Last Updated on January 19, 2024 by Alex Birkett
Yes, I do have Calendly alternatives that will meet your appointment scheduling needs.
What is Calendly?
Founded in 2010, Calendly has grown steadily over the years helping LinkedIn, Zendesk, EMyth, and The University of Georgia and other users schedule appointments.
Compared to other appointment scheduling tools, Calendly differentiates itself through its simplicity and intuitive user interface.
All you need to do is create an account and set your availability preferences. Once you share a scheduling link with colleagues or prospects, they will pick a convenient day and time and then Calendly will create the event in your calendar.
Calendly makes scheduling easier by syncing with your existing calendars such as Outlook, Google Calendar, and Office 365 to prevent double bookings. If you have several meetings lined up on a particular day, use Calendly to create buffer times between meetings to allow you to adequately prepare.
And when you want to focus on deep work, use it to block off the days when you don’t hold meetings.
If you’re running a remote team or have clients from different geographical regions, you don’t need to have a timezone converter tool close every time you’re scheduling a meeting.
Calendly comes with a timezone detector that aligns different time zones, making it easier for your colleagues, clients, and prospects to schedule meetings with you.
And if you charge your clients for each meeting you have, Calendly allows you to accept payments using PayPal and credit cards.
It integrates with Zapier, allowing you to connect it to more tools that aren’t on the list of Calendly’s integrations.
That said, Calendly doesn’t provide you with analytics. Customers who have embedded Calendly on their websites don’t have a way to know how many people click on their meeting links but don’t book.
The tool can be slow and at times, it crashes costing you more time when scheduling your meetings. Its email support also comes with restrictions. Free users have to wait for normal support hours while paid users have to wait for three hours.The waiting time is inconvenient whenever you get stuck while using the tool.
Even though Calendly packages itself as the ideal appointment scheduling appl for anyone who wants to schedule a meeting, here is a list of the best Calendly alternatives, depending on your needs:
The 9 Best Calendly Alternatives
- X.ai: Best overall alternative
- Hubspot Meetings: Best alternative for Hubspot users:
- Chili piper: Best Alternative for B2B sales teams
- Meetfox: Best alternatives for consultants
- Setmore: Best alternative for small business owners
- YouCanBook.me: Best alternative for educators
- Doodle: Best alternative for large teams
- Acuity Scheduling: Best alternative for health professionals:
- Calendar: Best alternative for freelancers
1. X.Ai: Best Overall Alternative
Compared to Calendly, X.ai is a clear winner. They do have similar capabilities, but X.ai takes it a step further with their AI assistants, Amy, and Andrew.
Think of them as your executive assistants who do the heavy lifting by working out the details with other attendees to set up your meetings.
And since you don’t hold one type of meeting, it comes with templates for each meeting, so no more, “here’s my calendar link” for every type of meeting you want to schedule.
It supports 55 different languages so your meetings aren’t restricted to English speakers only.
If you use SMS marketing for lead nurturing or LinkedIn outreach for lead generation, X.ai allows you to share your availability with your prospects using these channels to deliver a seamless experience on one channel.
Got stuck using the tool? No problem. Even free users have access to chat support.
The only downside to the tool (which doesn’t remain a downside after a while) is that your AI assistants take a while to understand your calendar and availability preferences.
You might find yourself getting in to help them with scheduling a meeting. After all, we (humans) also need help as we learn something new right?
2. HubSpot Meetings: Best Alternative For HubSpot Users
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing platform, providing you with different tools to support your inbound marketing efforts and a CRM to help serve your customers better. As a marketer, it would be a pain if they didn’t have a meeting scheduling tool to complement HubSpot’s core features, right?
HubSpot has a better user interface (and fairer looks) as compared to Calendly, but that’s not all it has to offer. Here’s what HubSpot meetings tool is capable of:
- Synchronizing with your existing calendars e.g. Google Calendar, Office 365, and Outlook so prospects don’t have to guess about your availability preferences
- Allowing prospects to schedule group meetings with different people in the company.
- Allowing you to embed your calendar on your website helping you start more generate more leads from your landing pages visitors who want to talk to you
- Every time you meet with a prospect, HubSpot adds them into your CRM, so all you need to do is start following up.
3. Chili Piper: Best Alternative For B2b Teams
If you’re counting on your B2B sales team to convert more qualified leads into customers, then they need all the support they can get to do their job.
However, a lack of alignment between sales and marketing teams leads to friction, especially when sales teams aren’t able to follow up with the leads they get from the marketing team.
To avoid such awkward situations that kill team morale, how about using Chili Piper to bridge the gap and probably end the tensions for good?
Here’s how:
Include meeting inks in your email and social media campaigns so you get hold of your hottest leads instantly, so no more delays leading to marketers blaming sales reps for taking too long before reaching out to relevant leads.
If your prospects aren’t available for a scheduled demo or a sales call, Chili Piper allows them to easily reschedule meetings and then sends them an email notification to reduce no-shows.
Using Piper drive or Salesforce as your CRM for email outreach workflow? Chili Piper plays nicely with these and more CRM tools, by allowing you to create relevant routing rules, assigning leads, and meetings to relevant sales representatives depending on the conditions you’ve set.
Setting up the tool can be a challenge but given all the work it will be doing for your sales team, it’s worth the effort. Besides, if you want to see the scheduling app in action, schedule a demo with them.
4. Meetfox: Best Alternative For Consultants
If you’re counting on consulting clients to grow your business, MeetFox will give you a better ROI than Calendly. Meetings with clients is a core part of your business operations, and Meetfox simplifies everything you have to do into three simple tasks:
- Schedule your meetings
- Meet your clients
- Get paid
Sounds simple but you’d be surprised at how difficult it is to do that using Calendly. As a consultant, all you need is a scheduling solution that does what it is supposed to do so you focus on serving your clients. And that’s not all.
Here’s more of what Meetfox has to offer:
- Allows you to create a customized booking page for each of the meetings you have
- It sends meeting invoices on your behalf and as a paid user, you won’t pay transaction fees. Bye-bye annoying and time-consuming admin tasks.
- It integrates with the tools you’re already using such as Gmail, WordPress, and your existing calendars to streamline your available times
- It has an intuitive user-friendly, so your clients won’t have to struggle to find out how to schedule a meeting with you
- It’s easy to set up but if you get stuck, their customer service is within reach, through chat support and access to their knowledge base articles.
5. Setmore: Best Alternative For Small Business Owners
When you’re building a business, you want more than ease of use and simplicity. Not that they don’t matter anymore, but you also want a scheduling app that is tailored to your ever-changing needs and has a smooth learning curve.
Enter Setmore.
Its central booking calendar means that you have a single source of truth for all your meetings and you can access it from any of the devices you’re using.
To make things even better, Setmore keeps up with your marketing activities by integrating with Facebook and Instagram.
You won’t have to ask your prospects to use a different channel to book meetings with you.
Share your meeting links with them inside these platforms and once they book, send automated SMS and email reminders to each attendee to reduce no-shows.
It is easy to set up and use and once your clients want to make online payments, they can use Setmore as it allows you to accept payments securely
6. Youcanbook.Me: Best Alternative For Educators
Calendly has always been the go-to booking software for educators. Even with its many features, you can’t customize the look and feel of your booking page and form has always been out of reach for most users.
As an educator, you have different kinds of group and 101 meetings ranging from campus tours, parent-teacher meetings, and student meetings.
So, in addition to scheduling meetings, you need an appointment scheduling software tool that has flexible customization features on the booking page and forms for each of these meetings. Invitees will find it easier to understand the kind of meetings they’re booking and what you expect from them.
The result? More productive meetings.
YouCanBookMe also allows you to:
- Automate the scheduling process right from booking to SMS and email notifications for meetings
- Export your booking data if you want to create a detailed report for analysis
- Harmonize your schedule through calendar integrations
- Keep track of your meetings through its intuitive user interface
7. Doodle: Best Alternative For Large Teams
When running a huge team working on different projects, meetings are an important part of everything you do.
Progress relies on how well information flows between team members so that everyone knows what they need to do and when they need to do it.
And you don’t want to stay in the dark whenever you need project updates simply because you can’t find an ideal date and time slot to review progress and address emerging issues. It is frustrating.
Doodle comes in to streamline your online scheduling through its calendar syncing capabilities.
All the team members have to do is share their availability preferences even across different time zones then find a suitable day and time slot.
And since there’s a lot of sensitive information flowing in between large teams, Doodle is hosted on AWS and uses Cloudflare to provide an extra layer of security for teams using the tool.
8. Acuity Scheduling: Best Alternative For Health Professionals
As a health professional, the rapport you build with your patient improves the quality of your doctor-patient relationship trust is the foundation of this rapport. Whenever you’re scheduling meetings with your patients, you want to start things off by reassuring them that they’re safe and that you guarantee confidentiality.
Acuity Scheduling isn’t just another meeting scheduler. It is HIPAA and BAA certified, and using it to schedule patient meetings boosts your credibility and earns their trust. Good luck doing that with Calendly.
In addition to being HIPAA and BAA complaint, Acuity scheduling also allows you to:
- Integrate with MailChimp and Aweber to help you automate patient follow-ups
- Know about your performance by providing you with detailed reports on no-shows, pending online appointments
- Sync your existing calendars to prevent double-booking
- Collect payments using Stripe and PayPal from clients for the sessions you have
- Integrate with video tools for online meetings such as Zoom
- Send reminders to patients via email and SMS to reduce no-shows
9. Calendar: Best Alternative For Freelancers
The calendar’s look and feel might make you think that you’re using Google Calendar all over again.
If you’re not keen enough, you’ll even miss out on its analytics capabilities that outweigh what Calendly has to offer.
As a freelancer, you’ve been bogged down by client meetings when you have lots of work to do with tight deadlines. Getting new business, building your brand, and connecting with other freelancers are fantastic.
However, without data to know how much time you spend working on client deliverables vs. meetings, you won’t know what meetings to get rid of and which ones to keep.
In addition to helping you schedule meetings, Calendar provides you with detailed reports telling you how much time you spent working on client deliverables, on meetings, and any other activity scheduled on your calendar.
The numbers might not always be pretty and if you feel guilty about how you’re spending your time, it’s time to do something about it.
In addition to getting detailed reports, Calendar also allows you to:
- Block your schedule whenever you want to get rid of distractions
- Sync all your calendars and see your availability in one place
- Access your calendar from wherever you are using the android and iOS mobile apps
Conclusion
You’ll always have a meeting to schedule and attend. No matter what you do and the clients you serve, you have to find ways to make it easier for you to stay productive and deliver better experiences to your clients. One way to do that is through using appointment scheduling software.
Falling for the hype and a large user base prevents you from doing what you’re supposed to do: serving your clients and finishing your projects.
To avoid that from happening again, look at the list of tools we just covered and pick a tool that will meet your needs.
All you need to focus on is spend more time working and having productive meetings.