Scheduling App Showdown: Calendly vs Hubspot Meetings (May 2021 Update)

A Little Background

Do you still send emails back and forth when you schedule appointments? Then this will feel familiar:

When do you have time? I can't on that day. Please send three times I can pick from. Can we do 2PM instead of 3PM. I'll be out all week. And the list goes on and on and on...

Scheduling can be dramatically painful. Done wrong will destroy sales productivity by turning valuable sales time into a battle with emails in an effort to get to a time you can lock down. It doesn't have to be like this...

If you've scheduled anything with me for the past 7 years you'll know what's coming. We schedule hundreds of appointments for ourselves in the outsourced sales business of YourSales to speak to mainly existing clients, interested business leaders, and sales professionals on or interested in an assignment. In addition the SaaS Sales Professionals on assignment schedule an even more impressive amount of appointments for any of all the reasons you might want to make an appointment in sales.

Read on below for the ins and outs on the differences between Calendly's and Hubspot's schedulers. For the full, updated overview of scheduling automation software, have a look at this.

The Solution (aka If You Use None of These You Must Start Using Either of Them)

Some time during 2014, following another round of excruciatingly painful email ping-pong, I finally stumbled upon Calendly. Calendly and similar tools make it possible to send a link to whoever you're scheduling an appointment with and let them select the time. I started using Calendly to book all of my appointments and later embedded it into the YourSales website. Now - more than 2000 easy schedulings later - I don't want any Sales Professional to be without a scheduling tool. Think about it: How long does it take you AND your client to schedule a meeting on the phone or over email? Now multiply by hundreds each year.

The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from everyone we've spoken to over the years. Sales Professionals will love not having to go through the scheduling slog and just spend time helping clients with more pressing issues.

So Why Change from Calendly to Hubspot Meetings?

As many other organizations we've started looking at other tools around the sales stack. Most recently we've started exploring how we and potentially our clients could be using the Hubspot platform as an important component in the stack. Hubspot offers quite a range of tools that are well integrated. These tools are all part of a single subscription, so using just Hubspot would present a cost benefit and simplify our sales stack.

Of course, though, each of those tools need to provide us with abilities we already have in our current setup. When Hubspot shared with us that they have a meeting scheduling function, it was a welcome addition and prompted a test vs probably the best scheduler out there: Calendly.

The Good (aka the Reasons to use Hubspot Meetings)

Hubspot's scheduler looks good. In particular it looks a lot better than Calendly when embedding into a website. You can customize several elements and it just wins in this arena. Like with Calendly I was happy to find customizable questions to invitees. With Hubspot Meetings there's both integration with contact properties in Hubspot CRM as well as an option to add additional fields with further questions. Very nice.

Of course, some of this functionality is available for Calendly as well using a zap using the integration platform Zapier.

Also, of course, the price for Hubspot Meetings is bundled in with the subscription for the rest of the Hubspot CRM suite.

The Not So Good (aka the Reasons to Continue with Calendly)

Where Calendly really shines and shows the software has been around for a while, is the high degree with which it's customizable.

Calendly has more meeting reminders, which include the variables mentioned above. In addition Calendly has an option for the invitee to reschedule an appointment. The meeting reminder feature exists Hubspot. It's limited to a single reminder, though, and forget about the rescheduling option.

Finally (for us) the availability can be set in increments of anything using Calendly, where with Hubspot the availability increments start at the beginning of your day and have increments equal to the length of the meeting you're working on. Not very handy and feels a little rigid.

Our Conclusion

For now we're staying with our Premium version of Calendly despite the slight drawbacks mentioned above. The meeting feature with Hubspot simply still lacks maturity at this point. We'll revisit this if and when things change.

Feel free to have a look at our comparison chart in case you want to make up your own mind, looking at what's important for you.

Once you've set up your smart scheduling, you could easily consistently personalize every single meeting. See this article to find out how.

What's your take on automated scheduling? How does it work for you? Why? Why not?

Have fun scheduling the smart way, schedule a talk about SaaS sales with me - and Good Selling!!