Calendly stands out from its competitors for its ease of use, slick design, and the amount of time it saves. It’s also one of the few scheduling tools with an indefinite free plan.
Calendly is a cloud-based meeting scheduler that aims to eliminate back-and-forth emails. One of the first things you’ll notice about Calendly is its slick design and a user experience that conveys simplicity. While gathering feedback from active users, we found that Calendly’s ease of use came up almost every time. Michael, a Digital Marketing Consultant at a small-sized business says, “Calendly is so easy to use. I haven't needed to contact support or refer to any help documentation, because the UX is just so intuitive and simple. I love how clean and simple the layout is. All my bookings are booked without anyone getting confused.”
How Calendly works is that you create a set of rules for your availability, integrate video conferencing tools, create your schedule, and share your calendar with your guests. You can either send your Calendly link or embed it on your website. Your meeting attendees can then pick a time from your available dates and you wouldn’t have to confirm their meeting slot, Calendly would automatically send them a confirmation mail with details.
Your invitees can reschedule or cancel a meeting, without your interference and needless back-and-forth emails. You can create personalized reminders and thank you notes that Calendly would automatically send to all attendees. One great thing about Calendly is the automatic timezone conversion it comes with, which makes it very easy for both the attendee and the meeting host to fix a meeting in their local time.
Calendly has a lot of useful features but one that stands out from the crowd is the team scheduling feature. What that means is that not only can you schedule one-to-one meetings but also create different types of group events. You can book events for multiple attendees or co-host the meeting with other people or even share the hosting responsibilities with other members of your team. The last one is referred to as a round robin event and can be particularly useful for HR teams that like to equally distribute their work. You can also create different calendars for different types of meetings, lengths of meetings, etc. so that certain kinds of meetings are scheduled for 30 minutes only and others for 60.
Be aware though, a lot of the features that make Calendly great, such as the ones listed above are only available in the paid plans. Another problem you might run into with Calendly is that syncing it with your personal calendar is not always accurate. For example, you book into a webinar that by default adds the meeting to the ‘Home’ calendar instead of ‘Work’. That can cause conflict with new Calendly bookings.
Calendly is simplistic and straightforward when it comes to scheduling. It may not be right for organizations who have complicated scheduling needs.
Quite a few users have qualms with Calendly’s functionality on the mobile app. So if you’re somebody who relies on a mobile phone for work, you might face some limitations.
Calendly has many big names in their customer base, such as eBay, Compass, Lyft, Dropbox, La-Z-Boy, Twilio, and Stack Overflow.
Calendly integrates with a variety of calendars, video conferencing software, recruiting solutions, and other third-party tools. You can also get custom integrations with Calendly’s API or other connectors like Zapier, Make, Outfunnel, etc.
Some of the popular integrations include Zoom, Typeform, Slack, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Hubspot.
Calendly has five pricing plans that can be billed either monthly or annually. If you choose the latter, you’ll save 20%. Below are the prices you’ll pay per month per user, if you choose to get billed annually.
All the paid plans come with a 14-day trial, at the end of which, you’ll automatically be downgraded to the free plan. They also offer special pricing for non-profit organizations. You’ll have to reach out to their customer support specialists for details.
Companies of all sizes looking for an affordable and user-friendly scheduling solution. Sole business owners and small businesses might find Calendly particularly helpful since there’s a free plan as well.
Setting up Calendly is very easy and you don’t even need to be tech-savvy to figure it out. Calendly guides you every step of the way without overwhelming you with too much information. The implementation process won’t take you more than 30 minutes.
Calendly has a help center with articles for customers to self-serve. Customers may also reach out to Calendly's customer support team via email or live chat if further help is needed.
Calendly was founded by Tope Awotona in 2013, out of his personal need for a scheduling product that came without the frustration of exchanging needless emails. When he realized that he could not find something on the market that worked as seamlessly as he wanted it to, he took matters into his own hands.
Seeking inspiration from Dropbox and its cloud-based approach, Awontona hired a couple of engineers in Kiev with the aim of building a simple scheduling product that could be used for multiple reasons by different kinds of users.
It’s worth mentioning that the same company that started with Awontona’s personal savings accounts is now valued at $3 billion, as of May 2021. Awontona has had to face a lot of hardships in life; seeing his father get murdered when he was only 12, immigrating to the U.S. from Nigeria, and later losing his mother. He attributes his success to sheer grit and perseverance.
Is Calendly a video conferencing tool?
Calendly is a booking software that natively integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, and other video conferencing tools. You can use it to schedule video calls and also physical appointments.
Is Calendly free?
Yes, Calendly has a free plan. If you want more features, you can also switch to the paid plans that have a 14-day free trial.
Is Calendly HIPAA compliant?
No, Calendly is not HIPAA compliant, which makes it unsuitable for patient scheduling. Healthcare organizations can, however, use Calendly for scheduling internal meetings.