Bookafy vs. Calendly: Which scheduling software is better?

Dive deep into the world of online scheduling as we dissect the strengths and weaknesses of two scheduling giants – Bookafy and Calendly.

Bookafy and Calendly are both great appointment schedulers, each bringing its own set of strengths to the table. 

Our in-depth comparison is your compass through this scheduling landscape, unraveling the distinctive qualities and capabilities of Bookafy and Calendly.

Empower yourself with the insights needed to make the best decision that aligns perfectly with your specific scheduling requirements.

For a deeper understanding, delve into our detailed reviews of Bookafy and Calendly.

Bookafy vs. Calendly: At a Glance

Criteria	Bookafy	Calendly	Winner
SMB Guide’s Rating	8/10	9/10	Calendly
Appointment Workflow Automation	✅	✅	Tie
Customization Options	✅	✅	Calendly
Calendar Management Features	✅	✅	Calendly
Automated Reminders and Notifications	✅	✅	Calendly
Client Management & Communication	✅	❌	Bookafy
Automatic Rules	✅	✅	Tie
In-Meeting Tools	❌	❌	Calendly
Meeting Templates	✅	✅	Tie
Meeting Analytics	❌	✅	Calendly
UX and UI	Bit outdated	Easy-to-use	Calendly
Integrations & API Capabilities	✅	✅	Calendly
Supported Platforms	✅	✅	Calendly
Customer Support	Live chat Self-help	Live chat Email Self-help	Calendly
Pricing	Free – $10/mo (per user)	Free – $47/seat/mo	Bookafy
Scalability	❌	✅	Calendly

Bookafy: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing

With its sleek and intuitive customer-facing design, Bookafy makes online scheduling a breeze for both you and your clients.

Say goodbye to the hassle of manual scheduling and hello to a more efficient, organized, and profitable business.

Pros & Cons

Price

Bookafy’s pricing plans can be divided into three types: 

• Free
• Pro: $9 per user per month
• Pro+: $13 per user per month

You can also avail a 7-day free trial.

Calendly: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing

Calendly stands out as a widely used online tool designed for scheduling appointments and simplifying the coordination of meeting schedules.

Its acclaim stems from a user-friendly interface and versatile features, earning favor from both individuals and businesses alike.

Despite its strengths, some users might find the pricing structure somewhat limiting for specific needs.

Pros & Cons

Pricing

Calendly offers four distinct pricing tiers, beginning with a free plan catering to essential scheduling needs:

• Free: $0
• Standard: $10/seat/month
• Teams: $16/seat/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

For large organizations requiring more than 30 accounts, you can get a personalized quote from Calendly.

Appointment Workflow Automation

After setting up your appointment options, the process is relatively straightforward for customers.

They can access the booking URL, select the desired appointment type, date, and time, and provide the necessary information during the booking process.

This information can be tailored to your preferences in the dashboard. 

Once they’ve completed the booking, they’ll have the option to add the appointment to their calendar and receive a confirmation email.

Calendly simplifies appointment scheduling by providing clients with access to your scheduling page through a shared link.

They can browse through your available event types and pick their preferred date, granting them the autonomy to independently organize meetings.

You also have the flexibility to designate time intervals both before and after appointments, offering the ability to customize these gaps.

This feature is designed to avoid consecutive bookings without any breaks in between, promoting a more balanced schedule.

Upon confirmation of a booking, clients are promptly sent email invitations containing links for the scheduled conference call.

Additionally, they receive options to modify or cancel the appointment if needed, ensuring flexibility in the scheduling process.

✅ Winner: Tie

Customization Options

Bookafy provides a range of customization options to tailor your booking experience to your specific needs.

You can personalize the appearance of your booking page, including adding your business logo and writing a brief description that will be displayed on the homepage.

Additionally, you can control various settings such as whether to display reviews, allow customers to reschedule appointments, and customize the appearance of the accent button, header text, and background.

You can also choose to allow customers to book multiple appointments for the same session, and display important details such as business hours, appointment types, and groups, and your phone number. 

To further enhance your branding, you can customize the font family and color of the iframe.

Calendly’s subscription packages provide a wealth of flexibility for creating diverse types of bookable appointments.

In contrast to the free version, which confines users to a single event type, there is significant room for customization within the paid packages.

Users can specify their preferred meeting platforms, like Zoom or Google Meet, allow guests to be added by invitees, set booking time limits, establish intervals between appointments, define minimum advance notice requirements, and control the number of meetings permitted per day.

Opting for the Standard plan or higher unlocks additional features, including the integration of company branding and the removal of Calendly’s logo from the scheduling interface. 

Conversely, while the free version does allow the inclusion of your business logo at the top left, it lacks the option to eliminate Calendly’s branding entirely.

✅ Winner: Calendly

Calendar Management Features

In the calendar section, you can view and create one-off appointments with ease. 

However, if you wish to customize the calendar’s appearance, you will need to navigate to the customization tab and select “Calendar View.”

From there, you can modify the default calendar view, set the duration of appointment slots, and customize appointment status. 

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a feature that allows for built-in buffer time between appointments, as is offered by some other software options.

Calendly effortlessly integrates with calendars from Google, Outlook, iCloud, and Exchange, effectively preventing any instances of overlapping or double bookings.

In the Free version, users can synchronize with one external calendar. However, this capacity expands to six calendars with a paid upgrade, offering enhanced flexibility.

Calendly also adeptly adjusts meeting schedules to different time zones, ensuring seamless communication for clients situated in diverse regions.

Users can use “Scheduled events” for rescheduling. While providing a reason for the change is optional, clients are promptly notified of any modifications and are granted the autonomy to reschedule the meeting on their own terms.

✅ Winner: Calendly

Automated Reminders and Notifications

If you want to take advantage of reminders and notifications Bookafy, you’ll need to upgrade to one of the paid plans.

With the Pro+ plan, you can send multiple reminders for each appointment, making it easier to stay on track. 

Additionally, you can add notes and details to each appointment, allowing you to quickly recall the purpose of the event.

You can also set up recurring reminders, so you don’t have to enter the same appointment every time. 

Once you’ve saved your appointment, the app will automatically send you a reminder notification at the specified time.

Upon scheduling a meeting through Calendly, clients receive a calendar invitation. To access extra automated reminders, an upgrade to a premium plan is necessary.

Starting from the Standard plan and moving upwards, you can oversee reminders through either text or email.

This feature guarantees that meeting attendees receive thorough information regarding the scheduled meeting, enhancing communication and ensuring everyone is well-informed.

✅ Winner: Calendly

Client Management and Communication

Bookafy provides a comprehensive client management section. This dedicated space, conveniently located under the Customer’s tab on the left-hand side, serves as a centralized hub for storing and managing critical details about your clients.

Within the Client Management section, you can:

• Seamlessly store and retrieve customer-specific data like contact details, appointment history, and any additional notes relevant to your interactions
• Access your client’s readily available information 
• Integrate social networks into your client profiles

Calendly, on the other hand, currently doesn’t offer client information storage.

✅ Winner: Bookafy

Automatic Rules

With Bookafy, you can set up some automatic rules including: 

• Locking Time Zone on Booking Pages: With Bookafy, you can ensure consistency and avoid scheduling errors by locking the time zone on your booking pages. This feature helps both you and your clients stay on the same page, especially when dealing with appointments across different regions.
• Setting up Invitee Questions to Show Automatically: This ensures that you receive essential details from your clients before appointments.
• Defining Specific Booking Policies: Tailor your booking policies according to your specific needs with Bookafy’s customizable features. For example, you can set appointment lead times to control how far in advance clients can book. Moreover, Bookafy supports HIPAA compliant emails, allowing you to maintain the highest standards of privacy and security when communicating with your clients.

Within Calendly, a diverse array of automated configurations and guidelines are at your disposal, including:

• Automated Cancellation Policies: Users can set rules that automatically cancel appointments under specific conditions. For instance, they can define a timeframe within which clients are allowed to cancel or reschedule.
• Time Zone Adaptations: The platform adapts meeting times to cater to various time zones. This feature guarantees precise scheduling and minimizes any potential confusion stemming from differences in time zones.
• Establishing Working Hours: Users can define their work hours, restricting client bookings to these specified time frames. This ensures that appointments align with the user’s designated working hours.

✅ Winner: Tie

In-Meeting Tools

Neither Bookafy or Calendly provides any in-meeting tools directly. In other words, functionalities like video conferencing, screen sharing, or integrated meeting tools are not built into these scheduling solutions.

That being said, Calendly offers an additional feature called “meeting polls” which users can leverage to propose multiple time slots and allow invitees to vote on their preferred time.

This collaborative approach facilitates finding a mutually convenient meeting time, ensuring that the scheduling process is more accommodating for all parties involved.

✅ Winner: Calendly

Meeting Templates

Bookafy offers a flexible approach to customization, allowing users to optimize their meetings with pre-filled categories and customizable forms.

This includes one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one appointment types based on their specific needs.

Additionally, Bookafy provides the convenience of adding sessions immediately or scheduling them for a later time, giving users more power to manage their appointments efficiently and ensures that the scheduling system adapts to their unique workflow.

Within Calendly’s free version, users can create templates tailored for individual meetings.

Opting for a premium subscription unlocks advanced features, allowing the development of specialized templates for various meeting formats like Group, Collective, and Round Robin.

Furthermore, customization options extend to the design of different meeting types. Users can generate and apply unique templates for each format, effectively streamlining the scheduling process across diverse meeting scenarios.

Calendly also offers recommendations on the most fitting meeting type based on the user’s preferences and specific requirements.

✅ Winner: Tie

Meeting Analytics

Bookafy currently doesn’t provide a meetings analytics feature.

Included in premium plans such as Calendly Groups, Calendly’s analytics extensively explore meetings, providing in-depth insights.

These tools furnish comprehensive data on meetings, offering specific insights into team bookings.

The Analytics leaderboard is a valuable resource for administrators, allowing them to pinpoint top-performing team members based on meeting booking statistics. 

You can also use Calendly’s analytics for predicting capacity requirements by looking at the meeting patterns, peak booking times, and team performance metrics.

It also sheds light on areas that might benefit from additional training, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and skill advancement throughout the organization.

✅ Winner: Tie

User Experience and User Interface

The user interface tends to be more complicated than it needed to be, with some elements not being placed in the most logical location.

For example, the “Customers” section would be better served as its own menu item, rather than being buried under the “Manage” tab. 

While the interface was not overly difficult to use, it could benefit from some updates and refinements to make it more user-friendly and intuitive.

Additionally, the overall design of the interface seems somewhat outdated.

Calendly showcases an intuitive and easily navigable interface that provides immediate access to your scheduling link upon logging in.

The purposefully crafted dashboard prioritizes ease of use, guaranteeing a seamless experience.

The process of setting up Calendly is remarkably straightforward and user-friendly. It mainly revolves around configuring your availability and creating events, both of which are intuitive and simple tasks.

✅ Winner: Calendly

Integrations & API Capabilities

Bookafy seamlessly connects with your website, providing two-way calendar synchronization across multiple platforms (available on paid plans) including Mailchimp, Stripe, Authorize.net.

You can also integrate with various video conferencing services such as Zoom, GoToMeeting, WebEx, and Teams if needed.

Calendly provides a wide array of over 100 integrations, encompassing diverse third-party applications in areas such as marketing automation, project management, and applicant tracking.

Its seamless synchronization with your calendar app simplifies the management of schedules.

In terms of API functionalities, Calendly offers an API that empowers developers to craft personalized integrations.

This level of flexibility allows users to extend Calendly’s functionalities based on their specific needs.

✅ Winner: Calendly

Supported Platforms

Bookafy is currently only available through the web-based application that you can log into using your laptop/desktop access.

It also offers a custom API which is great. However, it leaves you wanting more as it’s missing the mobile apps. 

Calendly provides an online platform and exclusive mobile applications tailored for both iOS and Android devices, facilitating easy appointment scheduling on the go.

The mobile apps have received favorable reviews, earning an impressive 4.9-star rating on the App Store and a commendable 4.7-star rating on the Google Play Store.

✅ Winner: Calendly

Customer Support

With Bookafy, you can find answers quickly and efficiently through the comprehensive FAQ section on the website.

In cases where you need additional support, you can reach out via live chat or email.

When you use the live chat feature, you’ll be given the chance to speak with a real person. However, before connecting you with a human representative, you’ll be asked to check the help center articles to see if you can find the answer you’re looking for.

Within Calendly’s free plan, users benefit from diverse support channels. An automated chat feature is available for general inquiries, while more intricate assistance can be sought by submitting a support ticket after logging into the account.

For self-directed issue resolution, the Help Center provides a variety of written guides and video tutorials. Customers on the Standard or Teams plans are entitled to live chat support, and those on custom plans receive priority support.

✅ Winner: Calendly

Pricing

Bookafy offers three pricing plans

Plan	Price
Free	Always free
Basic	$9/seat/month per month
Premium	$13/seat/month per month

The Free Plan offers the most basic features which beginners can get started with. However, the Pro and Pro+ plan offer the best use case for established businesses.

Calendly’s four pricing plans are:

Plan	Price
Free	Always free
Standard	$10/seat/mo
Teams	$16/seat/mo
Enterprise	Custom

✅ Winner: Bookafy

Scalability

Bookafy’s scalability is notably limited, with the highest-tier plan, which includes HIPAA compliance, representing the pinnacle of its scalability features.

While this plan offers advanced booking software, CRM integration, built-in Zapier integration, an open API, and more, it may fall short for larger businesses. 

For enterprises with extensive requirements, exploring alternative solutions would be advisable.

Calendly highlights its scalability through a range of pricing structures tailored to accommodate organizations of different sizes.

Specifically crafted for enterprise-level teams, its top-tier packages boast features such as collaborative scheduling, extensive integrations, and heightened security measures.

The success metrics tied to the Enterprise plan reveal significant outcomes, including:

• a remarkable 160% increase in customer outreach
• a 22-fold increase in scheduled interviews
• a high 323% return on investment

According to Calendly, this package assists enterprises in:

• Boosting productivity.
• Improving customer engagements.
• Streamlining scheduling procedures.
• Strengthening data security measures.

✅ Winner: Calendly

Standout Features of Bookafy

Bookafy stands out with its distinctive feature on the Pro+ plan—HIPAA compliance. This is particularly valuable for medical professionals, including doctors and other healthcare providers, who are obligated to adhere to HIPAA regulations. 

The Pro+ plan enables them to utilize the platform for conducting telehealth appointments while maintaining the necessary privacy and security standards mandated by HIPAA.

Bookafy’s commitment to HIPAA compliance on the Pro+ plan sets it apart, ensuring a secure and compliant environment for telehealth interactions within the healthcare industry.

Standout Features of Calendly

Key highlights of Calendly include:

• A versatile event creation capability that facilitates the organization of diverse appointment types.
• Automatic adjustment of meeting schedules to accommodate various time zones, ensuring accurate and consistent scheduling worldwide.
• Inclusion of buffer times, defining minimum notification durations, and imposition of daily meeting limits.

These features collectively contribute to avoiding consecutive bookings without intervals.

Bookafy vs. Calendly: SMB Guide’s Verdict

Calendly’s extensive range of features positions it as an ideal choice for businesses of all sizes, seamlessly adjusting to evolving business requirements. 

In contrast, Bookafy is particularly well-suited for smaller businesses and freelancers wanting a simple scheduler without the complexities associated with scalability concerns. 

Therefore, Bookafy proves to be an excellent solution for businesses with more modest operational scales, while Calendly stands out as the overall preferred choice between the two platforms.