Businesses that thrive often have a lot of customers who request appointments, consultations or just a quick chat. This is great news for engagement and profits. Without a system, scheduling meetings can quickly become a headache for both customers and business owners.
The whole thing is a back-and-forth affair, which has been a tradition.
- Schedule a meeting
- Estimate how long it will take
- Where will it take place
- How to prepare
- This can be used in conjunction with other commitments
Calendly is here to help.
Calendly.com, a popular scheduling tool for businesses that wants to cut down on back-and forth email hassles, is available. Calendly.com integrates with many other tools so it will likely work seamlessly with your existing tech stack.
We’ll be revealing everything you need about Calendly. We hope that you will find all the information you need to make an informed decision about Calendly’s appointment scheduling software.
Let’s get started!
About Calendly
Calendly is the most popular scheduling platform. Over 50,000 companies have used Calendly to streamline over 200 million meetings since 2013. You’ll find such companies as Dropbox, Compass and eBay among its clients. Impressive, right?
It integrates with more than 100 partners. It can be used in conjunction with the tools that you already have to manage your online business, website, or workspace.
How do you use Calendly to your advantage?
It’s easy to do:
- Create rules regarding your availability preferences. You can set your office hours, the days you are available, and the hours that you work.
- Next, you can share your Calendly URL with your guests or embed the scheduling tool onto your website.
- An appointment is booked, last but not least. Customers can choose a time slot from the available slots and the event is added into your personal calendar.
It is just as user-friendly!
Calendly’s Key Features
You should now have a good understanding of Calendly’s functions, if you continue reading the previous section. This review wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t mention all of the features that make Calendly what it is.
Here’s a list of Calendly’s most prominent features:
Efficient Bookings
Calendly syncs with your calendar and makes it easy to find your availability. Calendly only displays visitors when you are available, so there is no need to worry about double booking.
Clients can only choose the type of meeting they want and the length of their meeting. To allow invitees to choose how they want to connect with you, you can offer multiple locations in person or virtually. You can also choose to keep complete control of this – you have the option.
You can then share your availability from anywhere by using a personal link. This link can be embedded on your website, social media profiles, web chat or sent in email and text messages.
All appointments sync automatically with your calendars so you always know what’s happening.
You can always cancel your appointments if you are faced with an urgent situation that isn’t manageable. You can cancel appointments as fast as possible, and invitees will be notified.
Follow-Ups
Calendly uses automation to send reminders and pings to invitees. This allows you to focus on your work.
Collect Payments
Calendly integrates seamlessly with Stripe, Paypal and allows you to receive payments immediately after you have scheduled a meeting. You can rest assured that you will be paid promptly and without the need to send manual invoices.
Group Appointments and Group Scheduling
Calendly makes it easy to book appointments for both individuals and groups. You can automate round-robin-type meetings based on first-come-first-served or geography.
Standardized Scheduling
To standardize your meetings, you can also create and save templates. If you want to make sure everyone is on the same page, this is a great resource that you can share with your team members.
You can bulk-edit meetings to help speed up the scheduling process.
Overview of Team Activity
You can view the details of all meetings, including who is attending and what they are for, from your admin dashboard. This will allow you to see which team members are at their peak and who may be able help you pick up the pieces.
Personalize Notifications
Calendly’s premium plans allow you to personalize follow-ups and check-ins with invitees. You can also change the colors and remove Calendly branding from these emails to make them your own.
Integrations
Booking appointments is an important part of many service-based companies, but it’s not enough to run the entire business. Calendly works with you to make your workflow more efficient.
Calendly also integrates with Zoom. This allows you to easily set up webinars and video conferences. The software generates details for both your calendar and the client’s calendars when you create an appointment.
There are many integrations that are worth mentioning.
- Slack
- Salesforce
- Hubspot
- Microsoft Teams
- Zapier
- Stripe
- PayPal
- MailChimp
- ActiveCampaign
- AWeber
- ConvertKit
- Klaviyo
- Google Calendar
- Outlook
- Office 365
- iCloud
…and many other things.
Calendly Prices
This scheduling app sounds great, but how much will it cost you? Even though scheduling appointments can be time-consuming, it is technically something you can do for free.
There’s good news.
Calendly offers a free forever plan for individuals. However, there are some restrictions. You can only set one type of event and cannot schedule group or collective meetings. Calendly’s team pages and workflows won’t be of any benefit to you on this plan.
There are two premium plans available, both affordable and free. A custom enterprise plan is available for larger businesses. Calendly’s sales team can provide more information and a quote.
Before we get into the details of Calendy’s paid plans, it is important to remember that each user in your team must have their own Calendly account. Businesses with large teams may find the cost to be very high.
The pricing below is based upon an annual billing:
The Premium Plan
This price is $8 per month, and is for small teams that require customization or advanced features.
This comes along with:
- Two calendar connections per user
- Individual, group, and round-robin type events
- Unlimited active event types
- Team pages
You can also personalize your email notifications and scheduling pages
The Pro Plan
This plan costs $12 per month and is for teams that have more complicated scheduling requirements. This plan includes workflows, customized SMS notifications, additional color customization, and the ability for invitees to redirect to another website after they have booked an appointment.
You can also integrate with HubSpot and Salesforce. It also allows you to connect Stripe and PayPay, so you can take customer payments via Calendly.
You can also connect up to six calendars per person.
The Enterprise Plan
Calendly will provide a custom quote. We do know that Enterprise plans include phone support and onboarding. You also get more administrative functions, such as user groups, SCIM provisioning and SAML-based single-sign-on.
Customer Support
Calendly offers self-help resources and email support to its customers primarily through Calendly. On average, you will receive a reply within three hours. Calendly offers articles about all features in the online help center. These articles are simple enough to navigate, as Calendly is very easy to use. Video tutorials are available if you don’t enjoy reading.
This help center is available in English and Spanish as well as French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and Spanish.
Live chat support is available on premium plans. This is not available to teams with more than 10 users. If you consider that each user must be a paying customer for live chat, it is limited to businesses who pay more than $80 per monthly.
Phone support is also locked to the Enterprise plan, as discussed in the pricing section.
Pros & Cons
Let’s begin with the pros.
Calendly’s Pros:
- This free version is great for managing basic appointments for individuals or small businesses.
- There are many event types that you can create, including recurring and group appointments.
- More than 100 native integrations are available.
- Calendly has a relatively intuitive user interface.
- Calendly is mobile friendly
- Share your availability from anywhere. Calendly makes it super simple to integrate with your website and social media channels.
- Calendly provides a good user experience.
- Available as an Android or iOS app.
- Calendly offers an API that you can access – this may be useful if your coding skills are strong.
Calendly’s Cons:
Here are Calendly’s drawbacks.
- Calendly’s customization options for email notifications and online scheduling pages are very limited. Calendly’s most costly plan does not allow you to add colors.
- Users describe the interface as confusing, because some menus are hidden away in order to keep the UI tidy.
- Account managers have limited options for rescheduling. You can, for example, reschedule an appointment but not allow your invitee to choose the most convenient time.
- Paying multiple users can be very costly, making it more expensive for larger organizations.
- Live chat support can only be accessed by larger teams.
FAQ
We’ve collected and answered the most common questions about Calendly.
Is Calendly Free?
Calendly offers a 14-day free trial. Calendly automatically moves you to the Calendly free plan after this trial ends. In short, yes.
You can use Calendly for as long or as you wish.
However, there are some limitations. Calendly free users can only create one type of event and connect to one calendar. It is also impossible to connect to your team pages from Calendly, which can be problematic if you have members of your team you wish to collaborate with.
Calendly’s free plan suits sole traders who need a simple scheduling tool to schedule meetings. Calendly’s free plan allows you to schedule unlimited meetings with one person.
This plan doesn’t include group meetings. The free program is limited in terms of the integrations that you can use. It only connects to other important calendar integrations.
Plus: You can’t make payments after you have booked through Stripe or PayPal.
Is it possible to sign up multiple Calendly users?
Calendly allows you to add other users to your trial account for a free. They’ll be all downgraded to Calendly’s free version after that.
To integrate the accounts of your team members, each member must upgrade to a premium account. This unlocks the ‘team pages’ feature that allows you to view all of your team’s bookings and schedules from one place. This is essential to ensure team coordination. Instead, Calendly would be used by everyone as an individual.
Calendly Accepts Payments
Calendly does not accept payments but you can make payments right after bookings are made. These integrations are available only on Pro plans. If you don’t already have one, you will need to create one.
Our Final Verdict
Scheduling appointments can be a hassle. Calendly is an app that makes scheduling appointments easy. It also comes with a functional free plan.
Calendly is a popular scheduling app. It makes it very easy. Calendly is a time-saver for both small and large businesses. For smaller businesses with multiple employees, however, it could be a problem.
Calendly is free to try and we encourage you to do so. Although the interface is simple, there may be some learning curves and limited support. Calendly is loved by many users who use it to make appointments.
Let us know what it is like if you give it a shot in the comments section below. Are you thinking of Calendly alternatives such as Doodle, GoToMeeting or Acuity Scheduling. Tell us about it! We’d love to hear from you soon!
