Calendly vs. Doodle: An Honest Comparison of These Scheduling Tools
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Running a business has many moving parts—and chasing after clients to secure a meeting time is the last thing you want to worry about. That’s why picking a platform that works for you is so important. That means a platform that is:
- Doing the timezone math on your and your clients’ behalf
- Communicating your availability to clients
- Scheduling meetings around your calendar in an efficient manner (like respecting preset time blocks for things like focus time or school pickup/drop-offs, should you want them)
Efficient scheduling can be the difference between a smoothly running Lexus and a Ford Pinto. Platforms like Calendly and Doodle can help you streamline your operations for appointment scheduling. If you're curious to know which one is right for you, read on in this comprehensive guide, which will provide an unbiased comparison of Calendly and Doodle, helping you make an informed choice.
Calendly vs. Doodle: A quick glance
Category |
Calendly |
Doodle |
|
|
|
|
|
Best for |
Enterprises, individuals seeking enhanced calendar connectivity, sales, marketing, recruitment, education, and businesses. |
Casual users, social clubs, sports teams, coaches, solopreneurs, and community organizations. |
| Free trial available | ✅ | ✅ |
| Free plan | ✅ | ✅ |
| Pricing | More cost effective when billed monthly. | More cost effective when billed annually. |
Calendly overview
Trusted by over ten million users worldwide, Calendly is a versatile scheduling platform that's agnostic to a wide range of users. This platform streamlines appointment scheduling, offers customization options and automates communication workflows.
Users can share personalized calendars effortlessly through seamless website and social media integrations, making the scheduling experience efficient and user-friendly, especially with the Meeting Polls feature for finding preferred meeting times.
Best suited for: Enterprises, individuals seeking enhanced calendar connectivity, sales, marketing, recruitment, education, and businesses.
Core features include:
- Personalized interactive calendars
- Meeting polls
- Email notifications
- Multiple integrations
Doodle overview
Doodle simplifies scheduling through quick polling and seamless calendar sync. Originally a polling tool, it has evolved into an appointment scheduler suitable for various types of users. It suits a range of scheduling needs and is ideal for those who value quick polling and integration with popular calendars like Google Calendar, Office 365, and iCal.
Best suited for: Casual users, social clubs, sports teams, coaches, solopreneurs, and community organizations.
Core features include:
- Bookable calendar
- One-on-one scheduler
- Group polling
- Survey builder
Calendly vs. Doodle: Meetings supported
Both Calendly and Doodle support various meeting types. Let’s look at how they differ.
Calendly
Calendly accommodates typical meetings you’d expect when working with external people, like:
- Sales calls
- Customer/discovery calls
- Candidate interviews
- External feedback calls
Designed as a dedicated meeting lifecycle management platform, Calendly offers extensive team and enterprise functionality. It can extract available meeting slots based on multiple calendars rather than just one. For example, if you have a dedicated sales team, you can create one calendar link that extracts available times across the entire team when prompting prospects to book a demo.
Calendly is an excellent choice for busy professionals and teams looking to enhance productivity and create a positive impression through efficient meeting scheduling.
Doodle
Doodle’s best for its inherent simplicity and effectiveness, providing a user-friendly interface for various scheduling needs. Doodle’s great for:
- One-on-one meetings
- Interviews
- Consultations
- Group decisions
It’s great for casual users, small groups, and those seeking simple scheduling solutions.
Whether coordinating a casual catch-up or arranging a small meeting, Doodle's intuitive polling feature lets users decide preferred meeting times. It provides a streamlined and hassle-free scheduling experience–ideal for those who prefer simplicity over complexity.
Calendly vs. Doodle: Calendar integrations
Seamless calendar integration is a vital component of scheduling tools, and both Calendly and Doodle offer multiple options. Both integrate with popular calendars like:
- Google Calendar
- Office 365
- iCal
They also offer integrations with other popular platforms such as:
- Zoom
- Google Meet
- Slack
Calendly vs. Doodle: User experience
Both Calendly and Doodle have received mixed user feedback. Let’s see what customers are saying.
Calendly’s User Experience
Users of Calendly praise its intuitive platform, which significantly streamlines the scheduling process. The convenience of customizing meeting preferences, automated time zone adjustments, and easy calendar integration has made it a favorite among sales professionals, marketers, recruiters, and educators.
However, some users have noted Calendly's lack of workflow capabilities, making it harder to send automated messages post-booking.
Elizabeth F, a VP of Communications at a small business shared that:
| "As of now (10/26/2023) , you can't add workflows to Managed Events. (Example - I assigned an event type to my staff who are in "____" group, but I can't add a workflow to that event type to automatically send a thank you email with a survey after event completion.)" |
Doodle’s User Experience
Doodle reviewers appreciate its interface's simplicity and ability to quickly poll invitees for preferred meeting times. The platform excels in targeting non-business users and small groups. Sales and marketing teams, freelancers, and various organizations have also found value in Doodle's straightforward scheduling capabilities.
On the downside, one user complained of frequent pop-ups, ads, and an overall confusing layout, Bob Burleigh shared:
| "I've been a Doodle user for a decade, for my company, and as a Volunteer in a number of philanthropic/non-profit organizations. Until April 2022. Never. Again. The "improvements" for the most recent survey were SO awful I am gone forever. Pop-ups every 5 seconds, 2/3 of the screen was ads on both sides of the dates. The new layout is VERY difficult to see/navigate and even more difficult to see who else has selected particular date." |
⭐️ Calendly comes with all the bells and whistles of customization for specific professional needs. Doodle shines with its simplicity, catering to a broader audience looking for simpler scheduling solutions.
Calendly vs. Doodle: Pricing
Pricing can significantly influence the platforms you choose for your business. So, let’s look at how the two compare.
Calendly pricing
Calendly has three paid tiers for business purposes on top of a free forever plan. All three come with scheduling solutions that simplify setting up appointments and meetings. Here's a summary of features available at each pricing tier:
- Essential Plan: For individuals and solopreneurs, offering basic scheduling features geared toward one-on-one meetings. It offers limited integrations and customization options.
- Professional Plan: For small businesses and teams, delivering more advanced scheduling capabilities, support for group meetings, and a broad selection of integrations. This plan also allows for more extensive customization and branding options, with monthly pricing structured per user.
- Teams Plan: For larger teams and enterprises, enabling you to facilitate team-wide scheduling and management. It additionally incorporates advanced reporting and analytics tools.
Doodle Pricing
Like Calendly, Doodle also offers free and Premium subscription options. The free version is suitable for individuals or small groups, offering basic scheduling features and group polling for availability assessment. The Premium subscription provides an ad-free experience and unlocks additional features for more advanced scheduling needs.
While Doodle can cater to some businesses, its feature set primarily targets casual users, offering the following integrations:
- The Doodle Bot for Slack facilitates starting a Doodle poll within a Slack channel or conversation.
- Zoom and Google Meet integrations allow you to add video conferencing links to Doodle-scheduled appointments.
- Integrations with Outlook, Teams, Google Calendar, Office 365, and Microsoft Exchange make adding Doodle meetings to personal calendars easy.
⭐️ Both scheduling platforms offer a free forever plan. But, when looking at a per user cost, Doodle is the clear winner when billed annually (with savings of 55%). However, when billed monthly, Calendly wins.
Calendly vs. Doodle: Our verdict
Calendly and Doodle both simplify and streamline scheduling, regardless of the meeting's nature. However, they cater to different user profiles and offer varying functionality to meet user requirements.
Why should you use Calendly?
Calendly can accommodate individuals and teams from various sectors, including coaches and trainers.
- Sales professionals can set up different client meetings, streamline scheduling, and reduce no-shows.
- Marketers can automate scheduling along the sales pipeline and capture earlier-stage prospects with website-embedded forms.
- Recruiters can schedule diverse interview types and improve the interview process.
- Educational institutions and advisors can manage various types of meetings and group scheduling.
- Small businesses and enterprises can streamline the scheduling process and allow people outside the organization to view their availability.
Calendly offers broad usability across industries, making it suitable for shareholder meetings as well as casual coffee chats.
Why should you use Doodle?
Doodle primarily targets non-business users but also finds use in companies and organizations. With Doodle, you can:
- Serve non-business needs, like university students finding a time to meet up for group projects and similar use cases for organizations (like deciding on offsite dates).
- Schedule one-on-one meetings between a business and customers.
- Support recruitment and staffing teams by organizing various types of interviews.
- Facilitate consultants and freelancers in planning meetings with clients and colleagues.
- Help clubs, sports teams, faith groups, and community-based organizations manage regular meetings, special events, group decisions, and onboarding.
Final Verdict
When it comes to picking Calendly or Doodle, it will ultimately depend on your specific needs. Go for Calendly if you need more advanced functionality, business features, team functionalities, advanced scheduling capabilities, and a large number of integrations.
Pick Doodle if you’re a non-business user, small group, or seeking simple scheduling solutions.
Option 3: Upgrade your scheduling workflows with YouCanBookMe
YouCanBookMe is the ultimate solution for those seeking the perfect blend that outshines Calendly and Doodle.
YouCanBook.me (YCBM) Differentiators:
YouCanBookMe stands out with its focus on solopreneurs and small businesses, prioritizing customization and delivering an exceptional client experience. It’s a scheduling tool with unparalleled customizability, from branding to post-booking experiences.
Similar to Doodle and Calendly, YouCanBookMe integrates with commonly used apps like Google Calendar, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Outlook. But, to help you streamline your business operations, YouCanBook me also works with tools like Stripe and thousands more through Zapier.
Experience streamlined automation with seamless confirmations, reminders, and follow-ups dispatched, significantly reducing no-shows so everyone stays in the loop.
Unlike Calendly and Doodle, with YouCanBook Me, you can also create “request only” booking links, giving you full control to accept or reject incoming bookings.
Affordable pricing to meet your small business needs
YouCanBookMe offers the best bang for your buck, with paid plans starting at only $8.10/month (yep, that’s almost 20% less than both Calendly and almost 50% less than Doodle!).
Here's the best part: YouCanBookMe offers a 14-day free trial across all of our plans and a free forever plan, giving you a zero-risk chance to see how much YouCanBookMe can enhance your business.
Stop the scheduling struggle, and don’t settle for second best. Your time is invaluable—let us help you elevate your booking process. Try it today and embrace the difference!
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Written by
The YouCanBookMe team
We care... so we share. The YCBM team has a lot to say about online scheduling and improving productivity. We pay it forward with interesting articles, top tips, updates, and insights about how to be a scheduling ninja and a productivity pro!
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