Vyte review

Vyte Review: to tell it sweet and short

Vyte is a good meeting scheduler to collaboratively decide the best time to meet. You can do one-on-one and group meetings on Vyte. It has all the essential features of a meeting scheduler and some interesting features. The UI is modern, clean, and easy to navigate. The chat support is prompt and helpful.

You can organize a Vyte meeting in three ways

1. invite a group of people to a meeting by email
2. people book time with you from the booking page
3. share event details as a link

The mandatory invitee feature is good for meetings involving a VIP.  This gives priority to the VIP’s time. When the VIP picks a time, the same time slot is confirmed for the meeting.

Vyte’s strength, according to me, is group meetings. Group meetings allow participant to collaboratively decide a meeting times. Features like polls, suggestions, guest invitees, and chats will ensure that you meet with a proper agenda and preparation. Vyte’s paid plans start at $8 per user per month which is similar to Calendly but higher than Doodle. However, Doodle has minimum user requirements in paid plans which makes the five-user plan cost $30 per month. And, Doodle has only annual billing.

Who will find Vyte limiting?

Team scheduling is one of their weak areas. That is understandable considering Vyte’s target audience. If you are planning to use Vyte in a sales or to offer a service, there is no way for customers to select a team member of their choice. Vyte allows syncing multiple calendars but the pooled availability does not reflect on the booking page. Similarly, they allow you to form a group/team/organization by inviting people. However, you cannot do much with that for team scheduling.

Who will find Vyte useful?

The purpose of your meeting will define which scheduler you need to go for. Vyte is ideal when you want to decide the meeting time collaboratively. For ex. discussions among colleagues, a counselling session between a student and a teacher. Vyte’s features like the meeting poll, Suggest meeting date and place, Invite guests, and chat window help people to collaborate well.  Also, by default what you get is a meeting request with multiple time slots as options. You can review and confirm which slot is suitable. (Turn this off and Vyte will confirm the one slot that the guest chooses). Such features ensure that people meet with sufficient preparation and context. Therefore meetings are effective.

What is their business model?

I could not find any public information on who funds Vyte. I assume that it is privately owned by its CEO, Martin who is ever present in the product UI on the chatbot. They have put extra effort on making referrals work. Every page on the UI and notification emails and even the booking page has props that ask people new to Vyte to sign up for a trial. I tried deactivating my booking page and accessed it. There was a message asking me to claim that booking page with a link to a Vyte’s website.

Viability of the company

Vyte has been in existence from 2014 according to Techcrunch interview with the founder. I could not find much about their financial status or funding. There is not much on the Vyte website also.

Vyte Review: How do they fare on the basic features of a scheduler?

Vyte checks all the boxes of a good meeting scheduler

1. Setting availability
   1. Calendar sync – They integrate with Google, O365, MSExchange, iCloud, and CalDav calendars. Vyte will match the availability on the calendar. Turn this off to take meeting requests that overlap a busy time slot. If you want to turn off meeting requests and take confirmed meetings right way, you can. You can set your working days, define a date interval in which you are available and not take meeting requests outside of that. In the same way, you can avoid getting booked last minute and also beyond a few days. Before and after each meeting you can set a buffer time.
2. Meetings requests and Meetings – The normal way in Vyte is asking people to place meeting requests with you. They will select all time slots convenient to them as a request. You review and confirm a time slot for the meeting.
   1. The other way is to ask people to book their convenient time and confirm it right away.
3. Sharing it with customers
   1. Email – If it is an event, the invite emails, updates, chat notifications, will go to all participants. They can add the event to their calendars.
   2. Booking page – People can book meetings with you after checking your availability on the booking page. Vyte offers a free booking page with your account. You can customise the text, social media links, time zone, and language on the booking page. Using the intake form, you can ask for phone number and company name .
4. Post appointment actions
   1. Notify – All participants receive email notifications regarding meeting requests and confirmations.
   2. Update – Vyte updates the calendars of all participants about meeting invites and confirmations.
   3. Block – Depending on how you have configured it, Vyte will block your calendar from another meeting or keep it open.
5. Online Meeting – Vyte has integration with Webex. Vyte will create a webex meeting.

Vyte Review: What are the extra features?

• Events – An event is a closed group meeting where the host shares meeting invites. There is a great deal of collaboration in meetings. Participants can chat, suggest a new place and date, and invite their guests. I found this as a key differentiating feature of Vyte. The Vyte admin can turn these off if not necessary.
• Assistant password – If you have an assistant who takes care of your meetings, they can log in to your Vyte account with a password. The only advantage is that you do not have to share your Google password with them. Otherwise, they have all the permission like yours.
• CalDav calendars – This is a good addition and not common in meeting schedulers.
• Slack command – A useful feature for those who use Slack. By using this command inside Slack, you can get everyone together for a meeting.
• Free duration where the booker can decide the duration – In other meeting schedulers, you have to set up a service/meeting time. Here, you can leave it at the booker’s discretion. Not to worry, you can define it if you want to.

Vyte Review: What are the cool features?

• Appending meeting duration in the booking page URL – Just like how you can leave the duration of the meeting in the hands of the visitor/booker you can append a number to your meeing page/Vyte page URL to define the meeting’s duration. If append 15 to the URL, the meetings’ duration will be 15 minutes.
• Overlay calendars – When someone visits your booking page and wants to find suitable times, they can overlay their calendar on yours and see which times are open for both of you. This needs the visitor to log in/Sign up for their Vyte account which has their calendar synced.

APIs

Vyte provides APIs to use their platform without their UI. There are detailed guides on how to extend the default capabilities. For ex. Team scheduling is not available via UI but is possible with APIs

• Create and manage booking pages – for team booking pages and separate pages for individuals.
• Scheduling API for 1-to-1 bookings – how to completely dispense with the Vyte interface and fully manage 1-1 bookings using only the API.
• Add scheduling features to your app or platform – This will let you easily add a button in your product to schedule a meting with 1 person or a group. In fact, we will learn how to generate links to some Vyte Page with pre-defined option as query parameters. For instance, you will be able to create a button to redirect from your website to an event creation page with pre-filled fields.
• Set up team booking – Thanks to the API, you are able to group your user by team. The team API is really versatile so that you can represent all types of organizational structure, from hierarchical to matrix structure. Here we will learn how to create and manage our first team. At the end, we will see how to book a team event.
• Use our web components – We provide a web component to integrate the Vyte slot picker directly in your website. This is a fully configurable Vue.js component with the following props:

Vyte Review: Ease of use

Vyte is quite easy to use. The UI is broadly divided into three

1. Account settings
2. Event settings
3. Vyte page settings

While the design looks contemporary, the UI does not follow the mind of the customer. Also, some of the UI messages are confusing. The good thing is that the product’s chat support is excellent and you can find your way with your help.

Help and Support

During my evaluation of Vyte, I had to contact the support team many times. They were quick with their replies and always had answers for me. I wanted to make a booking page for my team. It was not possible from the product UI. I contacted the support. They told me that they can set it up for us.

However, the product help documentation is not sufficient. I could have got my answers from the help documentation instead of contacting the support team.

Bugs spotted

I was checking out the booking page. The availability was displayed as a calendar view instead of slot view. I could book more slots than permitted. When I contacted the support team, they suggested that I use the slots view which worked well.

Privacy Policy

Read Vyte’s privacy policy here.

Vyte Review: Pricing model

Vyte’s paid plans start $8 per user per month when billed monthly or at $10 per user per month when billed annually.

Total cost of ownership

Vyte charges customers on a per user basis. A user is someone who joins your organization in Vyte with your invite. Based on the integrations that you need, the cost will rise as subscription for those apps.

How it compares to the segment leader

While the product meets my need, the cost of $10 per calendar makes me wonder if I should go for Doodle. Read Vyte vs Doodle review

Summary of other Vyte reviews:

Rating

While the product meets my need, the cost of $10 per calendar makes me wonder if I should go for Doodle.  

Long term Vyte review:

Often, you will find that the product that you started using with full conviction is not the one you need now, after a few years. The reasons could be that it is not able to scale, or the total cost of ownership goes enormous, the support is bad, there are no updates.

Our long term review is a way to observe how a product and the company behind it behaved in the last one year. This is an important read if you are buying the product for a longer term. Read our long term review about Vyte.