Implementing appointment scheduling software for your professional team or small business can save you valuable time and help improve your customers’ experience to keep them coming back.
There are many different scheduling automation apps out there to choose from, including Calendly and Setmore. These two tools are quite similar, but there are some key differences that might make one or the other better for your needs.
In this comparison, we’ll give you overviews of these two popular scheduling tools and take a look at how they stack up against one another in terms of features, ease of use, integrations, customer service, and pricing.
Before we move on – allow us to introduce ourselves as the creators of the Webba Booking plugin, driven by our passion for delivering exceptional booking solutions for websites. While Setmore and Calendly are certainly viable options, Webba Booking shines in several key areas:
- Tailored for WordPress: Designed exclusively for WordPress websites, Webba Booking offers a seamless and straightforward setup process for WordPress users.
- Dedicated to Appointment Booking: Our focus is solely on appointment booking. With no distracting elements, we provide your customers with a contemporary booking form while ensuring easy management of your services and bookings. See our Demos.
- Top-Notch, Personalized Support: As a tight-knit team, we are committed to providing a 5-star support experience. Each of our users receives personalized and rapid assistance to ensure they make the most of our plugin.
- Seamless Integrations: Webba Booking smoothly integrates with various tools to enhance your booking experience. This includes automatic synchronization with Google Calendar for effortless scheduling, Zoom for generating online meeting links, Twilio for sending SMS reminders, and more.
- Payment Flexibility: Setting up payment processes is a breeze with Webba Booking. You can easily accept PayPal or credit card payments thanks to our seamless integrations with PayPal, Stripe, and WooCommerce.
Get started with Webba Booking here
Calendly vs Setmore: Overviews
Calendly
Calendly is an online scheduling and appointment booking tool that helps businesses and professionals streamline their meeting and appointment management processes and eliminate back and forth via email.
Calendly booking pages and links provide a simple and efficient way for individuals and teams to schedule and coordinate meetings, interviews, client consultations, and other types of professional appointments.
Pros:
- Users get personalized scheduling links
- Integrates with various online calendars
- Sends automated notifications to users and customers
- Users can customize availability and event types
- Appearance of scheduling pages can be customized
- Offers reporting and analytics
Cons:
- Mainly designed for corporate-type teams
- Can get expensive for big teams
Setmore
Setmore is an online appointment scheduling and booking software platform that allows businesses and professionals to better manage their appointments and availability.
The Setmore calendar platform can work for businesses in various industries, but particularly service-based ones like healthcare, wellness, beauty, education, and more. Setmore can help streamline service appointment scheduling processes and enhance customer experiences.
Pros:
- Customizable availability and appointment durations
- Provides a centralized calendar where users can manage appointments
- Sends automated appointment reminders
- Offers a customer database
- Booking page appearances can be customized
- Can be used to manage multiple staff members
Cons:
- Mainly designed for smaller, service-based businesses
Features
Setmore and Calendly offer similar features, but with some notable differences.
When it comes to appointment booking functionality, both platforms allow users to schedule and manage appointments efficiently. They share many core features, including email/SMS appointment reminders, customizable booking pages, and more.
However, Setmore offers more flexibility in terms of booking page customization, even allowing businesses to add their Instagram streams to their booking pages and customize booking forms to gather specific information from clients in order to build a customer database.
Setmore also allows users to manage the availability for multiple team members from a unified location, which makes it ideal for service providers who have various staff members that can get booked for different types of appointments.
Because of these additional core features, Setmore stands out as the better of the two platforms, especially if you’re a service provider.
Winner: Setmore
Ease of Use
As for ease of use, both Setmore and Calendly offer intuitive interfaces that make automating scheduling a breeze for everyone.
Setmore’s user-friendly design allows users to quickly navigate through the platform and set up appointments effortlessly. The drag-and-drop functionality for scheduling and customization options make it easy to adapt the tool to individual preferences.
Similarly, Calendly boasts a simple and streamlined user experience, enabling users to create and share booking pages with minimal effort. Calendly’s clean interface and straightforward setup make it accessible for users of all technical backgrounds.
Both Setmore and Calendly excel in the ease of use category, providing hassle-free scheduling solutions for businesses and individuals alike, so there’s no obvious winner here.
Winner: Tie
Integrations
When we look at integrations, Calendly has a clear advantage over Setmore.
Calendly offers a wide range (100+) of integrations with popular productivity tools, CRM systems, communication platforms, and other professional apps.
Calendly seamlessly connects with platforms like Google Calendar, Outlook, Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Zoom, and many more, ensuring smooth integration into existing workflows.
Setmore does offer integrations with many popular professional platforms as well, including some of the same as Calendly, but it simply doesn’t have as extensive a list of integrations as Calendly does.
While Setmore covers many of the same essential integrations, Calendly’s broader range provides users with more flexibility and compatibility options for their professional needs, making it the winner in the integrations category.
Winner: Calendly
Customer Service
In the customer service and support category, both Setmore and Calendly provide users with self-serve knowledge bases full of FAQs, guides, and other resources that can be quickly accessed to get fast support for common issues.
Beyond that, Calendly only provides email support, and users need a paid plan in order to receive email support.
Setmore, on the other hand, offers email and live chat support, so users can reach out for instant help when needed. Their support team is known for being responsive (the site claims they respond in under a minute) and helpful in addressing any concerns or questions.
While both Calendly and Setmore offer similarly basic customer support, Setmore’s live chat feature gives users a real-time communication option, making it the winner in this category.
Winner: Setmore
Pricing
When it comes to pricing, Setmore and Calendly offer various options to cater to various user needs.
Both platforms offer free plans for individual professionals or small business users, as well as different paid plans for professional and enterprise teams of different sizes.
Pricing for Calendly’s paid plans starts at $8/user/month, while pricing for Setmore starts at just $5/user/month.
In fact, Setmore doesn’t have any plans that cost more than $5/user/month, making it the more affordable option by far, considering that Calendly’s pricing goes up to $16/user/month. This means Calendly could get quite expensive for larger professional teams.
Winner: Setmore
Setmore vs Calendly: Which One Should You Choose?
When To Choose Calendly vs Setmore
If you’re a professional working independently or as part of a corporate team, Calendly might be just the tool you’re looking for to help tidy up your professional calendar and make scheduling meetings and appointments more easy.
With its vast range of integrations, Calendly is also an excellent choice if you want to integrate your meeting scheduling software with many other professional apps and platforms you use for different business operations and processes.
When To Choose Setmore vs Calendly
If you run a small or medium-sized service-based business, Setmore might be the better choice for you over Calendly, as it’s designed specifically with these types of businesses in mind.
Features like staff scheduling and recurring appointments can be particularly helpful if you want to manage appointments for different employees and returning regulars.
Wrapping Up
When it comes to Calendly vs Setmore, it’s a pretty even matchup — both tools can certainly make your life easier in terms of scheduling and calendar automation.
Because these two platforms are so similar, you may even find that neither one is quite suited to your needs, especially if you’re looking for a booking plugin for WordPress with payment options.
If that’s the case, we highly recommend trying Webba Booking as an alternative to Setmore and Calendly!
