourhoods are oversubscribed, or how attendance moves through the week, the reporting is shallow compared with a dedicated platform. Occupancy data has become central to how occupiers plan space, a point the CBRE 2025 European Office Occupier Sentiment Survey reflects across its findings.

Hardware and customisation options are narrow

Support for meeting room display hardware is limited next to platforms built around it, so the screen-by-the-door setup that makes rooms easy to manage is harder to achieve. Floor plans and booking rules are also less configurable, which becomes a constraint once you need different rules for different teams, sites, or desk types.

Visitor management is not included

Places does not cover visitor management. If you want front-of-house sign-in, host notifications, and a record of who was on site, that is a separate system to buy, integrate, and maintain alongside it.

What to look for in a Microsoft Places alternative

Before comparing products, it helps to fix the criteria. These are the ones that decide whether a desk and room booking platform holds up at enterprise scale:

• Pricing model. Per-user pricing rewards small headcounts and penalises growth. Per-resource pricing, charged per desk or per room, stays flat as you add people, which matters most for organisations with far more employees than desks.
• Enterprise features as standard. SSO and SCIM provisioning should be included rather than gated behind a top tier, so IT can manage access and offboarding without a premium upgrade.
• Depth of reporting. Look for utilisation analytics that answer real estate questions, not just a log of who booked what.
• Hardware flexibility. Room screens and check-in devices should run on standard off-the-shelf tablets, not proprietary hardware you are locked into.
• Breadth on one platform. Desk booking, meeting room booking, and visitor management in a single system means fewer contracts, one source of data, and less integration work.
• Microsoft 365 fit. Since you are keeping the Microsoft stack, the alternative should integrate cleanly with Outlook, Teams, and Entra ID rather than fight it.

How Clearooms compares as a Microsoft Places alternative

Clearooms is a UK-based platform covering desk booking, meeting room booking, and visitor management on one system, built for hybrid offices at organisations with 200 users and up. Mapped against the criteria above, here is where it lands.

On pricing, Clearooms charges per desk and per room rather than per user. Costs stay flat as headcount grows, which is the opposite of the Teams Premium model and suits estates where employees outnumber desks, universities and professional services firms being typical examples.

On enterprise features, SSO and SCIM are included on every plan rather than reserved for a premium tier, so provisioning and offboarding run through your identity provider from day one. Reporting goes beyond booking logs into utilisation analytics facilities teams can use for space planning. Room hardware runs on any standard Android or iOS tablet, and on recommended PoE devices, so there is no proprietary kit to buy. And desk booking, room booking, and visitor management sit on the same platform, which removes the separate visitor system Places leaves you to source.

On the Microsoft side, Clearooms keeps the integration that makes Places attractive in the first place. It offers two-way Outlook sync, a Microsoft Teams app, SSO through Entra ID, and SCIM provisioning, so people still book from inside the tools they use. You can see the full set on the integrations page. Most organisations are running within a day, helped by a UK-based support team of actual people rather than an automated queue.

Side-by-side comparison

When Microsoft Places might still be right for you

Places is the better call in a few situations, and it is worth being honest about them. If your office is small with simple booking needs, if you already hold the Microsoft licences that cover the features you want, and if you have no real utilisation reporting requirement, the case for a separate platform is weak. Staying inside Microsoft 365 keeps the stack tidy and avoids another vendor relationship.

The calculation changes once you are managing a large estate, want utilisation data to drive space decisions, need hardware-supported meeting rooms, want visitor management included, or are wary of per-user pricing as you grow. That is the point at which a dedicated platform usually earns its place.