If you need an appointment scheduling app for your online meetings, Tidycal and Calendly are two good options. These apps have interesting features that both companies and freelancers easily use to schedule appointments by email, social media, forums, and so on.
If you can’t choose one over the other, let us help you. We walk through the features, use cases, and prices of each software. We’ll also talk about Cronos, the best solution for scheduling online meetings.
Tidycal
Tidycal is an appointment scheduling software that offers a simple way to book group or client meetings in just a few easy steps. In addition, it’s an easy-to-use tool for users who are not familiar with an appointment scheduler.
With Tidycal, each user can create a booking page to indicate their business days and times so that their clients can make reservations at their convenience, all within an intuitive process for organizers and attendees alike.
As a calendar booking tool, Tidycal offers automated event notifications and appointment reminders for all of your attendees so they never miss a meeting with you or your team. The tool also allows you to customize your booking page so that it seamlessly integrates with your corporate identity.
Features
Tidycal differentiates itself from other scheduling tools by giving users the possibility to make a one-time payment to use the product for life. In addition, this meeting scheduling tool adds other notable features that we’ll take a look at below.
One-time lifetime payment
Unlike other tools like Acuity or OnceHub, which charge a monthly or annual subscription, Tidycal offers a $29 one-time payment plan that gives you access to all features and updates for the rest of your life.
Integration with multiple calendars and payment platforms
Tidycal syncs with Google Calendar, Office 365 and Apple, so that your clients can see your availability when they booking a meeting with you. In addition, you can integrate Tidycal with PayPal and Stripe, to charge for your services or products when booking an appointment.
Interface and link customization
Tidycal allows you to customize the look and feel of your booking calendar. You’ll be able to choose colors, logo, language, and date and time format. You can also customize your booking link, making it easier for your clients and coworkers to remember and share.
Prices
One of the main benefits of Tidycal is its simple cost structure. The tool only offers two plans for its users, the free plan and the paid subscription, which comes in handy if you don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about which subscription suits you best.
Free plan
Tidycal’s free plan offers very specific features for users that can be helpful if you have basic meeting scheduling needs.
With this plan, you’ll have access to unlimited event types, and you will be able to fully customize your business hours. You will have unlimited free meetings, access to the online calendar, and be able to add your brand colors on the booking page to maintain your corporate identity.
Paid plan
You’ll get access to Tidycal’s advanced features with a one-time fee of $29, which will allow you to use the tool on a lifetime deal. The professional plan expands the application’s capabilities, allowing you more freedom for scheduling meetings. This plan gives you access to:
- Group events
- Group scheduling
- Custom email reminders
- Integrations with other services
- Paid meetings
Calendly
For scheduling appointments, Calendly is one of the most well-known software on the Internet. It is an optimized service for scheduling meetings in teams of all sizes, including high-level international companies.
Calendly offers a sophisticated user interface with professional features that scale with each service plan, allowing you to pay for more advanced features as your business grows and gets more and better customers.
Calendly works like any other program of its kind: you can create event types according to the types of meetings you have and set your availability to create a meeting link to share with all interested people. This link can be used in emails, social networks, messaging apps, or your own website.
Features
Like Tidycal, Calendly users have access to useful features and services for small businesses, mid-sized projects or large enterprises, as well as freelancers. Here are three key features:
Smart time zones
Calendly automatically detects the time zone of your guests and shows them the schedule options in their local time zone. This way, you avoid confusion and misunderstandings when scheduling meetings with people around the world.
Rotating events and integrated metrics
Calendly gives you the option to create rotating events, which allow you to assign appointments to different members of your team based on availability, workload or rotation.
In addition, you can access built-in metrics that show you the performance of your events, number of guests, attendance rate and customer satisfaction.
Group and collective scheduling
Calendly allows you to create collective event types, where you can invite several people to the same meeting. The tool also gives your clients the option to allow one person to choose between several members of your team.
These options are useful for organizing webinars, workshops, interviews or consultations.
Prices
Unlike Tidycal, Calendly offers traditional service plans, each with its own features that are added as plans increase in price.
Except for the first plan, each of the paid subscriptions can be paid monthly or yearly, which is priced at a lower rate. Let’s dig in.
Free plan
The first Calendly plan is free for all users. It’s an interesting option for freelancers who cannot yet afford advanced features but still need conveniences when scheduling client meetings. This subscription includes basic features such as:
- Customized links
- Automated notifications
- Customized booking image with your corporate identity
- Integration with video call services (Google Meet, Zoom…)
- Slack integration
- Intercom integration
- Integration to a single calendar per user.
Standard
Calendly’s first paid plan includes everything from the previous subscription, but adds new features to improve the service and give people a better experience for scheduling online meetings. You can pay $10 monthly, or make a one-time annual payment of $8 for each month. This plan offers:
- Automated workflows
- SMS meeting notifications
- Guest redirection
- Creation of group event types
- Custom integrations with webhooks
- Stripe and Paypal payments
Teams
Calendly’s third plan is focused on intermediate projects that are already consolidated and want to scale their operations even further, so they need more advanced functions for internal meetings, appointments with partners and customers.
It is priced at USD 16 per user per month in a single annual fee, and USD 20 per seat in recurring monthly payments. New features of this plan include:
- Single sign-on (optional extension)
- Rotating events
- Group management and permissions
- SalesForce connection
- Creation of events managed by your entire team
Enterprises
Calendly’s ultimate plan. It includes all the features of the previous subscriptions and adds some new ones, all to be a platform optimized for large national companies or those with a global scale.
All interested organizations should contact Calendly to order the service, as this plan is tailored to fit the needs and requirements of each company. Among the new features of this plan are:
- Single sign-on enabled for all
- Audit trail
- Data deletion API
- Full access to SalesForce functionality
- Automatic group provisioning
- Phone support
- Legal and security checks
Calendly vs Tidycal: What are the differences?
Now that we have reviewed each tool and discovered what Tidycal and Calendly can offer us, let’s get to know their main differences in key aspects to better understand their strengths and weaknesses.
Prices
Calendly has a traditional pricing scheme, offering four subscription plans with additional features as companies or groups need a more sophisticated system for scheduling appointments and meetings.
In contrast, Tidycal offers only two forms of subscription. While the first is free, the second requires a one-time fee to use the service for life in exchange for a few intermediate features for all users. If you want a simpler approach, it’s a good option.
Interfaces
Calendly’s interface is made for all levels of business, adapting especially well to the work processes of high-level companies, offering several interesting functions. For those who are not used to this pace of work or tools of this type, the interface can be a bit tricky.
On the other hand, Tidycal presents a simple interface that streamlines the process of setting your availability and scheduling appointments on booking sites. The tool proposes a simple and elegant design that any user can understand.
Features
Calendly is known for the many features and conveniences it offers for freelancers and businesses of all sizes. As plans scale, so do the facilities that the tool’s customers can use to their advantage to enhance the experience inside and outside their organizations when scheduling appointments.
Compared to Calendly, Tidycal offers very few features, even in its paid version. While they are interesting and useful for users with basic needs, it is very likely that the tool falls short for more demanding work processes.
Which one is better?
If you are in charge of a company or project that needs to schedule continuous meetings with clients, partners and employees, and need advanced security and privacy features and guarantees, Calendly is an option that will solve all your concerns.
If, instead, you need a program to set your availability and allow others to schedule meetings quickly and easily, consider using Tidycal. It’s affordable and won’t be a major drain on your finances.
Cronos: the best solution for scheduling online meetings
Beyond Calendly and Tidycal, there’s a third appointment scheduling program that is much more adapted to your needs to optimize processes and be more productive. Meet Cronos.
How it works
With Cronos, you can create different types of events according to the meetings you have on a daily basis. Each event will have its own title, description, approximate duration, and your schedule availability. When you are done, you will have an appointment booking form to share with others.
People will choose a day and time for the meeting based on your availability. When they schedule, you will receive a notification in your email and also an update in your Google Calendar, where you can add more details. You can also add a videoconference to your scheduled event with Cronos from Calendar, such as Google Meet or Zoom.
The Cronos platform is accessible to all types of users, making it easy to use. You can also share the form link wherever you want, be it email, website, text messages, social networks, and so on.
Prices
Cronos is completely free for everyone. You can use all the features of the tool at no cost.
Conclusion
Depending on what you need to have in your daily life, both Calendly and Tidycal will be effective solutions for you. Each tool is good in its own way to offer you an efficient appointment booking system with which you can make better use of your time and be more productive.
However, if none of these programs convince you, Cronos will. It combines the simplicity of Tidycal and the professional look of Calendly to offer an experience tailored to all users, whether they are companies or freelancers. With Cronos, scheduling meetings is much better than ever before.
