Calendly Review - One Of The Best Online Scheduling Tools Out There!
Planning your day can be stressful. It is even more stressful in C-level positions (without a secretary). But no matter, if you're a freelancer, a startup, or an established company, making appointments with business partners or customers, can take a long time and be annoying.
In this review, we'll introduce you to one of the most popular tools to make it easier for you and others to book appointments.
Covered in this article
What Are (Online) Meeting Schedulers?
Let's jump into it!
Disclaimer
We rely on our first-hand experience, our partner’s experiences, as well as reviews from G2, Capterra, Gartner, and many others. If you have had other experiences or suggestions, please let us know!
What Are (Online) Meeting Schedulers?
These tools support you, especially in the sales or partnership area, in arranging meetings. Instead of having to check availability by email or text message, potential clients or customers can book appointments directly in your calendar. This saves both, you and your customers, a lot of time.
Another advantage: You can connect these tools with your CRM to directly collect data like name, company, position, and email address. This is exactly how Calendly works.
Calendly Introduction
Since we work online and internationally we mainly use Calendly.
Calendly allows you to:
Synchronize calendars (so that only free appointments are available)
Define appointment lengths
Send follow-ups and reminders automatically
Set up paid meeting sessions
Create custom registration fields to collect more data
Connect meeting software (Teams, Meet, Zoom, Locations, Phone...)
& much more.
It is fully responsive on mobile, available in the Appstore and allows you to create workflows to automate recurring tasks such as sending meeting reminders or follow-ups.
Calendly Security
Calendly cares a lot about security and privacy. We have listed the main points below.
Centralized team management (Manage users, teams, reporting, and shared event types from one centralized admin dashboard)
Securely deploy Calendly with SAML SSO and SCIM provisioning.
(Aims for) GDPR compliance
SOC 2 Type II certified
Calendly never stores passwords, content, or PII associated with your team’s accounts
Calendly Pricing
As most SaaS products, Calendly has different pricing tiers:
Basic: Free but very limited (just one calendar and one predefined timeslot)
Essential: $8 /month when paid yearly
Professional: $12 /month when paid yearly
Teams: $16 /month when paid yearly
You can start here and get a 14-day free trial.
Calendly Limitations
One big thing we need to address here: The GDPR “Problem”.
Calendly always strives to be in strict compliance with the GDPR.
However, the GDPR is a new regulation with no certification process, so they cannot prove their compliance. Moreover, we’ve noticed some issues when integrating MS Teams and Microsoft Calendar - but this issue was fixed a while ago. For us, it works totally fine with google calendar. Nevertheless, if you are concerned about the GDPR you might have to switch to alternatives such as Calenso.
Calendly Reviews
With a user base of more than 10,000,000 users worldwide, Calendly is one of the most well-known tools out there when it comes to scheduling meetings online. The average rating is above 90%.
Calendly Pros / Cons
Pros:
-Easy to use (very intuitive interface, automation are easy to set up)
-Usable free version
-Custom branding (paid plans)
-Integration of other tools possible (Zoom, other Calendars, HubSpot, Salesforce)
-Manage teams and track activity
Cons:
-No guarantee for GDPR compliance
-Sometimes integrating third-party tools is difficult
-Limited video conferencing capabilities
-Microsoft integration is difficult sometimes (google works better)
-Setting up work hours can take time (but is crucial)
Calendly Summary
We have been using Calendly for years in combination with google calendar and google meet, the integrations work without any problems. The free version is very limited, so you hardly get past a paid version, but this also allows many more possibilities. The setup is very easy and the look is professional.
One important point: be careful when setting your availabilities, because people can book appointments everywhere within free slots. So take your time and see when you really have time.
We know many other companies that use Calendly, mostly with a HubSpot or Salesforce integration.
If you are concerned about GDPR compliance, we recommend switching to tools like Calenso. Otherwise, we can highly recommend Calendly. No matter if you're a freelancer, sales employee, or c-level executive.
Questions?
Are you now sure how you can digitalize your company or how Calendly works? Feel free to contact us. Whether you are looking for the right No-Code or Low-Code solution for your company or an NCLC vendor that needs more awareness, just let us know. If you have feedback, ideas or just want to talk about those topics feel free to reach out as well!
By the way, if you want to know how scheduling meetings with Calendly works (and feels), you can try it & have a virtual coffee with us!
