Calendly vs. YouCanBookMe

Both Calendly and YouCanBookMe have powerful scheduling features that will meet the needs of most businesses… Yet their design philosophy, pricing structure, and supporting features are what make them better for different audiences.

We've compared the tools in five dimensions, crucial for scheduling software:

1. Ease of use
2. Scheduling features
3. Customization options
4. Integrations
5. Pricing

Here's how they measure up: Calendly vs YouCanBookMe.

Comparison Summary: Calendly vs YouCanBookMe

Calendly is a scheduling tool with enough features to satisfy varied and complex scheduling requirements. It’s made for enterprises that schedule a lot of external and internal meetings between departments. Funnily enough, the pricing system also makes Calendly ideal for individuals that want to connect more calendars.

YouCanBookMe, on the other hand, is a customer-focused scheduling platform for small-to-medium businesses. Its mission is to help small business owners create a better scheduling experience for their clients—and it has recently released new features to back that up. Not only is it super convenient to use, but it packs a lot of powerful features into a hassle-free scheduling solution for creating booking pages quickly and easily.

What is Calendly?

"Simple scheduling for complex workflows" 😵‍➡️😎

YouCanBookMe was born in 2011 with the main goal of being customer-focused.

Given its attention to customer experience and a user-friendly interface, it has been meeting this goal ever since. It offers a simple pricing structure, with a free option and a simple, single-tiered paid plan that unlocks all advanced features. YouCanBookMe is ideal for small-to medium-sized businesses looking to create booking pages on the fly, offering powerful features that small businesses appreciate, like different appointment types on the same booking link, payment options like Apple & Google Pay, plus promo codes.

YouCanBookMe also offers first-class support to all paid users, regardless of size, and extensive customer success and onboarding help for large teams. In addition, you get flexible customization options, such as creating booking pages in more than 40 different languages (including right-to-left scripts), custom colors to match your branding, and a fully-customizable footer for your booking page that can display your company information.

YouCanBookMe also powers over 1 million bookings per month globally, helping small and medium-sized businesses thrive.

YouCanBookMe vs Calendly: Pricing

YouCanBookMe has single-tier pricing that unlocks all features immediately, while Calendly has a three-tier pricing with the premium plan being twice as expensive as YouCanBookMe's plan.

Both Calendly and YouCanBookMe have free plans.

Calendly offers one booking page, YouCanBookMe offers 10 booking pages, and both offer one calendar integration, and basic scheduling features on their free plans. If you're new to scheduling and have very light scheduling needs, either of the free plans will serve your needs.

Calendly charges per team member, YouCanBookMe per linked calendar. In practice, these things are the same.

Before we explore the paid plans, one of the biggest differences is that Calendly charges per user seat, while YouCanBookMe per linked calendar.

In practice, there is very little difference.

Every person in a company who needs to book meetings will only use one calendar anyway, making one user seat equal to one linked calendar. In case you need to connect multiple calendars (like one calendar for work, one calendar for home, one calendar for the kung-fu club, etc.) then you'll have to buy multiple calendars connections with YouCanBookMe, while you'll be able to connect multiple calendars on one Calendly plan.

So whenever I mention that a plan is $10 or $12/month, I mean it's $10/month per user for Calendly and $12/month per linked calendar for YouCanBookMe.

Note: a calendar connection is NOT a booking page!

A calendar is an app for managing your appointments, events, and tasks (like Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook Calendar, FastMail Calendar, etc.)

A booking page is a page provided by your online scheduling tool that lets users add appointments to your calendar, based on the rules you've defined (meeting length, time slots, and descriptions). Most scheduling software requires you to link your calendar and booking page together so they can automatically add new appointments to your calendar, although YouCanBookMe offers a full calendar-free version as well.

For individuals, the pricing is the same. For teams, Calendly is twice as expensive as YouCanBookMe.

YouCanBookMe has only one plan: $12 per month for one calendar connection (aka one user). This plan comes with all functionality unlocked, including unique booking options, a wide range of customization options, and first-class customer support. Larger teams also get dedicated customer success reps while Calendly reserves that service level to enterprise-only clients. 

Calendly’s basic plan, on the other hand, starts at $10 per month per user. While you get all of the core scheduling tool features you'd expect, you'll have less access to customer support (versus when you're on the enterprise plan) and limited customization abilities when compared to YouCanBookMe.

If you're an individual that only needs basic scheduling features, both YouCanBookMe and Calendly will give you the same value. But if you're a team, YouCanBookMe unlocks all the features that Calendly offers in its more expensive plans, all for just $12 per team member. Calendly will be up to two times as expensive as YouCanBookMe depending on which plan you pick.

Calendly vs YouCanBookMe: Internal Setup and Collaboration

YouCanBookMe is easier to use, while Calendly offers more enterprise value with its analytics and internal management.

YouCanBookMe’s booking page editor makes it easier to set up and manage booking pages, while Calendly uses different tools for managing events, workflows, and routing.

When creating booking pages in YouCanBookMe, all workflows and routing tools are in the left menu (1). It also has a live preview of what the booking page will look like (3), which Calendly doesn’t have.

You can add team members and assign them to the booking page (2). Notification flows, forms, availability, and customization are also accessible in each page-specific editor (1).

In YouCanBookMe, every booking page is completely separate so different pages can have different images, booking links and team information as needed.

Meanwhile, Calendly has a completely decentralized system:

You can create new events in the dashboard (2). But notifications (they call them workflows) and forms are accessible in separate tabs (1). So setting everything up the way you want isn’t as straightforward and takes some tinkering. Things like branding and your booking link are set at the top level so you have less flexibility between booking pages.  

You'll love Calendly's structure if you're an enterprise company working on a massive scale and would benefit from rigorous "module-to-module" work. But if you're a small-to-medium-sized team and you want to quickly configure what you need and spin up new booking pages, you'll love YouCanBookMe's workflow.

Calendly has booking analytics, YouCanBookMe has booking data that you can export.

Analytics is the latest addition to Calendly's feature set. They'll help you find out the most popular meeting days as well as top-performing meeting types and team members. YouCanBookMe, on the other hand, also has booking data that you can export as CSV and analyze in Google Sheets or any other data processing tool to slice and dice the data just how you need it.

Calendly vs YouCanBookMe: External Scheduling Workflow

Calendly has a straightforward scheduling workflow, while YouCanBookMe is more flexible with its form pre-filling and coding features.

YouCanBookMe uses appointment types, while Calendly has event types.

If you offer multiple services, you can create different online appointment types on the same booking page with YouCanBookMe. Meanwhile, Calendly offers different event types, where you can create different booking pages for one-on-one, group, collective, and round robin meetings.

Both tools offer pooled availability on booking pages but approach it differently.

Pooled availability allows clients to schedule with multiple assigned team members on a single booking page.

With YouCanBookMe, you can have multiple team members show up on a booking page and bookers can choose one according to their availability and specialization. You can also set the page up so the client gets automatically assigned to a user based on priority or a round robin system.

This is valuable for teams that route a lot of clients to a booking page for customer service or sales demos since they don’t need to worry about overlaps and availability.

On the other hand, Calendly uses "shared event types". You can create:

• Group events, useful for webinars and classes with one host and multiple invitees.
• Collective events, useful for group sales calls with multiple hosts and one invitee.
• Round robin events, useful for distributing incoming leads with rotating hosts and one invitee.

Calendly’s round robin system works the same as YouCanBookMe's, but there’s no way to let clients pick who they want to talk to: you only have the round robin option.

Calendly uses “routing forms” for simple routing.

You can use them to automatically prequalify clients and route them to specific calendars or other resources like help pages. In Calendly, the forms aren’t booking page specific. Instead, you can link calendars to their outcomes and share them with links.

If you want a booking form before your calendar, simply set it up so the calendar is one of the route options and share it on your page like you would a calendar.

YouCanBookMe lets you prefill forms and "code" events with form data.

You can create links that pass customer data to YouCanBookMe, or even direct clients straight to certain users using form prefilling. It’s useful if you already have customer data because you can decrease booking friction.

YouCanBookMe also has simple conditional statements for the automation of personalized notifications and calendar events, based on the form data.

Additionally, YouCanBookMe offers similar functionality to Calendly to handle group (such as webinars) and collective events.

Calendly vs YouCanBookMe: Integrations

Calendly has 125 native integrations, while YouCanBookMe has 9 native and 1,500+ Zapier integrations.

Calendly offers 125 native integrations, while YouCanBookMe has 9.

Calendly is more flexible if your team uses an elaborate tech stack. But YouCanBookMe won’t feel restrictive either thanks to its 1,500+ Zapier integrations.

Calendly has a native Salesforce integration, while YouCanBookMe offers it via Zapier.

You can save time and directly connect Calendly with Salesforce to update client information in real time as clients book appointments.

Meanwhile, YouCanBookMe does this via Zapier because its native Salesforce integration is still in beta. You can apply for the beta if you manage more than 100 calendars.

Both Calendly and YouCanBookMe offer Stripe for customers to take payments for bookings.

YouCanBookMe has optimized its Stripe integration to include features like offering promo codes and sending receipts for payments. Bookers can also pay using Apple Pay & Google Pay, and a number of other international payment providers.

Calendly allows you to connect Paypal, but YouCanBookMe offers more flexibility relating to the messaging and workflows you can set up with regards taking payments for bookings and specific services.

YouCanBookMe vs Calendly: Customization

YouCanBookMe is much more customizable than Calendly when comparing entry level paid plans - Calendly customization is reserved for higher tier plans.

YouCanBookMe lets you create booking pages in 44 languages and the dialects of 100 countries. Calendly offers 9 options for invitee language.

Customization is where YouCanBookMe really stands apart, with the emphasis being able to create a unique and excellent scheduling experience.  

There are three options for how to display your availability, so you can choose the one that most suits how your clients book. And almost all the text an invitee sees can be edited to match your business brand, including 44 languages (including right-to-left scripts). Calendly offers 9 options for invitee language.

YouCanBookMe also offers the option for invitees to overlay their own availability to yours. This means only the times that both of you are free will show, making scheduling much faster and easier.

YouCanBookMe offers custom colors for booking pages, Calendly does not.

Both tools offer basic customization features, which include the ability to customize the booking page URL, booking page color, the message your customers see, and even the follow-ups. But YouCanBookMe also offers custom colors, while Calendly has limited options.

Add your own branding to the booking page with YouCanBookMe.

You can take booking page personalization up a notch by adding a footer to the page. It can have your contact details, website URL, or social media accounts.

Calendly has more customization options when it comes to embedding booking pages.

Calendly has inline embeds, popup widgets, and popup hyperlink options, while YouCanBookMe only has inline embeds out of the box, although modals and hyperlink options are something you can configure yourself on your website. On top of that, when copying the embed code, Calendly gives you options to hide event type and cookie banner, as well as text color and button color changes without having to tinker with the code.

YouCanBookMe vs Calendly: Pros & Cons

Final Verdict: YouCanBookMe vs Calendly

Small to medium businesses will love YouCanBookMe, while enterprise departments with complex internal structures will love Calendly.

As you might have realized by now, YouCanBookMe and Calendly are very similar platforms, especially when it comes to scheduling features. But there’s a fundamental difference between the two that make them ideal for teams of different sizes.

Use Calendly if:

• You are an enterprise with many big departments each needing its own booking page
• You want to natively connect your appointment scheduling software with a wide range of other software

Use YouCanBookMe if:

• You want to ensure your clients' scheduling experience is top-notch.
• You care about customization and personalization to highlight your brand
  You are a small or medium-sized business that needs an easy-to-manage online booking tool
• You're looking for advanced scheduling features at an affordable price

If you're looking for a more comprehensive comparison of scheduling tools, take a look at: Calendly vs Google Calendar.