Scheduling and taking appointments is an integral part of many businesses. If you have considered Calendly in the past to book and schedule meetings, you have possibly enjoyed their free and easy-to-use functionality.
However, when it comes to other use cases, such as paid appointments, back-and-forth emails, round-robin team assignments, contact management, or more complicated calendar settings, Calendly might not offer all the features you are looking for. You better understand that back-and-forth emails can be very time-consuming. You could lose a qualified client just because it is too boring to sync up.
This is the reason you are looking for an online meeting booking tool like Calendly. You need to quickly communicate your availability while letting your prospects manage the booking on their own. Now, you want to invest in the perfect tool. While Calendly is a common choice, products vary in terms of features, price, use cases, integrations, and other strengths. Fortunately, there are a lot of efficient scheduling tools online that help small and medium-sized businesses schedule meetings and book appointments more efficiently.
In this blog, TechNinjaPro will help you find one that meets your business’ specific needs when booking meetings or finding time in your hectic schedule.
What is Calendly?
Calendly is a powerful tool that makes it easier to schedule meetings. When you are using Calendly, you can send a link that connects to everyone’s calendars and facilitates planning a time that works perfectly. You just need to set your availability preferences and share the link with your customers or team members or simply embed it on your site.
Calendly does not offer any extra settings for booking pages, such as coupon codes, discounts, or extended booking for specific types of clients. Calendly comes with a range of useful features including, calendar integrations, SMS and email notifications, buffers, time zone detection, customizations, and more.
For a flawless user experience, it is integrated with apps like Zapier, Salesforce, GoToMeeting, and more. However, for users looking for a simple tool to book meetings, Calendly is a free and perfect choice. Before breaking down all of your scheduling options, let’s talk about Calendly’s features and why you might need to seek a Calendly alternative.
Calendly Features
- Free API, Functional
- Group and Team scheduling functionality
- Multiple Calendar integrations
Pricing Plans
Pros of Calendly
- It Includes basic automation such as reminder emails for organizers and attendees.
- Integrated across multiple calendars easily
- Easy for all parties to reschedule.
Cons of Calendly
- There are no choices to add business assets
- Minimum options for appointment booking or paid meetings
- To collaborate on events, participants have to be users within your account.
While Calendly does not meet the requirements of primary users, there are tons of conditions for which it would not work. For example, users want to be members of a specific plan to participate in collaborative events, which means pricing can quickly get costly.
Similarly, if you need to brand your scheduling pages, Calendly does not offer that as a choice. Fortunately, there are several Calendly alternatives that do offer this functionality.
5 Best Calendly Alternatives
1. Setmore
Setmore is one of the best Calendly alternatives for choosing a scheduling app, mainly because it is simple to use and provides a really generous free plan. Setmore will only take a few minutes to get set up; even those with minor technical knowledge will find it very easy. In fact, its setup wizard means that it is impossible to miss a step.
Aside from being a straightforward tool, It has some distinctive features that Calendly lacks. The reality that you can download Setmore onto your desktop might be appealing to some as it means you can use it offline.
Setmore’s free plan comes with four user accounts, or for $25/month, you will be able to have up to 20 user accounts. When you consider that Calendly charges $10/month per user, Setmore is a more economical choice for bigger teams. In fact, Setmore’s free plan is pretty affordable, offering unlimited appointments, automated emails, and payment processing via Square.
Calendly does provide a slightly more comprehensive range of calendars, though you can always use Zapier. TechNinjaPro would recommend Setmore to anyone searching for an effective free plan or those who benefit from the desktop software.
Pros of Setmore
- Reasonable price compared to competitors
- Every user on the account gets their own appointment scheduling link
- Flexibility with services you can make available.
Cons of Setmore
- Calendar syncing errors and bugs
- Some fields seen by the scheduler cannot be edited
- Office 365 sync has to be turned on and off regularly to fix issues.
2. Sprintful
Sprintful is another simple, flexible yet comprehensive online scheduling tool. To use the software, simply configure your appointment settings by setting up your meetings’ duration, capacity, and optional pricing. Then sync your existing meeting calendars, set up and configure rules for your availability and customize the days, short notice, times, meeting buffers, blocked dates, and optional custom forms. Lastly, you can customize your branding by adding your brand color, logo, header message, and website name.
Sprintful also supports multiple meeting types, including one-on-one meetings, group meetings, and business services. It comes with a variety of supportive features, including calendar integrations, custom forms, custom branding, time-zone support, and more. For a flawless user experience, Sprintful integrates with apps like Zoom, Zapier, Google Meet, and many more.
Pricing
Pros of Sprintful
- Sprintful support multiple event types
- Different configurations are possible to provide diverse customers and prospects.
- Very affordable compared to other apps
Cons of Sprintful
- It does not integrate with enterprise infrastructure systems such as SAML or SSO. However, this feature is not supported with other tools as well.
3. Doodle
Doodle is a scheduling tool that is easy to use and works perfectly on mobile phones. It is simple to set up, and the use of this tool is relatively simple. You set up a meeting and propose a few different times, and the person you are meeting with selects what works perfectly for them, except it does not happen right in the email.
When you need more participants in that meeting and your team is across different time zones, you may have to use its polling features to figure out what times work best for your team. It is one of the best online scheduling tools available.
Compared to Calendly, Doodle is user-friendly and more affordable software. However, it is missing some functionalities and features that more complicated programs offer.
Pricing
Pros of Doodle
- One scheduling polls are free
- Affordable plans
- Calendar syncing
- Confirmation & reminder emails
Cons of Doodle
- Integrations are limited
- Not enough customization
4. Simplybook.me
Simplybook.me is another perfect Calendly alternative focusing on company and group use rather than individual scheduling. Like Calendly, it provides an option to send a scheduling link that offers available times within a specific window. Simplybook.me also provides features to create entire portals and applications for customers to book appointments.
It is simple to create custom landing pages and white-labeled applications that look like they were made specifically for your business. Simplebook.me provides scheduling links, but the actual benefit of this Calendly alternative is the design functionality. It is a unique tool because it offers a broad range of really good-looking responsive site templates.
Pricing
Pros of Doodle
- One scheduling polls are free
- Affordable plans
- Calendar syncing
- Confirmation & reminder emails
Cons of Doodle
- Integrations are limited
- Not enough customization
5. Monday.com
Monday.com is a productivity tool that officially came onto the market in 2014. Its offering is much more comprehensive than Calendly. For example, you can have many workspaces and multiple dashboards within these. This can be an efficient way to separate projects or manage the tasks of different teams. It has tons of templates, meaning that you can use it for many more functionalities than simply scheduling. Because it is a comprehensive scheduling tool, you will get templates such as blog planning, social media scheduling, sprint planning, and much more.
Monday.com is available in more than 12 languages. Its free plan is available for up to 2 users. Monday.com is a perfect project management tool with a variety of features. If you are searching for a tool that can help you keep on top of everything from sales & marketing to customer service and product development, Monday.com is worth checking out.
Pricing
Pros of Monday.com
- It provides employees ownership of specific tasks.
- It has a clear layout on how well you are doing with certain tasks
Cons of Monday.com
- It has a high price
- It integrates with more email software
What is your favorite Calendly alternative?
Whether you are starting with meeting schedulers or have been using them for years, there are many Calendly alternatives custom-built for your requirements. Start by searching for a Calendly alternative that fits your business need and narrow it down by functionality and feature set.
For example, do you need something that does polling, or are coupon codes necessary in your check-out functionality? Whittling down your requirements will make it easier for you to identify which Calendly alternative works perfectly.
Conclusion
TechNinjaPro has seen that there are many best Calendly alternatives out there, but which one is best for you? Well, that totally depends on what your requirements are. The choices are endless when it comes to meeting scheduling tools. Based on TechNinjaPro‘s overview, you can now choose which scheduling software best suits your business and personal workflow and what you perceive to be the best Calendly alternatives in 2021.