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So much to do, so little time. At least it feels that way.
We all have the same 24 hours available to us each day, but it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
The difference between feeling calm, cool, and collected about your day versus frazzled, unprepared, and rushed often comes down to time management and scheduling. A carefully planned and scheduled day – no matter how busy – is always going to feel better than one without any structure.
As part of a commitment to better planning, you can simplify and streamline your work scheduling with a dedicated app or tool.
Focus on just one part of your day – meetings, for example – and you’ll be amazed at how much time and energy you save.
Love them or hate them, meetings are a part of any profession to at least some degree: boardroom meetings, coffee meetings, impromptu meetings, lunch meetings, virtual meetings, and more.
Consider this: The average executive spent roughly 10 hours per week in meetings during the 1960s. Today? The average has increased nearly 2.5x to 23 hours per week. And that figure doesn’t include the time you spend coordinating with others to find a time and place that works for everyone, scheduling, rescheduling, and canceling.
The average American employee attends 62 meetings each month and loses 31 hours to unproductive meetings. American businesses hold somewhere between 36 and 56 million meetings each day.
If we can’t escape them, we should at least ensure that they’re productive and that we don’t lose any more time than necessary to them.
Enter meeting scheduling tools.
With the right one, you can save time on the back-and-forth, schedule more meetings more effectively with both colleagues and customers, and simplify the entire process. As the saying goes, work smarter, not harder.
But what does the right tool look like?
A quick Google search of ‘meeting scheduling tools’ will give you 38,300,000 results at the time of writing. You’re going to need to do some filtering to narrow it down. Here’s what to look for.
If the tool requires hours of additional training to use it, it’s not user-friendly. Your colleagues and customers should be able to figure it out with minimal effort. It needs to be intuitive and simple. If not, move on.
We send and receive a lot of email. In fact, it’s still the preferred communication channel for most professionals. It makes sense to find a scheduling tool that integrates seamlessly with it, adding to or changing your schedule automatically when new information arrives in your inbox.
‘Good’ is, of course, a subjective term. Consider the cost of the tool in relation to the time, energy, and hassle it saves you on average. How much are X hours worth to you?
Any tool you use should ideally reflect you and your brand – your colors, logos, taglines, and so on. This is particularly important if your customers will be using it to schedule time with you or your employees.
Android. Windows. iOS. Mac. We don’t all use the same mobile devices or computers, so your scheduling tool should be available across all platforms. Don’t leave anyone on the outside looking in.
To eliminate the endless cycle of back-and-forth, a scheduling tool needs to have dead-simple sharing and syncing across all devices. A change or request by one attendee should be immediately seen by all.
Modern businesses use an average of 16 SaaS tools. Your meeting scheduling tool should integrate with most of them, including your calendar app, sales automation tools, and preferred CRM.
Let’s get to the list. Some of these are the big players you know, but there may be a few you aren’t familiar with. All prices are per user unless otherwise specified.
Website: appointmentthing.com
Price: Free – $15/month (details)
Free Option: Yes
AppointmentThing is a an appointment scheduling tool that offers beautiful design and powerful functionality. They offer the ability to connect your calendar (Google, Outlook or Apple) as well as your video conferencing platform of choice (Zoom, Google Meet or GoToMeeting) to automatically create a unique link for each meeting.
AppointmentThing focuses on providing a brilliant end-user experience, as well as offering great features for you such as drag & drop availability setting, payment integrations and multiple sharing options like embeddable booking forms, adding times to emails and more. Set your availability to be booked for appointments using some simple rules and then it’s as easy as sending your meeting link to your contacts. AppointmentThing will add the calendar invite automatically to both you and your attendee’s calendars as will also send automated email reminders and calendar notifications to ensure everyone shows up on time.
Website: www.calendar.com
Price: Basic plan is free; Pro plan is $10 per month for annual billing; Business plan is $12 per user per month for annual billing; Enterprise plan also available based on company size
Available for Web, Android, and iOS use, the Calendar app offers smart scheduling, powered by its machine learning algorithm. The app learns your scheduling habits and can take over the tasks of inviting attendees and scheduling meetings and events on your calendar. You can also create events with just a few clicks. Once scheduled, manually or automatically, the event or meeting can be added to your calendar and anyone else who has confirmed.
Calendar works with Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, and Outlook as well as integrates with many business tools. These tools include email, sales tools, productivity platforms, and more. Other exceptional meeting features on the paid versions include meeting transcriptions and analytics that help you understand how you spend your time with people and in meetings by using your calendar’s data.
Website: hubspot.com/products/sales/schedule-meeting
Price: Free
Free Option: Unlimited free use
This free tool from HubSpot is designed to help users schedule appointments, without the back-and-forth emails.
It works by providing users with a personalized booking link they can share via email to invite people to view their availability and book time. When someone schedules a meeting, it will automatically be added to the users calendar.
Like most meeting tools out there, HubSpot Meetings integrates with Google Calendar and Office 365 Calendar, but what is special about it is that it also integrates with HubSpot CRM — which is 100% free forever.
For every new meeting, HubSpot CRM creates a new contact record that the user can track over time. This is a useful feature especially for those working in sales.
Website: 10to8.com
Price: Free – $50/month (details)
Free Option: Yes
10to8’s scheduling software is one of the more feature-rich softwares on the market. Automate smart SMS and email alerts for appointments to reduce the risk of missed appointments. You’re also notified immediately of any changes or cancellations, which allows sales professionals time to quickly adjust their own availability for other clients.
Other noteworthy features include two-way chat integrated with your own calendar system. It ensures clear real-time message exchanges between you and your clients. The app integrates with and syncs your Google Calendar, Exchange, Outlook and iCal. New entries on your calendars are quickly synchronized on 10to8, giving you complete visibility across your schedules and appointments.
10to8 also integrates with over 500 other apps, including Zoom Video Conferencing, PipeDrive, and many popular CRM’s.
Website: appointlet.com
Price: Free – $10/month (details)
Free option: Yes
Appointlet has been used by thousands of sales teams to qualify leads and book ongoing meetings with registered members. With powerful features like CRM and web conferencing integrations, your organization can optimize every step of the booking process. We provide custom urls and code snippets that can be copied and pasted into your website’s codebase. Simply set up your account and share the booking link with customers to get started.
Appointlet also offers live customer support to help you along the way, along with a robust knowledge base, helpful blog articles and a video tutorial series to give you everything you need to succeed.
Website: bookafy.com
Price: Free – $11/month (details)
Free Option: Yes
Bookafy automates the appointment booking experience by creating a CTA with skill-based routing, automatically sending confirmations and text reminders, generating and adding Zoom/GoToMeeting/24Sessions/Skype links to the emails and calendar downloads and automatically syncing client data with your CRM and Personal Calendar. Bookafy also gives each salesperson a branded booking page with their profile picture to add to email campaigns and signatures.
Bookafy threads the needle of having a robust product, that is simple to use with a beautiful UI. Bookafy has one of the most robust and flexible programs on the market, while still giving users and customers a beautiful booking experience.
Website: calendly.com
Price: Free – $15/month (details)
Free Option: Yes
Calendly is the lowest-lift sales tool to increase your sales team’s efficiency and your company’s revenue by removing the back and forth of scheduling demos and other sales meetings.
As a salesperson, all you need to do is send a meeting link to your leads and Calendly takes care of the rest by showing your availability based on the rules you’ve created, sending an invite to you and your lead once the meeting is scheduled, and automating reminders and notifications to reduce no-show rates. Using round robin, leads are distributed automatically to schedule with the first available rep or based on equitable distribution. Calendly works seamlessly with your current tech stack, including Salesforce, Zoom, GoToMeeting and more.
Calendly’s intuitive design and functionality takes the burden out of scheduling with leads for both the lead and the sales rep—providing leads with a world-class experience and getting demos on the calendar quickly.
Website: vyte.in
Price: Free – $10/month (details)
Free Option: Yes
Vyte is an easy tool to let your customers book appointments directly in your calendar. Pick your link, set up your weekly availabilities, connect your calendar (Google, Microsoft Office 365 or Exchange) and start accepting appointments right away. Need to schedule group meetings with your clients? Vyte also has you covered.
Customers can book you directly or you can ask them to suggest several times and confirm the one that is most convenient for you for this particular meeting. Additionally, if you send Vyte links from email templates that have name and email (or even phone number and company) variables, they can be populated automatically so customers don’t have to say who they are.
Website: chilipiper.com
Price: $25 – $50/month, billed annually. Optional $200/month concierge (details)
Free Option: No
Chili Piper is a suite of advanced scheduling solutions for customer facing teams. With extensions in the most popular email clients, Salesforce, and SalesLoft, booking meetings is always just a few clicks away anywhere salespeople are working.
Since sales development reps (SDRs) will often handoff or distribute meetings to account executives (AEs), Chili Piper created a feature called queues. With queues, sales teams can put their AEs into groups based on the prospect’s Salesforce data like company size or territory. So when an SDR books a meeting for an AE, Chili Piper will look up the prospect in Salesforce, decide which queue the prospect should go through, and then will automatically bring up the AE’s availability for a meeting and take care of the meeting invites and reminders.
When a sales rep is booking a meeting over email, they can click the Chili Piper extension and Chili Piper will automatically look up the email address the SDR is writing an email to in Salesforce, determine which sales rep the meeting should go to (if for someone else), and bring up a calendar view of that rep’s availability. From there, the sales rep can click on multiple times which are then inserted into the email, which makes it easy for their prospect to book a meeting in one click.
Website: get.cogsworth.com
Price: $49/year, with optional additional paid feature add-ons (details)
Free Option: Free trial
Getting prospects on a call or into a meeting is an important step to closing a sale. With Cogsworth you setup your availability, create a service and send the link in your emails for your prospects or customers to book you. You can also translate your booking page into any language and ask your own questions using their simple form builder. Once you have an appointment, email and SMS reminders ensure that your prospect shows up.
Website: doodle.com
Price: Free – $69/year (details)
Free option: Free for family & friends
Doodle is a great tool for scheduling meetings among multiple stakeholders. The meeting-holder can suggest days and times and invite participants to choose which slots work for them. Once the availabilities are collected, you can choose the time slot that works best for everybody, and drop the event in on everyone’s calendar automatically.
Website: freebusy.io
Price: Free – $15/month, Enterprise level $16/month billed annually (details)
Free option: Yes
Every scheduling tool makes it easy to share your availability with a link for 1:1 meeting with a prospect. But what happens if the prospect wants to bring to the meeting more people from their side and is asking you to bring technical sales from your side and provide a screenshare? With FreeBusy you can find the time and schedule meetings with internal and external people in 60 seconds, not 2 days. And it integrates to your web conferencing to automatically create and add the conference call.
FreeBusy also allows you to create live meeting polls. You can preset everything about the meeting ahead of time, do the work of suggesting a few times to your prospect, and poll external participants to vote on preferred times while sharing availability for internal participants. Calendar changes for internal people will be reflected in the poll options in real-time and the poll will guide external participants toward other times.
Website: meetfox.com
Price: Free – $29/month (details)
Free Option: 15-day free trial, limited free forever option
MeetFox is an online meeting tool used by over 10,000 consultants and freelancers to book meetings, video conferences, and accept payments. MeetFox provides a secure and reliable way to speak with clients and monetize meeting time.
MeetFox allows easy in-browser video conferencing (no downloads, PIN codes, or plug-ins). You can join a meeting from any device (in-browser compatibility). It supports screen sharing, file sharing, and chat. MeetFox also supports video & audio recording. On MeetFox, you can do a conference/group call with up to 16 participants.
Website: onsched.com
Price: $39 – $79/month (details)
Free Option: 15-day free trial
OnSched is a solution for booking for sales, that allows sales reps to get a full lead report including title, company, company size and 30+ other parameters every time a booking is made just based on an email address. Likewise, their API platform enables companies to integrate scheduling into their applications and marketplaces.
Website: pick.co
Price: $3/month (details)
Free option: No
Pick is a super-simple tool designed to do one thing: make scheduling meetings as quick, easy and pain-free as possible.
All you need to do is set your availability, grab your custom URL, and share it with the person (or people) you want to set up a meeting with. Pick will then choose a time that works for everyone, send out invites, and automatically add details of the meeting to participants’ calendars.
Website: setmore.com
Price: Free – $89/month (details)
Free Option: Yes
Setmore allows you to automate the consultation and appointment process. List your services and empower leads and clients to self-book their appointments with you, anytime day or night, and send automatic reminders to make sure they keep their appointments. Manage your time better with a beautifully designed, organized calendar for web, iOS and Android.
Setmore is the ONLY online scheduling platform that includes Live Booking, an add-on live call answering and appointment booking service. Their Live Booking receptionists will answer calls for you and help clients book appointments to your calendar.
Website: setster.com
Price: $20/month – $300/month for 100 users (details)
Free option: Free trial
Setster is a cloud based, API first solution that offers all the customization and business rules needed to tackle complex appointment scheduling needs. Perfectly suited for larger sales departments with intricate scheduling needs, Setster is flexible in navigating large scale booking and seasonal influxes without compromising the customer experience or overall accuracy.
Setster focuses on the customized experience and offers a robust modern developer API to remotely manage and provision data, while offering a personalized and branded customer booking experience. Overall Setster seems to be a great fit for organizations concerned with user experience and scalability.
Website: supersaas.com
Price: Free – $46/month, unlimited registered users, price levels based on number of past appointments kept and how many future appointments set (details)
Free Option: Yes
Super SaaS is unique in that it allows you to set up custom-duration time slots, offer unlimited types of predefined meeting slot durations, limit those slots for specific user groups, and completely customize your scheduling page with your brand colors and logo. You can also automatically add buffer times between meetings, set custom time events, and set recurring appointments and email/SMS follow-ups. The system is accessible in more than 34 languages and offers automatic time detection, so you can easily conduct business worldwide.
Their indefinite time trial plan allows you to test out all features (except sync with personal calendar which is limited to a 7-day trial) without any limitations.
Website: x.ai
Price: $8 – $24/month (details)
Free option: Free trial
The x.ai AI scheduling assistants, Amy + Andrew, promise to save users tons of time during sales prospecting. When you’ve got a prospect interested in setting up a meeting, you can CC in Amy or Andrew, and they will reach out to your prospect over email to schedule the call in line with your availability and scheduling preferences.
Website: youcanbook.me
Price: Free – $10/month (details)
Free Option: Yes
YouCanBook.me automates the process of setting up a call with a prospect and makes it easy for customers to book a time that suits them. You can customize your availability and personalize it for a VIP lead. It integrates with your calendar directly, you can manage pooled availability across your team for calls, you can set up different booking flows for each type of sales scenario. Booking pages can be embedded and customized to your brand.