In case the “Cal” in both their names didn’t give it away, TidyCal and Calendly are two booking and scheduling apps that can help you streamline your appointment booking and remove the manual work from scheduling appointments on your business calendar.
In spirit and basic functionality, both these platforms are similar, but there are some big differences when it comes to features, ease of use, integrations, customer service, and pricing.
Knowing what these differences are will help you decide what the better tool for you is between Calendly vs TidyCal, or determine if you might need a different appointment scheduling app altogether.
TidyCal vs Calendly: Overview
TidyCal
TidyCal connects to whatever calendars you use for doing business, including Google Calendars and Microsoft Office 365 calendars, and you can connect multiple calendars if you wish (to help avoid double booking).
Once you connect your calendar(s), you can create a custom booking page that offers different appointment types and lengths.
Visitors to your booking page can select the type of appointment they’re interested in to see your availability, then choose a time to automatically book it on your calendar.
In terms of use cases, TidyCal seems to be mainly geared towards individual professionals who offer different types of services — there’s even a directory of service providers who use TidyCal on the app’s website.
TidyCal Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Easy to set up and use
- Provides all the basic appointment scheduling functionality you need
- Syncs with multiple calendars
- Can accept payments at time of booking
- Allows one-on-one and group meetings
- Free version available
Cons:
- Only has a few integrations
- Free version has very limited features and functionality
Calendly
Like TidyCal, Calendly syncs with your professional calendar(s) and allows you to create custom booking pages with your appointment availability.
You can then share the link to your Calendly booking page via email, chat, or text, or embed a Calendly booking page on your website.
Calendly offers many integrations with other professional tools and has a lot of features that can help enterprise teams implement Calendly to automate various operations processes.
Calendly seems to be aimed at professional teams in corporate environments across a variety of industries and departments, from marketing and sales to recruiting and customer service teams.
Calendly Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Easy to use
- Provides all basic scheduling automation features
- Has lots of integrations
- Can take payment with bookings
- Many additional features for different business uses
- Free version and various paid plans available
Cons:
- Can get expensive for larger teams
- Many features may be unnecessary for individual users
Features
When it comes to features, both TidyCal and Calendly offer the same basic functionality of syncing with your business calendars and allowing you to create custom booking pages.
Beyond that, both platforms also allow you to accept payments at the time of booking via integrations with different payment platforms.
TidyCal’s features don’t go much further, though, which is why we’ve chosen Calendly as the winner in this category.
Calendly simply has many more features than TidyCal, including group meeting polls, meeting analytics, workflows, and routing forms.
Winner: Calendly
Ease of Use
If you just want to create a custom booking page and share it with customers and clients, it’s pretty easy to do so in either Calendly or TidyCal. Signing up, syncing your business calendars, and creating new booking pages is intuitive and simple using either tool.
Since Calendly has more in the features department than TidyCal, there’s more of a learning curve to using different features of the platform. Because of this, TidyCal is the more straightforward of the two apps and the winner in this category.
Winner: TidyCal
Integrations
TidyCal integrates with several popular online calendars, including Google, Apple, and Microsoft calendars. It also integrates with payment platforms Stripe and PayPal and video meeting apps Zoom and Google Meet.
Calendly is the clear winner of TidyCal vs Calendly in the integrations category because of the sheer volume of integrations it offers — there are a whopping 101 listed on Calendly’s site at the time of writing this review!
Calendly’s most popular integrations include all of the same ones that TidyCal offers, plus others like Salesforce, Slack, HubSpot, Marketo, Google Analytics, and many more.
Winner: Calendly
Customer Service
As for customer service, TidyCal’s website has a chatbot that allows you to search for support documentation by keyword. However, there doesn’t seem to be any way to contact a customer service department directly.
Calendly’s website also has self-serve help and resource centers full of tutorials, troubleshooting tips, and other useful customer support documentation.
And, although it’s fairly hard to find (you have to navigate to the “Contact Sales” page and change the department from a drop-down), there is a contact form on the site that you can fill out to get in touch with Calendly’s support department.
Calendly’s extensive support documentation and the fact that you can directly contact customer service earn it a win in this category.
Winner: Calendly
Pricing
Both TidyCal and Calendly offer free versions of their apps with access to the basic features and integrations, which can work for more casual users.
But pricing for Calendly vs TidyCal’s paid plans, which most business users will want, is quite different.
At the time of writing, TidyCal offers a lifetime subscription to the full, paid version of the platform for a one-time payment of just $29.
Calendly, on the other hand, offers three different pricing tiers, ranging from $8 per user, per month, to $16 per user, per month.
Having different paid tiers available is certainly nice for teams of different sizes with different needs, but it means Calendly could also get quite expensive for teams of more than a couple of people.
Since TidyCal’s pricing is so straightforward and relatively cheap, we’re giving it the W in this category.
Winner: TidyCal
TidyCal vs Calendly: Which One Should You Choose?
When Should I Choose TidyCal
If you’re an individual service provider and all you want is a simple booking automation app, TidyCal is the simplest and more affordable option out of Calendly and TidyCal.
Whether you run a massage therapy business, a small salon, a personal training business, or anything in between, TidyCal can certainly help you streamline your appointment scheduling for one-on-one appointments and/or group classes.
When Should I Choose Calendly?
If what you’re after is a more robust scheduling app that you can use to help improve your sales process or implement for a full team of employees or co-workers, Calendly is probably the better option out of TidyCal vs Calendly.
With its 100+ integrations and many additional features, Calendly is far more equipped to grow with your business as you scale operations and as your appointment booking needs change.
Our Conclusion
These days, there are tons of booking automation apps that provide you with custom booking pages and unique scheduling links that you can use to optimize your calendars.
If that’s all you want, either Calendly or TidyCal should probably work fine for you. But, if you’re looking for a more technical scheduling tool that you can scale with your business, Calendly is definitely the more advanced of the two platforms.
That being said, there are far more options out there than just TidyCal and Calendly!
If neither of these tools sounds quite right for you and your business, why not give Webba Booking a try?
Webba Booking is the most flexible booking plugin for WordPress with payment options, and it’s ideal for all types of service providers who use WordPress to host their business sites.
