Calendly vs Tidycal vs Acuity Scheduling
Introduction
I was a champion of Calendly and its platform until one day, they “deleted” my account. After having had a disappointing discussion with their support team, I made a decision to move to another alternative scheduling platform. This blog article covers my research of alternative platforms that meet my criteria which I will cover later in detail. I’m not sure what percentage of Calendly users will have a similar customer profile as I do. So my gripes and complaints might not apply to you. Your mileage may vary.
What is a calendar scheduling platform and what does it do?
Platforms like Calendly, Tidycal, and Acuity Scheduling allow you to configure times and days that you are free for appointments. These blocks of free time are then presented to people who want to meet with you. They select a date and time, and the meeting is scheduled.
You may say that this is something that your company Outlook or Google Calendar already does. That’s true. But it doesn’t handle scheduling with someone outside your organization. And by that I mean it doesn't compare your availability with the other invitees. Also, people might be on a different work platform than you. Generally, Outlook won't share calendar details with people on Google Calendar.
This type of software is really good for people who are constantly meeting with people outside their organizations. Sales people, consultants, professional service providers, lawyers, hairstylists, etc.
Who am I? Specifically, what kind of calendar scheduling user am I?
I am a solopreneur who meets with clients in almost every timezone. Australia, United States, UK, Greece, and South America are some of the countries where my clients operate. And since I’m a one man consultancy, I really dislike playing scheduling ping-pong. I am generally flexible on which times I am willing to meet a client or prospect on a Zoom call. But the back and forth overhead of scheduling meetings is just too time consuming. I also sell consultancy calls for which I need to charge and collect payment.
For those of you who don’t know, I am a Certified Monday.com Partner who does custom implementations and integrations on my customer’s Monday.com accounts. Many of these clients also need or want a calendar scheduling platform of some kind. I make recommendations on which platforms are best and why. I also execute the implementations and integrations with the calendar scheduling platforms.
So not only do I use a calendar scheduling platform on a daily basis, I also generate income from meetings booked with me. In addition to that, I make recommendations to clients and implement and integrate calendar scheduling platforms for them as well. So I am more than just a power user. Unlike most users, I actually care about how the APIs work, how the integrations work, and all of the advanced features such as round-robin assignments.
Calendly is the industry leader
There’s no doubt that Calendly is the industry leader. It’s the most well known and most profitable out of all calendar scheduling platforms out there. This was one of the main reasons I chose Calendly in the first place. For the most part, it has all the bells and whistles you would expect. It has the best designed user interface in my opinion. It has the most out of the box native integrations with platforms such as Salesforce and others.
The incident that made me move away from Calendly
I had just finished convincing a client to start using Calendly to schedule their events with clients. The client signed up with initially 20 or so seats. They then invited me, via email, to sign into their account. They were going to give me administrative permissions so that I could help configure Calendly and integrate it with their Monday.com. I clicked on the invite and joined.
Later, I went back to check my calendly and found that my account was “deleted”. I use the term deleted because it was no longer there. My individual account had been merged into my client’s account. Why on earth Calendly would choose to do this is beyond me. It doesn’t make sense on many levels.
First, they are losing money. I had already prepaid for an annual subscription. They canceled it and refunded my money because my account had been merged into my client’s account.
Secondly, now my client can see all my calendars. Not the ideal situation. The worst part is that Calendly’s support team tried to make it seem like a feature.
The support team also told me to tell my client to remove me from their account afterwards, then I would have to signup again and pay for a new subscription. My old subscription was now a “legacy” subscription and that plan was no longer available. Once again, not an ideal situation.
The search for an alternative platform begins
If there are going to be negative consequences for actively promoting clients to sign up for Calendly and then configuring it for them, I decided that I must find an alternative. So I started looking for alternatives that might meet my requirements.
My requirements are:
Event types
Calendar connections per person
Number of meetings that can be booked
Create one-on-one events, meeting polls, and one-off meetings
Customize your booking link
Create group events
Create collective events
Create round-robin events
Create automated workflows
Customize notifications and reminders
Send invitee email reminders and follow-ups, and get meeting notifications via text message
Update cancellation policy
View analytics and insights about your scheduled meetings
Integrations with Make.com and Zapier
Webhook integrations
Add branding to your booking page
Remove platform branding
Customize colors of embedded forms
Customize confirmation page with links and redirects
Connect to Google Meet, and Zoom
Add Calendly to your website
Collect payments with Stripe and PayPal
Track UTM tags
Feature Comparison
Tidycal the AppSumo success story
Tidycal’s subscription is $29 USD for a lifetime subscription. Yes, that’s a one time payment. It’s amazingly cheap. So cheap that I bought it just to see if it would work for me. Unfortunately, it didn’t have all the features that I require. It does not handle rescheduling of events in the API and also the API is not a webhook. So you must continually poll the system at regular intervals to get updates. But for companies on a budget, it is incredible what you can get for $29 for a lifetime subscription.
Acuity Scheduling - https://acuityscheduling.com/
After looking at Tidycal and several other schedulers, I found Acuity Scheduling. It seemed to have all the features I was looking for. I went to the Make.com website and searched for Acuity and found that it had really broad and good support for API and Webhooks. In fact, it was the calendar scheduling app with the most comprehensive API and Webhook support.
After looking through the feature list, I jumped on Youtube next and watched several demo and review videos of the product. That’s when I saw a video by Mitch Baylis who has almost exactly the same customer profile as myself. The title of the video jumped out at me right away.
“Why I Ditched Calendly and Switched to This Awesome Scheduling Tool, Take a Look”
Sound familiar? ;-)
I had basically the exact same experience with Calendly as Mitch!
Acuity does basically everything that Calendly does with the exception of more enterprise features like workflows and lead routing integration with Salesforce. Acuity also handles their forms correctly. Acuity’s API and Webhook features are the most comprehensive that I have seen. Although, I do have to say that Calendly’s API and webhook support are also sufficient to do most things I need. The most important feature is that they don’t remove my account if I’m logged into a client’s account.
Couldn’t you have solved the issue by using a different email to login to your client’s account?
Yes. But the issue is still that they simple merged my account without prior notice. And all my data was available to view by the client. That was not cool. That coupled with the fact that their customer support basically did not care nor were they going to reinstate my account. Also, the branding on my own website’s embedded Calendly link was replaced by my client’s branding. Again, not cool.
Conclusion
Calendly is a very good platform. Unless you are a technical consultant who is configuring and integrating Calendly on a daily basis, it’s unlikely that you will encounter the same situation as I had. But since it did happen to me, I was very fortunate to have found that at least one other person has had the same experience that I did. I’m sure we’re not the only ones. I’m also fortunate to have found an alternative platform that seems to tick all the boxes I need.
I will still support clients who want to integrate with Calendly. But I will recommend Acuity Scheduling where it is best for the client. In the future, I will create a video demonstrating Acuity Scheduling and how to integrate it with Monday.com. I hope this blog article will help out other people who are either thinking about using Calendly or have run into the same scenario.
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