What is Calendly?
Meetings are a big part of everyone’s life these days. However, the constant emailing back-and-forth to schedule them can be tedious and time-consuming. And when meetings involve multiple people across multiple time zones? It’s a significant drain on your time and energy.
That’s where tools like Calendly can help with automating the scheduling process so you can focus on more important work. Calendly is an appointment scheduling software that easily syncs up with your calendars and allows other people to schedule meetings with you by choosing an available time slot from your booking page. It offers a tiered pricing model starting with a basic free plan and going all the way up to an enterprise-level plan.
While this review addresses Calendly specifically, a number of similar scheduling tools have popped up that offer similar functionality. One such Calendly free option is zcal, which currently offers the most generous Free Forever plan in the market.
Who can use Calendly?
Anyone trying to organize meetings with potential clients, partners, or team members should use Calendly. You might, for instance, place a link to your Calendly booking page on your website and invite site visitors to book appointments. Additionally, you can use it to coordinate meetings in lieu of sending a barrage of emails back and forth.
People who want to use automation to cut down on time will find it very useful. Calendly likely integrates nicely with tools you already use because it syncs with a wide range of business apps. Calendly is for you if organizing, scheduling, and managing meetings starts to seem like a full-time job in and of itself.
Calendly feature highlights:
Calendly offers a variety of features to make scheduling easier for its users. Popular features include:
- 1. Calendar connections: This feature helps check your availability across multiple calendars. This helps avoid double booking as Calendly will only show the times when you are available. The best part is you can integrate almost all the most popular calendars such as Google, Outlook, Microsoft Office and iCloud.
- 2. Availability preferences: You can specify exactly when and how you’re booked. You can easily maintain control over your schedule with the use of granular availability options, scheduling rules, buffers, and etc.
- 3. Multiple meeting types: You can choose from a variety of meeting types to handle different scheduling scenarios. Select the one-on-one meeting type to schedule a meeting with an individual, or group type to meet with multiple people at once. If you want more than one host to meet with an individual or want to setup a rotating host meeting, you can use collective or round robin respectively. Most of the advanced meeting types are not available in the free plan.
- 4. Time zone intelligence: It can be difficult to schedule meetings with participants who are located in different time zones. Calendly solves this by automatically determining the time zones of all meeting participants. Your availability will be displayed to meeting organizers in their own time zone.
- 5. Automated workflows: You can automatically send email reminders, thank-you emails, requests for follow-up meetings, feedback surveys, and more with Calendly’s “Workflows” feature.
- 6. Integrations: Calendly offers wide range of integrations, including connections to the major calendar providers. As for video conferencing integration, you can connect with Zoom, Google Meet, and Gotomeeting. If you want to automate tasks, check out the Zapier integration and if you want to connect to a CRM, Calendly has Salesforce and Hubspot integrations.
Calendly plans:
Calendly offers a number of plans. Every new user gets a 14-day free trial to test out the paid plans, after which you will be transferred to the basic plan, which is always free.
These include (billed annually):
- The Basic plan (free) includes one active event and one calendar connection per user.
- The Essentials plan ($8/month) includes two calendar connections, group events, and more.
- The Professional plan ($12/month) includes basic team features, more customization and integrations.
- The Teams plan ($16/month) caters to larger teams and companies.
- The Enterprise plan offers custom services for companies with over 30 team members.
FAQs:
- What is a Calendly link?
A Calendly link is a unique URL that allows invitees to schedule a time on your calendar based on your exact availability. You can copy the link and paste it into any communication channel (email, SMS, Whatsapp, Messenger, etc.) to invite people to book meetings with you.
- Does Calendly have a Free Trial to test out advanced features?
Yes, it offers a 14-day free trial when you sign-up. Once the trial expires, you will be automatically switched to the free basic plan, so you don’t have to worry about being charged unless you choose to upgrade. The free plan allows for basic scheduling but limits the number of features you can use.
- Can I upgrade or downgrade my plan?
Yes, you can do it by visiting your billing page: My Account > Billing. From there, you can modify your plan, add or remove user seats, and update your payment information.