Is BookingLive A Better Alternative to Calendly?
August 26, 2021
Is BookingLive A Better Calendly Alternative?
Many of us make appointments in advance with good intentions, but a hectic week or austerely leading a frantic, fast-paced life can easily cause them to slip our mind. Coordinating meetings and scheduling bookings can be a painful process, which is why many small and large companies have turned to online booking software to remove any sense of indecision or guesswork that is normally involved. Calendly has become one of the leading scheduling platforms in the world with up to 100 million meetings per year being organised through the app.
While Calendly has established itself as an extremely popular booking tool since it first came onto the market in 2013 in Atlanta, there are many Calendly alternatives out there that may be better suited to help you manage your appointments, services and customers.
Calendly prides itself on a simple methodology by letting you take ownership of your scheduling timetable. It reduces the time-consuming nature of back-and-forth emails by allowing you to set your availability preferences and then share a link with your client(s)/team member(s) via email or embedding it on your website. After they’ve selected an available time slot from the criteria you’ve set, the event is automatically added to your calendar.
As a fellow world-leading booking platform, we at BookingLive have weighed up the pros and cons of using Calendly and have taken the time to offer an insight into our own award-winning booking software that ironically may have slipped your mind.
Why Choose Calendly?
Ease Of Use
For those of you immune to the intricacies of technology, Calendly is the epitome of a straightforward booking solution if all you need is the ability to make appointments. What’s more is that Calendly lets you book in as many appointments as you require without any limitations, even if you’re on their free plan.
Simple and Clean Interface
The user-friendly interface eliminates calendar conflicts by quickly showing your availability to the days and times that work for you. Other impressive components include templates to fully automate your workflow and an integrated timezone detector which aligns different time zones for punctual global gatherings.
Why Look Elsewhere?
Essential = Expensive
Sadly, many of the essential features are only accessible on Calendly’s most expensive plan(s). Setting your system up for automated communications or predefining more than one-time slot are only available to Pro plan users. This means that when somebody wants to meet with you, they will only have a chance to save a 30-minute window in your calendar (unless you are willing to shell out $8 a month which is something for free within BookingLive’s SMB tool).
Calendly also proves to be costly for bigger teams as their pricing model charges per user rather than a set price for multiple users. If you’re a sizeable company with many potential users of the software, the price can very quickly begin to rocket skywards.
You Can’t Take Payments On The Free Plan
Calendly does have the facility to take payments via Stripe or PayPal, but again this feature will be absent unless you are prepared to put your hand in your pocket. Other online booking systems offer free plans that allow you to take online payments such as our free small business scheduling solution at BookingLive.
Unable To Integrate Branded Content
Make no mistake, branding is big business. Branding your business effectively represents many different aspects to your customer base – trust, loyalty, reputation and recognisability just to name a few.
For a lot of organisations, it would be beneficial if Calendly could modify different elements of their booking page such as colour, graphics and font type so that links can be sent to customers and clients with pages that appear to have been sourced from the company.
How Does Booking Live Stack Up In Comparison?
A Feature-Rich Free System
Our small business pricing model operates as a pay-as-you-go format, which means you avoid any set-up or monthly fees. If you aren’t taking payments, then this system is completely free, whilst still offering a powerful appointment scheduling tool that takes the stress out of connecting with other people (like Calendly) and much more besides.
Calendly’s speciality lies in scheduling very basic appointments and meetings, which makes it ineffective for service, event, course, rental businesses and facility bookings. BookingLive’s smb and enterprise booking journey start with five different key stages, allowing you to customise the process with images, videos and descriptions of the event or activity, pricing and upsells.
You can then share a CTA booking link or the customer can simply book via the free online booking page. This slick and simple to use booking process offers incredible efficiency and if you start with our free smb online booking system it will only start costing you money once you start taking payments.
Branded Online Booking System
Bring your personality to our booking system. We can modify our software’s user interface to match your company’s brand, giving you a unified, credible and professional look.
Analytics
Information is power. That is why we believe it is imperative to monitor your system’s stats and data closely to improve the user experience and subsequently increase your bookings and turnover. BookingLive helps keep you ahead of the competition by allowing you to integrate your Google Analytics and Ecommerce accounts into the booking system.
Calendly doesn’t provide you with analytical data, so customers have no way of knowing how many people click on their meeting links but then don’t follow through with the booking. This prevents retargeting and stops your organisation from combatting basket abandonment.
Built-In Calendar
As Calendly does not have its own calendar, users have to configure a 3rd party calendar (for e.g., iCloud), and sync all appointments there. This can become cluttered when you sync staff calendars too and all the appointments occupy it and intersperse with your personal events as well.
BookingLive’s booking calendar administration view is incredibly useful for seeing daily bookings, upcoming bookings, and the ability to edit the view to see specific locations, staff and products. The in-booking journey calendar widget can also be easily inserted into your website so that customers are able to view live availability through colour coded booking slots, enabling them to book and pay within seconds. Not only does a website booking calendar speed up the entire booking process, but it also enhances customer interactions.
What Booking System Is Right For Me?
Calendly values single use case simplicity and user experience for non-technical users who only need to book restricted functionality appointments, but at BookingLive we can offer a far more efficient and economic booking tool that does this and much much more.
Remember every BookingLive system (regardless of price) comes with support, ranging from phone support, in-app chatbot support, to on-site training for staff – we’re confident that with over 10 years of dedicated customer support for start ups all the way to Microsoft, Government and Healthcare providers we’ve got a solution that will work for your business.
BookingLive: PAYG online scheduling for small businesses
Our dedicated team at BookingLive are delighted to support thousands of small businesses in over 74 countries and counting. When you sign up for a free account with us, you can set bookable items live in under 5 minutes. Customers can then purchase your items 24/7 from anywhere in the world. Our membership for small businesses works on a PAYG basis so a small percentage is charged per sale made. Opting for this versatile solution means that you can provide your customers with an unrivalled experience. Benefit from automated admin tasks and payment handling with no hidden fees – you only pay when you make a sale.
