Intro
As a photographer I’ve been using Clanedly’s free plan to organise shoots and client meetings (you can check out some of my work HERE). You might like to try it, however you might love to know that there are some great Calendly alternatives with free plans too, so you can choose the platform that best suits you and your business.
This post will summarise the top Calendly free alternatives along with their key features and cons compared to Calendly, so you can kiss back and forth emails goodbye!
What is Calendly?
Ever had the experience of trying to organize a meeting, in person or online, and suffered the frustration of the never-ending back and forth email exchanges until you find a date that works for both of you?
Calendly is a scheduling app that solves this problem. It makes booking your calendar really easy and painless so you have more time to work in your business, vs doing admin.
How does Calendly work?
Calendly is very simple to use, all you need to do is 1) create your free Calendly account, 2) create an event that you’d like to invite someone by setting your availability and preferences 3) send an invite to your client, so that they can choose a time from your schedule that suits them. Then you’ll book in an instant.
But that’s nothing particularly special? But here’s where the real magic happens. You can grant Calendly permission to view your calendar so that your availability for appointments will automatically be updated.
Let’s say you have availability for client meetings on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and something comes up. Calendly will see your personal entry into your calendar and it will not longer make that time available to your clients. This is great because it means no more accident double bookings.
Calendly plans
All of Calendly’s plans integrate with Google, Office 365, Outlook, and iCloud calendars. Here’s a breakdown of their plans so you can see at a glance what might be best for you.
Free plan (basic)
- One event type
- One calendar
- Automated event notifications
- Personalized scheduling links
- Website embedding capabilities
- Automated new meeting and cancellation notifications
- Cost: Free
Calendly’s free plan is great if you only ever schedule one type of event. If that’s what you do, you can use Calendly to supercharge your appointment making at no cost. Or you can schedule unlimited one-time events.
Automated event notifications are great because your client can have the event automatically added into their calendar and they can cancel or reschedule at the click of a button while everyone stays in sync.
Essentials plan
Everything in the free plan plus:
- Send your invitee email reminders and follow-ups
- Customise email notifications and reminders
- Create group events
- Send your invitee email reminders and follow-ups
- Add links to your confirmation pages
- Unlimited event types
- Cost: 8USD
Clandly’s professional plan
Everything in plus, plus
- Custom branding options (colours and hide Calendly logo)
- Create automated workflows
- Customise email notifications and reminders
- Redirect your invitees
- Integration capabilities to connect with hundreds of apps through Zapier and build your own integrations by accessing the API
This plan might be for you if you want to customise and have full control over the client experience, add your branding / voice and allow integrations to connect to your CRM, mailing list and collect payments.
Pricing: 12 USD per month.
Why do freelancers look for alternatives to Calendly?
Even though most scheduling apps work in a similar way to Calendly, there are four reasons freelancers seek alternatives.
- Features
- Pricing
- Branding
- Integrations
Top 7 apps like Calendly
Here’s a rundown of some of the best alternatives to Calendly including their free plans and pro plans and how they compare to Calendly.
1) DOODLE – Best Multi-Participant Scheduler
Doodle is one of the most popular scheduling tools because it can be used to easily book meetings that need to include many participants. Everything happens via their website and its straightforward UI makes it easy for even the least tech-savvy people to book meetings.
Secluding works differently to Calendly. Instead of you sharing your availability allowing your client to pick a time, with Doodle the organiser goes to the Doodle site, creates a meeting poll and proposes a few different times. Then, all of the participants pick the times that work best for them.
Doodle vs Calendly provides a more collaborative approach to scheduling that’s best suited for businesses that need to regularly set up meetings with multiple participants in different sites. Automatic time zone adjustments when scheduling appointments is a big win in this area too
If that sums up how you work this might be a better platform than Calendly for you.
However, one of its drawbacks compared to Calendly is the absence of workflows. It’s awesome to be able to trigger an automation after a customer makes a booking so you can provide them with content that will help them get the most out of the meeting. This helpful feature is well worth it in my experience.
Doodle has many of the features in common with Calendly, however it is limited by lack of integrations and a fairly simplistic feature set.
Best Doodle Features
- Scheduling polls for multiple users
- Confirmation and reminder email functionality
- Clear visual snapshot of available and unavailable times
- Calendar syncing with integrated calendar providers
- Ability to add blackout days
- Limit the number of events that can occur in a single day
- Automatic time zone adjustments when scheduling appointments
Cons of Doodle vs Calendly
- No lifetime free basic plan
- No workflows (automations)
- No SMS reminders
- Most of the advanced features are only available on paid plans.
- Fairly simplistic feature set
Pricing
Unlike Calendly, Doodle is a scheduling alternative that does not offer a free plan. They offer a 14-day trial period for each of their paid plans. Their ‘Pro’ plan is 6.96 per month for one user.
2) Hubspot Meetings – Best Free Scheduler for Brand Control
Hubspot Meetings is the best free stand-alone alternative to Calendly.
Unlike Calendy’s free plan, Hubspot’s free plan offers complete brand control which is a massive plus! You can take every opportunity to show your customers who you are by highlighting your brand with custom colors, logos, and URL links.
With that in mind, many are of the opinion that, from an aesthetic point of view, Hubspot’s scheduler is far better than Calendly’s, especially when embedding into your website.
The second thing that makes Hubspot a great Calendly alternative is that its designed to integrate with Hubspot’s free CRM platform. If you’re using them together, Hubspot Meetings takes advantage of all of your contacts’ historical data and context to provide an excellent customer experience.
Of course, you can get the similar functionality within Calendly by creating a ‘zap’ using the integration platform Zapier to connect to your CRM of choice.
Hubspot could also be a great option if you are running a sales team because it can feed into their sales and marketing ‘Hubs’ that are available on a monthly subscription basis with Hubspot.
Best Hubspot Meetings Features:
- Unlimited meetings
- Brand control
- Buffer time
- Shareable and embeddable meeting links
- Email booking notifications
Cons of Hubspot meetings vs Calendly
- Automatic capture into Hubspot CRM
- No workflows
Price
Free
3) Microsoft Bookings – Best Scheduler for Microsoft Integration
If you already have a Microsoft Office 365 account, Microsoft bookings is a handy scheduling app that’s bundled in with your subscription.
Similar to Calendly, it includes a web-based booking calendar, but with the added benefit of offering seamless integration with other Microsoft products like Teams and Outlook, if you are already running a Microsoft environment.
However, if you plan to do anything beyond booking appointments you will find it lacking. One of the shortcomings of this product is the lack of online payment integrations. It also doesn’t have integrations with CRM or accounting tools. Therefore, it might not be the best Calendly alternative from that perspective.
Best features of Microsoft Bookings:
- Seamless integration with Microsoft products
Cons of Microsoft bookings vs Calendly
- Limited Customization and Features
- Only available if you have an Office 365 account
Price- Free if you have a Microsoft Office 365 account. It is not available as a standalone product.
4) Acuity Scheduling – Best for Bookings with Sales Functionality
Acuity Scheduling is one of the best apps like Calendly and it’s recently been snapped up by Squarespace.
This scheduling app has many features that make it very attractive to small service-based businesses. If you need to let your users buy products and schedule your services simultaneously, this is a great option because it expands its capabilities into business administration like client management, customizable intake forms, and invoicing.
Calendly and Acuity are competitively priced, and both offer a free trial period for paid features.
Best Acuity Scheduling Features
- Workflows even at lowest pricing tier (automate your follow-up emails)
- Tons of integrations: Mailchimp, Quickbooks, Zoom, PayPal
- Data dashboards make it easy to track how many no-shows and successful meetings you’ve had
- Add-ons to allow for things like checkouts and extra features in the scheduling process
- Intake forms
- Customize branding and templates
- Unlimited appointment scheduling
- Embeddable calendar widget
- Easy for businesses to create and users to add coupons and vouchers.
- SMS notification for upcoming appointments
Cons vs Calendly
- No free plan
- All plans are branded besides the highest tier
- Subscriptions and membership sales only available in the mid-tier
Pricing of Acuity Scheduling
The least expensive program starts at $14/month for a single user and the most expensive is $50/month for up to 36 users.
5) Appointy
Appointy is a powerful but simple appointment scheduling software that makes online scheduling easy and it is ideally suited to individuals rather than teams. Their free plan is a great option because it is fully-featured.
It works similarly to Calendly software by allowing users to create an event and send a scheduling link. The recipient can then select a time from your available, and the software will automatically add the event to each parties’ calendar.
Appointy offers functionality like additional custom fields, recurring appointments, preferred contact method, and allows users to set specific availability schedules daily, weekly, or monthly.
Best Appointy Features
- Fully-featured free plan with Website integration, Zapier (Connect with over 1000 apps)
- Automatic reminders, 100 appointments per month
- Easy to use design functionality
- Straightforward link design
- Automated meeting scheduling and forwarding to personal calendars
- Time zone auto-adjustment based on user’s location
- Custom field creation
Cons
- No team scheduling or round-robin options
Pricing of Appointy
Appointy offers a 14-day free trial of their premium monthly plans starting from $19.99
6) Picktime – Only Free Scheduler That Can Take Payments
Picktime is a free online appointment scheduling software that includes the ability to invoice and take payments, which is a benefit vs Calendly’s free plan.
It’s simple and extremely easy to use and it’s the only scheduling platform where you can manage both your personal and business calendars all in one place. It also has premium upgrades too.
Pictime’s Free plan Features
- 3 Team Members
- Unlimited Appointments
- Import Contacts
- Email Notifications
- Online Booking Page
- Payments with PayPal
- Over 8+ powerful integrations
- Syncs personal and professional calendars to keep everything organised
Cons
- Not as fully featured as other similar products
- Has a slightly steeper learning curve
Pricing
Premium subscriptions from 9.99 USD
7) You Can Book me
YouCanBook.me is a simple online scheduling platform. You can customise your booking page by choosing your availability, length of appointment, and setting notifications. You can share the booking page link via email, your CRM or embed into your website.
A number of useful features include, calendar integrations (Google and Microsoft), SMS and email notifications, time zone detection, customisable branding, and for a seamless user experience, it also integrates with Zapier.
Their free plan includes everything you need to jump right into scheduling and making bookings with ease and includes branding options, a fully configurable booking form as well as take payments via Stripe.
You can book me paid Features
- Zapier integration
- Multiple booking pages
- Follow-up emails
- Appoint reminders and notifications
- Appointment padding
- Password protected bookings
Cons
- No team scheduling or round-robin options.
Pricing
A simple 10 USD per calendar that’s connected per month to unlock all their features.
Which scheduler should you choose?
While Calendly is the best known scheduler on the market, other apps may be a better fit for your business.
As a starting point, you might want to make a list of all the ways in which you interact with your clients, so you can see at a glance what you need from a scheduler as a minimum.
Once you’ve penned this down, you could try a couple of the free plans and take it from there. All the free scheduling plans available take the faff out of making bookings, but you might find that some apps feel better to use than others or have more of your priority features in their base package.
It’s also worth thinking ahead to where you want to take your business over the year. This will help you to choose a scheduling platform that has the flexibility to build on to the functionality that you might need in the months to come.
If you want to up your wedding photography game and improve your business, I run a wedding photography workshop and you can find out more here