Meeting and appointment scheduling software
4.5/5 (435 reviews)Calendly is a scheduling software for organizing meetings and appointments between individuals and their colleagues, and between businesses and their clients or customers.
Calendly enables users to set their availability preferences, and then send out their own personalized invitation link to arrange meetings or appointments. The invitee is presented with a selection of available times and dates based around the user’s availability, and can make their choice from these. Calendly includes suggested meeting lengths of 15, 30, and 60 minutes, but users can create an unlimited number of different event types to suit their needs, set buffer time between appointments, and enforce a minimum scheduling notice period to prevent the last-minute booking of meetings.
Calendly allows users to set up and send out different invite types, giving invitees the opportunity to select the meeting format, which team member they wish to speak to, or both. Meetings can also be auto-assigned to any staff member available at the time an invitee chooses for their appointment. After invitees respond, they can be directed from the event confirmation page to the user’s site, or a custom ‘thank you’ page.
Calendly automatically sends out custom confirmation emails and event reminders to invitees, and notifies all meeting participants via email if an attendee reschedules. Integrations with Google and Office 365 calendars enable users’ calendars to be automatically updated, with Calendly checking for any booking conflicts before adding events.
Pros
TheThe best thing about Calendly is the ability to set schedules for specific event types! You can set blackout dates, available times, control meeting lengths, automatically add buffer time, limit the number of events scheduled for a single day, and more. This is perfect for setting up live events or meetings on an ongoing basis, but giving yourself enough heads up and flexibility to be in control. You basically give prospective customer the freedom to choose a date and time--but ensure that it fits in your schedule, too. Use this to schedule live demos with clients, training events, or even webinars. It's a great tool, especially for small sales teams that need a controlled flow of sales calls/demos.
Cons
Calendly is restrictive in analytics; for instance, I can't easily see how many people clicked to schedule an event, but didn't follow through. It's also difficult from a user interface standpoint. I find myself looking for settings and menus that are hidden within the slick, clean interface. On the scheduling side, it's pretty easy for clients to schedule events, but you can't customize the date picker--and that's really unfortunate, because I'd like to use it in more places but can't customize the look and feel or functionality.
We've been using Calendly for a little over 6 months at my company. This app makes finding times to meet with colleagues an absolute breeze. Working at a remote company with 90+ people, and specifically on a team of about 20, searching for available time slots in Google Calendar can be VERY time-consuming and challenging. With Calendly you are instantly shown the times available for the person you'd like to meet with. You can choose a time, and instantly add it to your Google Calendar. It sends them a reminder to their calendar as well.
Pros
Scheduling meetings is easy, and I don't ever have to rely on coordinating crazy google calendars with people. If you are setting it up for yourself to have people schedule meetings with you, it's easy to block out times that you are available or unavailable. It's also really great if you work with teams across different time zones as it takes your timezone into account when scheduling times with person/or vice versa, overall it's just one less thing to worry about.
Another super handy feature is the ability to request certain information from the person booking time with you. This makes it easy to request an agenda about the meeting or to perhaps ask a series of questions for recurring meetings with people.
Cons
The only problem I've had is mostly user error. As the one requesting a meeting, I wish there was an easier way to add calendar events to your calendar. I have on a few occasions forgot to add the scheduled time to my calendar (the option is there, I've just missed it a few times) would be awesome if it was automagically added some way to your Google Cal. :)
I love the simple UI and UX of this Software.
Pros
I really love how flexible Calendly has to offer, if you need a one-on-one Schedule, Calendly can give you that.
If you have a Team and you need them to schedule a meeting with your Prospects, Calendly has your Team.
If you need one member of your Team to schedule a separate meeting with your other member, Calendly will help you do that.
The integrations are also great, you can integrate Calendly with other meeting software like Zoom for a discovery call, GoToMeeting for Webinars, or even monetize discovery calls with their integration for PayPal or Stripe. Calendly will have those integrated easily.
I cannot stress enough how Calendly can customize your experience if you love certain Branding to be removed or to add, Calendly can do it for you.
There's so much to say but one thing stood out for me, the Timezone is already integrated with the Timezone of your Prospects, meaning, no more late, no-show meetings.
Cons
As much as I love Calendly, there are certain features that I don't like, well, every Software isn't perfect and we do have different take and opinion.
The Availability function to your Calendar, this is for me is confusing, you need to highlight first the day you want to be available until the date of your availability. I just wish Calendly can have a feature where you can just input a certain Date up until your Availability, more like a drop-down menu.
But that's just me, I still love how easy to use this software.
Each person in our company has a unique calendly link included under their email signature and available to share with clients as the need for a meeting arises. We save TONS of time using calendly and no longer waste time checking calendars, adjusting time zones, emailing back and forth, receiving responses after the proposed dates have passed, worrying we might double book, asking for phone numbers or addresses, etc. When a client schedules through calendly, the event apprears in Gmail with the location included and links to cancel or reschedule if needed. Everything we need "magically appears" without us having to lift a finger. Great asset to our work life and productivity!
Pros
I can share my calendly link with clients and contractors and they can easily schedule a meeting on my calendar without me having to be involved. It is user friendly for them and seamless for me. It requires no attention or maintenance on my part. You can connect calendly to your current calendar so that your availability automatically syncs as you make changes to your day. And this platform is highly workable for all of my needs without having to use a paid version! There are tons of customizations you can set, such as a buffer time to allow for travel between meetings, automatically blocking off or allowing specific times for each day of the week, disallowing bookings within __ hours, etc.
Cons
The ability to figure how exactly where and how to adjust all of the setup preferences is a little quirky. Some of the settings are "hidden" as sub-sections under other preference pages. I took a good bit of time setting and navigating through all of the customization options, but now that those are set, I don't have to think about or touch anything to keep Calendly working for me. With the free version, you can only have 1 meeting time for clients to choose from (for example, using my link, clients only have the option to schedule a 45 minute meeting with me). This is actually preferable to me though, as I don't want my clients to have to make more choices or spend more time in Calendly than needed. Using the free version keeps things simple.
I use this daily to have prospective clients schedule online appointments for us to speak over the phone or through video conferences.
Pros
The design was the first thing that got me attracted to Calendly, actually. I first saw it while booking an online appointment myself, and it actually was a good thing that the "host" was not using the paid version, because it was thanks to the branding that was included that I could research more about it. I was about to knock one star on my review for "value for money" because the free version comes with everything you need, and depending on the use, the branding might not be such a big deal for some people. So, there actually is quite a bit of value provided on the free version, so they should get the star for delivering it free of charge.
I love the fact that events can be edited and that they get their own custom URL, which I can share with prospective clients over the e-mail or text messages and they just book the time that works best for them through there. I also like that the local time is always converted to whatever the user needs to see, getting rid of eventual timing differences or errors in calculation. This is a very helpful tool!
Cons
There are no real cons for me since even with the free version, you get most (if not all) the functionalities you might need. I tried to come up with something for the sake of this review, but... no "cons" for me.
14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Basic: free.
Premium: $8 per user, per month (billed annually) or $10 per user, per month (billed monthly).
Pro: $12 per user, per month (billed annually) or $15 per user, per month (billed monthly).
Below are some frequently asked questions for Calendly.
Calendly offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: $8.00/month
Pricing model: Subscription
Free Trial: Available
14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Basic: free.
Premium: $8 per user, per month (billed annually) or $10 per user, per month (billed monthly).
Pro: $12 per user, per month (billed annually) or $15 per user, per month (billed monthly).
Calendly offers the following features:
Calendly has the following typical customers:
Freelancers, Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Non Profit, Small Business
Calendly supports the following languages:
English, French, German, Spanish
Calendly has the following pricing plans:
Subscription
We do not have any information about what devices Calendly supports
Calendly integrates with the following applications:
ActiveCampaign, Ad Sales Genius, Azendoo, BigMarker, Drip, EasyHire.me, Leadpages, LeadsBridge, Workato, Wrike
Calendly offers the following support options:
Forum, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Video Tutorials
If you schedule live events with clients on a regular basis, Calendly provides a clean interface to easily show others your available time slots and allow them to schedule an event. This has proved invaluable for our sales team to do live demos with prospects and not get too many scheduled at once. It also has allowed us to not schedule demos back to back without buffer time in between. That's huge!