Cal.com

Cal.com is open-source scheduling: the shared booking-link workflow you know from Calendly, released under the AGPL so you can read the code, self-host it, or build your own product on top of it. That last part is the strategic difference — it is positioned as scheduling infrastructure rather than only as an end-user app. As a product it does what a scheduling tool has to do. It connects to Google, Outlook, Apple and CalDAV calendars, reads existing busy time from all of them at once, and publishes event types with your rules attached: durations, buffers, minimum notice, daily caps, date ranges, custom booking questions, and rules for who can book. Team features cover round-robin assignment, collective availability where several people must be free, managed event types pushed to a whole team, and routing forms that send a lead to the right person based on their answers. Payments through Stripe, video links generated automatically for Zoom, Meet and Cal Video, and a workflow engine for reminder emails and SMS round it out. Pricing is freemium. The free individual plan covers one user with unlimited event types and calendar connections, 100+ app integrations, the mobile app and payments. Teams is $12 per user per month billed annually and adds shared availability, round-robin, managed event types and removing Cal.com branding. Organizations is $28 per user per month annually and adds unlimited sub-teams, routing, a company subdomain, SAML SSO, SCIM and the compliance certifications procurement asks for. Enterprise is custom. Self-hosting is free of licence cost and not free of work: you carry the database, the OAuth app registrations for each calendar provider, and the upgrades. The honest trade against the incumbent is polish versus ownership. Calendly has more years of edge-case handling, a deeper integration catalogue and a support organisation. Cal.com gives you the source, an API-first platform for embedding booking inside your own application, and a pricing model that does not punish adding teammates as hard. If you only need a personal booking link, both free tiers are fine and the decision barely matters. SavvyCal is the alternative worth knowing when the booker's experience matters most — it lets the person receiving the link overlay their own calendar. Google Appointment Schedules is free and sufficient if everyone involved lives in Google Workspace and you need nothing beyond a simple slot. Choose Cal.com when you want to own the scheduling layer, embed it in a product, or avoid per-seat pricing at team scale.