You could be setting yourself up for failure if your business relies on manual coordination of events or meetings. Even if you find the process to be convenient, it still comes with a price.
Calendar conflicts, time delays, double-booking, no-shows, uncertain stakeholder availability, and endless back-and-forth conversations—these are the real costs your business pays for having a disorganized calendar app.
In a business context, here are a few examples of how it can manifest.
Missing sales meetings with prospects due to calendar conflicts.
Delaying project deadlines because stakeholders couldn’t find time to align.
Teams fight over conference room bookings.
The solution? Implementing the right shared calendar app that helps you schedule, collaborate, and improve business efficiency.
Key takeaways:
Shared calendar apps help teams avoid calendar conflicts, prevent double-booking, and cut down back-and-forth emails by giving everyone real-time visibility into each other’s schedules.
In this article, we compare the 5 best shared calendar apps for teams in 2025— Zoho Bookings, Google Calendar, Outlook, Fantastical, and Teamup—to help you choose the right tool to simplify scheduling, improve collaboration, and boost productivity.
Zoho Bookings stands out as a shared calendar and scheduling solution with AI-powered setup, workspaces for different teams, shareable time slots and booking links, custom booking pages, automated workflows, and built-in reporting and analytics.
What are shared calendar apps?
Shared calendar apps enable team members and external users to view, create, and manage events collaboratively. It offers real-time visibility into team schedules, facilitating better coordination and reducing scheduling conflicts.
Why use a shared calendar app?
Using a shared calendar app with your team comes with many benefits. It becomes an indispensable part of everyday work because all of the important threads are connected around it.
By using a shared calendar app, you can:
Avoid calendar conflicts by seeing others’ schedules.
Prevent double bookings by blocking slots that are already booked.
Improve transparency and coordination based on others’ schedules.
Avoid time delays by quickly coordinating and scheduling meetings.
Manage projects and deadlines by setting milestones or reminders.
Manage resources like meeting rooms or equipment with separate shared calendars.
Three key benefits of using shared calendar apps
Enhanced team collaboration: Teams can see the real-time availability of other team members to schedule meetings and manage workload evenly.
Better time management: Shared calendar apps help you manage your time effectively by organizing your schedule in a calendar view, setting reminders for your events, and breaking down your work into manageable tasks.
Improved productivity: Overall business productivity improves when teams can collaborate quickly and schedule meetings without the need for back-and-forth communication. Shared calendar apps help save time from mundane admin work that drains resources.
Here’s a quick comparison of the shared calendar apps
App
Best for
Unique features
Available platform
Pricing
Zoho Bookings
SMBs and enterprises looking to automate their calendar booking and scheduling systems.
Workspaces, an AI-powered setup, the ability to share preferred time slots, automated workflows, and custom booking pages.
Web, Android, iOS
Free plan
Paid plans starting from /user/month
Google Calendar
Teams already working within the Google Workspace ecosystem.
Suggested times, appointment pages, and tight integration with Google Workspace.
Web, Android, iOS
Paid plans
starting from $7/user/month via Google Workspace
Outlook Calendar
Businesses that are already using the Microsoft 365 suite.
Drag and drop emails into events, Copilot scheduling.
Web, Android, iOS
starting from $6/user/month via Microsoft 365
Fantastical
Teams and individuals who need a central hub to connect and manage multiple existing calendars.
Natural language scheduling, meeting polls.
Web, iOS
Paid plans starting from $4.75/user/month, billed annually
Teamup Calendar
Organizations that need a centralized, standalone calendar system without relying on external calendars like Google or Outlook.
Event signup links, customizable permissions, and 11 calendar views.
Web, Android, iOS
Paid plans starting from $10/month for up to 12 users
The 5 best shared calendar apps for business teams
1. Zoho Bookings
Zoho Bookings is a team scheduling app and calendar booking system that helps you book meetings seamlessly. Unlike traditional calendar apps, Zoho Bookings skips all of the back-and-forth when trying to coordinate and schedule a meeting.
With Bookings’ AI, you can get started with appointment scheduling quickly and efficiently. It contextually customizes your labels for staff, resources, and meeting types in your appointment booking dashboard, ensuring that the details align with your business needs. The AI will also pull your logo, images, and contact details from your website to get your booking pages ready in no time.
Simply share a booking link or preferred time slots via email, and let customers book directly into your calendars. Manage all of your appointments from the calendar dashboard, or you can integrate your Google, Outlook, or Zoho calendars
Key features
Booking links: Share booking links with others to showcase your availability and allow them to schedule their meetings independently.
Workspaces: Create separate booking dashboards for different teams, departments, or business locations, and manage schedules with ease.
Booking pages: Create custom booking pages that reflect your branding to offer a seamless and hassle-free booking experience for customers.
Calendar dashboard: View and manage your team’s schedule easily in daily or weekly view.
Share preferred time slots: Send a few priority time slots for customers to choose from and schedule meetings quickly.
Online meetings: Schedule virtual meetings with customers by connecting with your preferred meeting platform, such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or Zoho Meeting.
Scheduling limits: Protect your schedule by setting a limit on the number of meetings you’d like to schedule each day.
Workflows: Set up workflows to automate tasks before, during, and after appointments.
Team scheduling: Add your team members, assign them to various meeting types, and manage their schedules in a centralized dashboard.
Zoho Bookings pricing
Free plan
Basic: per user per month (when billed annually)
Premium: $9 per user per month (when billed annually)
Ready to save time and automate your calendar events?
Using Google Calendar outside of the Google Workspace suite acts like more of a personal calendar. If you’re a solopreneur or a small business, using the free Google Calendar and sharing it with others would be beneficial to you.
Within the Google Workspace suite, Google Calendar offers more collaborative features for your team and helps manage everyone's schedules centrally. With Gemini, you can create and manage your schedules across the Workspace suite. Plus, you get to leverage other Google apps like Gmail, Drive, or Meet to help with your business operations.
Key features
Suggested time: For internal meetings, you can find available times for everyone you’re meeting without any delay.
Appointment scheduling: You can create appointment booking pages that showcase your available time slots for customers to book. When compared to other scheduling apps, such as Zoho Bookings, Google Calendar offers a basic booking setup with limited advanced functionalities and customizations.
Creating groups: By creating different groups for different teams, you can easily invite everyone in the group when creating an event or a meeting.
Google Calendar pricing
Google Calendar’s team calendar requires a Google Workspace subscription. Here are the pricing plans:
Starter: $7 per user per month (when billed annually)
Standard: $14 per user per month (when billed annually)
Plus: $22 per user per month (when billed annually)
Enterprise: Custom pricing
3. Microsoft Outlook Calendar
For businesses that rely on Microsoft apps, the Outlook Calendar app within the Microsoft 365 suite is a reliable option. It offers multiple ways to view your team schedules and manage calendars for various groups as well.
Compared to Google or Apple calendars, the Outlook calendar offers more comprehensive features for you to schedule events or meetings directly from your emails. Copilot also helps you quickly schedule events and manage your schedule across the Microsoft suite.
Key features
Scheduling assistant: When creating an internal event or scheduling a meeting with others, Outlook’s scheduling assistant displays times when everyone is available based on their individual calendar schedules.
Microsoft Bookings: This is a booking system offered by Microsoft that displays available time slots on a booking page, allowing customers to schedule appointments. When compared to other scheduling apps, such as Zoho Bookings, Microsoft Bookings doesn’t offer integrations with other apps, advanced booking customizations, or features to enhance your booking system.
Drag an email to the calendar: You can quickly convert an email into an event or a meeting by dragging it into Outlook Calendar. All of the details are pre-filled from the email, and you can review them before creating the document.
Microsoft Outlook Calendar pricing
Outlook Calendar requires a Microsoft 365 subscription. Here are the pricing plans:
Microsoft 365 Business Basic: $6 per user per month (when billed annually)
Microsoft 365 Business Standard: $12.50 per user per month (when billed annually)
Microsoft 365 Business Premium: $22 per user per month (when billed annually)
4. Fantastical
Fantastical is a calendar app that features a sleek UI and serves as a central hub, connecting all of your other calendar apps.
For team collaboration and schedule management, Fantastical provides a seamless experience by integrating all of your connected calendars. It integrates with iCloud, Google, Todoist, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Exchange, among others.
Key features
Natural language processing: Fantastical understands your text input and creates the event accordingly. If a user types "Stand up meeting with development team at 2 pm", Fantastical will create the event name as "Stand up meeting", the time as 2 pm, and automatically invite the users under the "development" group.
Openings: It’s simply Fantastical’s way of calling their booking pages. You can create meeting templates (meeting types) and configure them based on your requirements to schedule meetings with customers. Availability, buffers, booking forms, guest limits, and booking links are a few functionalities that it offers.
Proposal: Create a poll by selecting multiple time slots and sharing the link with others. Fantastical then converts the most popular time into an event and invites all of the participants automatically.
Fantastical pricing
For individuals: $4.75 per month (billed annually)
For family: $7.50 for five users (billed annually)
For teams: $4.75 per month (billed annually)
Ready to get started with a calendar booking system?
While Fantastical depends on syncing with external calendars to function, Teamup Calendar comes with its own calendar system that doesn’t require any external sync.
Teamup Calendar helps you create calendars and sub-calendars, and share and collaborate on schedules with other team members from its centralized, color-coded calendar interface with ease. It helps organizations and teams manage their shared calendar systems without any confusion.
Key features
Calendar event signup: When creating an event, such as a workshop or a group meeting, you can toggle the option to allow others (both internally and externally) to sign up for the event. Share the event as a link, a webpage, via email, or on social media so that others can be a part of it.
Multiple views: Teamup Calendar offers 11 different views to help you view and manage your schedules. You can filter or overlay calendars to view your team’s schedule instantly.
Create groups: Easily manage your team and their schedules by adding them to different groups based on their departments or locations. Provide different access permissions for each team member, or simply assign a common one for the entire group.
Teamup Calendar pricing
Plus: $10 monthly for up to 12 users (billed annually)
Pro: $25 monthly for up to 25 users (billed annually)
Business: $60 monthly for up to 50 users (billed annually)
Enterprise: $105 for up to 100 users (billed annually)
Here’s how the shared calendar apps fare on essential features:
Essential Feature
Zoho Bookings
Google Calendar
Outlook Calendar
Fantastical
Teamup Calendar
Real-time syncing
Multiple event types
Permission controls
Resource booking
Booking pages/appointment scheduling
Extensive and customizable
Basic with no customization
Basic with no customization
Notifications
Reporting and analytics
Recurring events
Automated workflows and reminders
Ready to manage your schedules better?
It’s time you put an end to endless back-and-forth conversations, calendar conflicts, and missed business opportunities. Get started with the best shared calendar app that improves team collaboration and contributes to your revenue.
Spaghetti Agency, for example, improved its overall sales cadence with Zoho Bookings. Now, the sales team can share different booking pages depending on their stage in the sales pipeline and set up meetings quickly in their shared calendars.
Author's bio:
Elavarasan Product Marketer, Zoho Bookings
Elavarasan is a product marketer at Zoho Bookings with over six years of experience in content strategy and SEO. He has a deep interest in understanding users and brings that perspective to all of his marketing work. Elavarasan champions storytelling in his content, strongly believing that B2B marketing needs more emotion and a greater focus on customer education. Find Elavarasan on LinkedIn.
