Calendly
Calendly is an SaaS platform that allows people to schedule meetings and events at a mutually workable time without the need for back-and-forth emails. Businesses use the platform to schedule team meetings, video conferences, and more for customer support, recruitment processes, and sales.
Users share a Calendly link that shows all available dates and times. Then invitees can choose from the available times knowing both parties will be available. With more than 10 million users across the world, Calendly has grown to become one of the world’s top 100 private cloud companies.
How do you use Calendly?
Users sign up on their desktop or through the mobile app with their existing Gmail or company email accounts. After completing the sign-up process, the user creates a unique Calendly URL which will be shared with invitees.
Calendly’s integrations with its users’ Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and other scheduling systems make scheduling meetings simple and largely eliminate double-booking. Calendly allows the users to set their availability and it can be changed at any time the user wants.
Users can set the maximum number of participants, duration of the event, and more. Calendly also provides built-in buffer time, the option to create and save an event, and the ability to change event visibility.
Calendly’s key features
Calendly’s combination of a simple user interface combined with robust integrations makes it a popular choice for businesses who already have calendar and scheduling systems in place.
- Integrations with multiple calendars: Calendly’s built ot integrate with multiple calendar and scheduling systems like Outlook, Google Calendar, Any.do, iCloud, and others. It automatically checks the availability with other calendars to keep users out of complicated schedules.
- Website embedding: Calendars can be embedded within a company’s company website to facilitate quick and easy access to scheduling for clients or customers.
- Customized branding: Users can customize their booking page with their business logos and colors suitable to their brand identity.
- Complete data privacy: The centralized dashboard with SSO and SCIM provision helps users to deploy Calendly securely. RSA encryption and GDPR-compliant data transmission process protect all the data transmitted through Calendly’s servers.
- Timezone detection: Calendly automatically checks the time zone of both user and the invitees to avoid confusion when scheduling international meetings and events.
Key benefits
Calendly offers a wide range of automation that enables users to make their tasks flawless. Here are some advantages of using Calendly:
- Easy scheduling: Calendly enables users to schedule all types of meetings and events along with allocating their availability and blackout dates. It automatically notifies when the number of events exceeds the users’ availability within a day.
- Numerous integrations: Calendly can seamlessly integrate with a wide range of payment platforms, video-conferencing tools, instant messaging platforms, and more. These integrations help users to make them more productive and efficient.
- Fewer emails: Calendly can highly reduce the volume of emails that the user wants to deal with on a daily basis for checking the convenience and accessibility of both parties.
- Workflows: Calendly automates all the tasks ranging from booking appointments and rescheduling to sending reminder emails and thank you notes.
Top alternatives
Doodle: As one of the top competitors to Calendly, Doodle is the powerful platform for scheduling one-to-ones and group meetings.
YouCanBook.me: It is a booking platform that highly integrates with Google calendar to automate all tasks related to scheduling meetings and appointments.
TimeTap: TimeTap is an online scheduling platform suitable for medium and large-scale businesses that streamlines the process of appointment booking.
