Calendly vs ScheduleOnce – which one should you go for?
A brief about Calendly
Calendly is the most popular and widely used meeting scheduler. What sets them apart is the depth into which they have gone in the essentials of a meeting scheduler. They have done it keeping the user interface simple and minimalistic.
Calendly has one of the highest number of integrations, meeting types among meeting schedulers, and they offer the maximum flexibility in setting up availability. Their pricing is reasonable as well.
We are not saying that Calendly is the best for all use cases. If you do not have time to research for an online meeting scheduler that is the ideal fit your, Calendly is the safest bet.
Calendly has not gone deeper into customization of emails and booking pages, collaborative meeting scheduling features, recurring group appointments etc. You can check out Calendly alternatives who cover such things.
Read our review of Calendly here
Calendly vs ScheduleOnce: Who will find Calendly limiting?
In service industries like salons, people visit salons for multiple treatments. You cannot book multiple services in one go with Calendly. Also, they do not have the classes feature. Calendly has not given much attention to the service industry. They focus on a different target audience.
They do not have meeting polls typical to meeting schedulers.
Calendly does not have enough customizations to brand the customer-facing aspect of scheduling: the booking page, the notification emails, domain mapping. If you are a company on the creative side, you will find Calendly limiting.
Calendly appears to become expensive for teams larger than 5 members if you are on a tight budget for a scheduling tool.
Calendly vs ScheduleOnce: Who will find Calendly useful?
Almost everyone who wants to automate their scheduling! However, Calendly has a target audience – sales teams, recruiters, consultants and interviewers. Their priority for new features will be based on the requirements of this audience. So, if you are part of this group, you will greatly benefit.
A brief about ScheduleOnce
ScheduleOnce focuses on compliance, security, customization, and control more than any apps that we have reviewed so far. The feature set is not vast but each feature is like a mini product, with many options. The user interface is clean, sprinkled with inline help. Throughout the onboarding, there were reassuring messages like ‘You can change this later’, ‘Did we get your time zone right?. Change it if needed’. It also looks beautiful. The help documentation, the error messages, warnings, and supporting messages are the best in terms of clarity and intent. Not just that the UI text like directions, field labels also help you in doing the right thing the first time. There is nothing confusing about anything.
ScheduleOnce does things a bit different.
- The Booking Pages have an importance that is not common. While on other schedulers, you set availability for services, staff or independent of both, here you set availability for staff and that is tied to booking page. If a service gets assigned to that booking page, the service follows the availability of the page. In that way, a service can have multiple availabilities depending on the booking pages they are on.
- Resource pools – When you want to allot bookings among your team in a round robin or another algorithm, you have to create a resource pool, which is a pool of booking pages. Customers can then book an appointment from a master page which displays multiple booking pages of your choice – the bookings get allocated to the pool based on the algorithm that you choose.
- The owner of the account is not allowed to change parameters of the staff’s booking page unless they add themselves as an editor to the staff page where the staff is the admin. Also, the owner cannot change the calendars that need to be synced for the staff. This is needed if the entire team’s appointments are to mapped and retrieved from a common calendar.
ScheduleOnce is also complex but they didn’t mean it that way. I think it is their effort to give fine-grained control and flexibility and a help-rich user interface that makes the tool complex.
ScheduleOnce’s complexity does not come from excessive features but from trying to give every possible option in their features. For a simple field, there will be a field label, help documentation, and placeholder text when the field label can do the job of three elements. Or, a pop up window will have Save, Cancel and Close buttons. If you want to simplify the UI, you can take off either the Cancel or the Close button.
Yes, more options are good but they make the product UI so busy the learning curve is steep.
Appointment scheduling apps are generally straightforward. That is one reason for the success of Calendly. Usually, these apps grow larger when they try to cover more use cases, like that of the needs of health and wellness industries.
Read our review of ScheduleOnce here
Calendly vs ScheduleOnce: Who is ScheduleOnce ideal
As I said earlier, you should use ScheduleOnce if you have a greater need for control, customization, security, and compliance in your industry and use cases. ScheduleOnce(SO) targets sales teams.
Calendly vs ScheduleOnce: Who will find ScheduleOnce limiting ?
Yes, sales teams will find this useful. However, ScheduleOnce’s priorities appears to be elsewhere. Rather than trying to focus on integrations, routing algorithms, sales-focused reporting, plug-ins or AI that will keep salesperson’s tryst with appointment scheduling app minimal, SO has placed undue emphasis on customization. That level of customization will be appreciated in the health and wellness industry where the business has to project the brand also to keep the customers.
Calendly vs ScheduleOnce comparison
| ScheduleOnce | Calendly | ||
| Teams plan | Pro plan | ||
| $9/per user | $12/per user | ||
| Feature | |||
| Calendars | Calendar connections per user | No limit specified | 6 |
| Calendar integrations | G Suite, Office 365, Exchange/Outlook, or iCloud calendars. | Google Calendar, Office 365, Outlook and iCloud | |
| Directly sync meetings to your calendar | Yes | Yes | |
| Services | One-on-one meetings | Yes | Yes |
| Allow customer guests | Yes | Yes | |
| Group events (for tours, webinars, classes, etc.) | Yes | Yes | |
| Meetings by approval | Yes | No | |
| Session packages | Yes | No | |
| Accept payments | Yes | Yes | |
| Availability | Round-robin | Yes | Yes |
| Collective | Yes | Yes | |
| Set max number of meetings | Yes | Yes | |
| Conference Room Booking | Yes | No | |
| Sharing | Personalized booking page link | Yes | Yes |
| One-time booking links | Yes | Yes | |
| Custom content localization. Add different languages and date formats to your booking pages. | Yes | Yes | |
| Embed the booking page on your website | Yes | Yes | |
| Booking page appearance customization | Yes | Yes | |
| Intake form | Yes | Yes | |
| Removable vendor branding | Yes | Yes | |
| Add links to event confirmation pages | Yes | Yes | |
| Invitee redirect | Yes | Yes | |
| Custom domain branding Use your domain name for booking pages and emails. | Yes | No | |
| Copy and Paste Times in email | No | Yes | |
| Notifications and reminders | Customizable email notifications and reminders | Yes | Yes |
| SMS notifications | Yes | Yes | |
| Integrations | Intercom integration | No | Yes |
| Zapier integration | Yes | Yes | |
| Custom integrations with webhooks | Yes | Yes | |
| Online meeting | Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex Meetings, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, and Skype. | Zoom, MS Teams, GoToMeeting | |
| Salesforce integration and support | No | Yes | |
| HubSpot integration | No | Yes | |
| Mailchimp integration | No | Yes | |
| Stripe integration | No | Yes | |
| PayPal integration | Yes | Yes | |
| Google Analytics integration | Yes | Yes | |
| Facebook Pixel integration | No | Yes | |
| Two-factor authentication | Yes | No | |
| Multi-user management | Yes | No | |
| Single sign-on | Yes | No |
Calendly vs ScheduleOnce: Conclusion
For most people, the default choice would be Calendly unless they want some of the ScheduleOnce advantages I mentioned earlier: Meetings by approval, Security, Compliance, etc. Calendly has more integrations, a larger help documentation, community and if you opt for more than 10 user, you will get live chat as well.