When discussing the switch from Calendly to Zoho Bookings, our customers list the following as major reasons for making the change:
Whenever we can bridge those Calendly gaps, we suggest Zoho Bookings. For the rest, we encourage customers to look at other Calendly alternatives.
Calendly represents the online scheduling market now. However, online scheduling and its audience are growing fast, and so are the differing needs. There are apps that are good for sales teams, service-focused businesses, and consultations.
Calendly can't keep up as these categories grow and vendors put out specialized apps that cover the entire spectrum of scheduling needs.
Based on our in-house knowledge, other Calendly alternative lists, and what we hear from customers, we've complied the following list. Each app has its own capabilities and audience, so one that works for some businesses may not work as well for others. Let's dive into the alternative to narrow down which might be best for you.
Zoho Bookings is a popular Calendly alternative, with the best free plan on the market and affordable paid plans starting at $6 a month. You can do one-on-one and group bookings in Zoho Bookings. It's ideal for individuals looking to avoid back and forth emailing and teams looking to allocate appointments evenly. There are multiple options for online meeting tools and payment gateways.
The key advantages are in personalization and pricing. The booking pages, emails, and domain are highly customizable. There's also the inherent benefit that it's part of the Zoho suite of apps, which means you can integrate Zoho Bookings with multiple business apps. APIs and custom functions make it easy to build custom solutions to scheduling problems. It's also one of the few options that has an app for both Android and iOS.
See how Zoho Bookings compares with CalendlyMicrosoft Bookings is a good Calendly alternative if you already have a Microsoft 365 subscription, as you can't buy it separately. You can hold one-on-one and group meetings and use Teams for online meetings. By managing the visibility of the booking page and disabling its indexing, you can also use Microsoft Bookings effectively within the organization.
One of the shortcomings of the product is the lack of online payment integrations. It also doesn't have integrations with CRM or accounting tools. Microsoft Bookings is ideal for small businesses in the service industry who run their business predominantly on Microsoft 365 apps.
The best thing about Setmore is its mobile app. It's modern, which is a stark contrast from the mobile apps of popular appointment schedulers. Setmore's UI is free of distractions. It's easy to navigate the interface, find features, and train yourself.
Setmore has live chat support aided by knowledgeable reps and well-written help documentation. Their pricing is affordable and incentivizes larger teams with lower per-staff pricing.
Setmore’s free plan is rich with integrations, including Square payments. It also integrates with Slack, Instagram, Facebook, and most website builders.
Where Setmore falls short is feature depth. Though the features are good for business consultations, sales teams, and service businesses, they aren't made exclusively for any of them. If you have Setmore on your list of possibilities, check out Zoho Bookings as well.
HubSpot's free meeting scheduler is simple and useful for common scheduling needs. It's available through HubSpot's Sales Hub, meaning it cannot be purchased without a HubSpot account.
The teams you create in Sales Hub are reflected in the meeting tool, and the tool pulls data from other HubSpot apps to help you set up meetings. You can include fields from your contact module on the scheduling form, which makes it easy for you to gather data. If you're leading a sales team, you can use the round-robin algorithm to automatically allocate appointments across the team.
This solution doesn't integrate with third-party tools except for Google and Microsoft apps. Calendly and Zoho Bookings, on the other hand, are independent tools and are better options if you're not planning to use HubSpot for other needs.
YouCanBookMe (YCBM) is a simple tool for scheduling meetings and appointments. It's a popular tool among universities and businesses in the education sector. You can use YCBM individually or with your team. Though the tool is simple, it depends on external calendars to set up availability. This makes it harder to operate compared to tools like Calendly or Zoho Bookings, which have built-in calendars.
YouCanBookMe costs $10 a month per linked calendar, but they offer special discounts for the education market.
Doodle is one of the earliest and most popular online meeting schedulers on the market.
Doodle has polls, surveys, and bookable calendars. Its polls are useful when you're trying to find the best time to meet with a group, and the surveys are helpful when you want to gather a number of opinions at once. The bookable calendar enables you to share your availability with others and let them book a time with you.
Doodle offers SSO, a mobile app for Android and iOS, a dedicated success manager, 99.9% uptime SLA, training, and priority support. These features serve larger organizations, like universities. Doodle works best when most of your meetings are internal.
Acuity focuses on small businesses in the service industry. This tool offers features that help businesses handle complex availabilities like recurring and uneven schedules, and generate more revenue via features like gift certificates, memberships, and coupons. It also offers a credit card vault, which is important for businesses taking paid appointments. Acuity is rich in features that cover any scheduling use case.
On the other hand, Acuity's slab-based pricing plans are not encouraging if you're a soloprenueur or only have a few employees. Such customers should consider the per-user billing plans through Calendly or Zoho Bookings.
Acuity has tried to cover almost every use case in appointment scheduling, while Calendly focuses on consultations. This makes Calendly more user friendly for most customers, whereas Acuity offers many features that can make it harder for customers to acclimate. In 2022, Calendly strengthened its team scheduling functionality with features like user access controls, meeting polls, and event types. Acuity has moved ahead with its strengths in managing service-based businesses.
10to8 is a well-rounded appointment scheduling app for service-based businesses. The app has many features and a clean UI, and it is especially fitting for businesses that visit customers to perform a service.
While 10to8 is similar to Acuity in terms of its target audience, it doesn't have as many features geared towards sales teams or recruitment teams.
While Calendly allows customers to book a meeting before adding them to the CRM, Chili Piper adds leads to the CRM first and then sends them through the scheduling workflow. In other words, Calendly follows a schedule-first, sales-second approach, whereas Chili Piper follows a sales-first, scheduling-second approach.
Chili Piper's features allow you to schedule meetings from your email, calendar, chat, and CRM. Because the app always captures the lead in the CRM first, the booking forms are prefilled; this makes most meetings a one-click experience for clients. Chili Piper also has routing rules to make sure that leads are assigned based on a team member's availability, experience, and other custom rules. In short, their aim is to connect a salesperson to customer as fast as possible.
OnceHub was one of the first apps to focus on sales teams and their scheduling needs. They have all the essential features of an appointment scheduling app.
OnceHub emphasizes compliance, security, customization, and control more than any other app that we reviewed. However, as a sales scheduling tool, OnceHub is a bit behind Calendly and Chili Piper in terms of integrations, routing algorithms, sales-focused reporting, plug-ins, and AI features that reduce administrative work.
The user interface is clean and offers clear help documentation. Keep in mind that OnceHub can be a little complex if you don't enjoy fine-grained control, flexibility, and a user interface crowded with help text.
While Drift is not primarily a scheduling solution, it offers a meeting scheduler and has several tools for sales teams. The main tool is a chatbot for your website that enables you to hold live conversations with visitors. The bot takes care of the conversations when your team isn't online. Drift extends this bot's functionality with emails, audience insights, and sales team routing. It also provides available site visitor information from your CRM, so you can have more personalized conversations.
These sales engagement platforms automate email and calls, personalize messaging, and provide real-time analytics. They also automatically update CRMs and other software in your sales tech stack, improving overall productivity. Sales managers can keep tabs on their team's performance with the dashboards. SDRs and BDRs will be able to start their day with their tasks already lined up.
The strength of both platforms is in the sales cadences. Sales cadences maintain uniformity and predictability for experienced sales team members while also reducing the ramp-up time for newbies. The platforms also help sales teams manage their email sequences without waiting for the marketing teams.
Many sales teams began using Calendly before these two sales engagement platforms hit the market. Maybe it is time for them to look beyond Calendly.
Mixmax is a sales acceleration tool that works with Gmail as a Chrome extension. Its ability to integrate with CRMs and recruitment software, as well as modules like tasks and rules, add more power to sales follow-up. The meeting tool in Mixmax is one of the many features that moves leads through the pipeline. Check out Mixmax if your team is using Gmail for sales conversations, as it can help you streamline those processes.
Vocus.io, like Mixmax, is a Chrome extension designed for sales engagement in Gmail. It's a combination of inbox, calendar, and campaigns. With the calendar, it's simple to create meetings and schedule appointments. As the admin, you can set permissions that enable team members to view one another's inboxes. Vocus.io offers built-in email templates, and you can create your own as well. You can also insert special widgets (like a poll), your calendar availability, and snippets. The campaigns feature lets you trigger multiple emails in different stages.
All of the apps above offer appointment scheduling solutions, but each serves a specific type of user, business, or approach. While Chili Piper, Salesloft, and Outreach are competing with Calendly to offer more features for large sales teams, the best Calendly alternatives are those that do what Calendly does best: consultations. In this case, Zoho Bookings, Microsoft Bookings, Setmore, and HubSpot's Meetings tool are strong options.
Among those four solutions, only Zoho Bookings and Setmore are standalone apps. The other two are part of a larger product suite, which means you have to buy HubSpot CRM or a Microsoft 365 subscription to gain access
For 2023, the best Calendly alternatives are Zoho Bookings and Setmore.
Now that we've seen what each app can do, it's time to answer some questions to bring extra clarity to your buying decisions.
Calendly has a free plan. However, Zoho Bookings has the best free plan on the market when it comes to essential features. Read about the seven best free appointment-booking plans in the market.
You should check out Chili Piper. Keep in mind that it is one of the more expensive apps in our alternatives list. Drift is another option.
You can try Mixmax or Vocus.io. Zoho Bookings and Microsoft Bookings are also good options.
The predominant customer base of both these apps is universities and other businesses in the education sector. Naturally, they have features and pricing that best support that market.
Acuity Scheduling and 10to8 have many features that are good for a variety of service businesses, regardless of industry.
Most of these apps do offer free trials, but Chili Piper, Salesloft, and Outreach have you sign up for a demo first. Microsoft and HubSpot require you to sign up for the software suite to try their booking tools. You can get started with a free 15-day trial of Zoho Bookings below.
No credit card information required. No obligation.
Continue using the forever free plan after the trial, or upgrade to a paid plan.
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