X-ai has announced sunset. Check out alternatives.

Calendly and X-ai are good for appointment scheduling. Calendly is the leader whereas X-ai offers AI-based scheduling.

Read on to find out which one will suit your need.

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A brief about X-ai

X-ai has two pricing plans: individual and team. You can use X-ai for managing your schedules or your team’s. The product has separate meeting calendars and templates for individuals and teams.

Meeting templates are central to how X-ai works. A meeting template is a service which has its title, duration, location, life, booking page, and mandatory and optional participants. You can create unlimited meeting templates.

X-ai makes scheduling faster with their scheduling assistants, meeting templates, and instant scheduling.

The ai feature is cool but should not be a decisive factor for your meeting scheduler.

X-ai is affordable for individuals. At $8, you will get unlimited calendar connections. So, you can pool your availability and reduce double booking.

Calendly vs X-ai: Who will find X-ai limiting?

If you are from the service industry, you will find that X-ai does not have enough customization and personalization to propagate your brand.

The do not have payment gateway integrations other than Stripe.

There is no direct integration with a CRM. However, with the integration with Zapier, you can connect with CRM and other apps.

The software’s primary target audience is sales and recruitment teams.

If you expect AI to take care of everything you might find it limiting. You have to accept the fact the improvements in ai are an ongoing effort and be forgiving and appreciative of the scheduling assistants, Andrew and Amy. They may not understand every instruction. Sometimes they get confused too. Moreover, there could be a series of emails for you and your guests. The reporting module in X-ai is not great. They do not have a calendar view of all upcoming and past appointments. The list report is useful but not as friendly as a calendar view. X-ai read the calendar and counts the available slots. However, it cannot tell you what meetings you have already.

Calendly vs X-ai: Who will find X-ai useful?

As I mentioned earlier, sales teams will find this product handy. The combined meeting template is good for organizing internal meetings. The round robin template is good for customer calls and demos. Each team member will get their own calendar page and also can be part of the team calendar. With the meeting templates, they can quickly schedule a meeting. The chrome plug-in will make it easier to copy-paste and send available times to a customer without leaving your email or CRM inbox.

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.

I am 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.

Calendly vs X-ai: 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 customizations enough 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 X-ai: 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.

Compare Calendly and X-ai

Calendly vs X-ai: Conclusion 

For most people, the default choice would be Calendly unless they want the AI experience I mentioned earlier. 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.