Looking for the best apps for scheduling meetings? We’ve got you covered.
It’s a good time to be alive, isn’t it? You can send messages to your friends and family (and even colleagues) with just a few taps on your phone, and you can use the same device to book a meeting in seconds. But while booking meetings has become easier than ever, it’s still important to know which apps are best for the job—particularly if you’re looking for something that offers all the bells and whistles of other scheduling apps without any unnecessary complications.
In this post, we’ll discuss some of our favorites—apps that are perfect for companies who need an easy way to schedule meetings without spending hours trying to figure out where everyone is coming from.
Best Apps For Scheduling Meetings
In the movies, scheduling is as simple as “see you there at 8.” In real life, it’s a more complicated mess of email, texts, and back-and-forth calls. Meeting schedulers exist to take the pain out of this process.
Spend less time on meeting prep
Automate the process
Scheduling tools typically let you connect your own calendar, automatically find when you’re busy and when you’re free, and let other people pick the time in your schedule that works best for them. You might be thinking Doodle or Calendly, and you’d be right. That’s the category of app we’re talking about.
We looked at dozens of scheduling apps to find the software that can help you take the guesswork out of setting up meetings, and these are the eight best tools we found.
The 8 best meeting schedulers
Calendly for letting others schedule meetings with you
Calendar for appointments in a free calendar app
CalendarHero for scheduling multiple meeting types
ScheduleOnce for a free meeting scheduler
Rallly for quickly picking a date
When2Meet for organizing meetings anonymously
Google Calendar for the calendar you already have
Arrangr for detailed meeting invites
Once you pick your app, make the most of it by automating your meeting scheduling. Here are 4 scheduling automation workflows to make meetings easy, including things like getting meeting notifications in your app of choice, getting all new meeting attendees into your CRM, or automatically sending follow-up emails after a meeting.
What makes a great meeting scheduler?
How we evaluate and test apps
All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who’ve spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it’s intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We’re never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.
As we tested meeting scheduler apps, we narrowed down our recommendations according to some key criteria. Here’s a look at what’s important:
Ease of use. There are two groups of people that use a meeting scheduler: the event organizer and the people responding to it. A good meeting scheduler should be easy for both groups to use.
Integrations with other apps/services. Primarily, you’ll need to connect a meeting scheduler to your calendar application, so the more calendar services an app supports the better. We also gave extra weight to apps that integrated well with project management software as well as automation tools like Zapier.
Ability to automatically set up video calls. Being able to quickly hop on a video call with people is more important than ever. Many meeting schedulers can not only add events to your calendar, but also generate links for video chats through common services like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams.
Appointment reminders and follow-ups. While a meeting scheduler might integrate with your calendar, there’s no guarantee that any of your attendees will get a reminder to show up on time. Good meeting schedulers will be able to remind everyone that their meeting is coming up, and some will even allow you to automatically send follow-up emails with summaries of your meeting.
Value for money. Usually, the core meeting scheduler features will be free for a certain number of users, but extra features like reminders, video call setup, automation, or even scheduling multiple meetings will be part of a subscription. We weighed how much value these tools offered versus the cost of their paid plans.
Best meeting scheduler for letting others schedule meetings with you
Calendly (Web)
The interface for Calendly, our pick for the best meeting scheduler for letting others schedule meetings with you.
Calendly lets other people schedule meetings with you by showing them your availability and offering them different types of meetings they can book with you. It’s an ideal app for anyone who gets a lot of meeting requests and needs a simple but clear reply.
You start by giving Calendly insight into when you’re free by connecting it to your calendar (Google Calendar, iCal, Microsoft Office 365, or Outlook). Then you create different meeting options for the types of meetings you offer, such as “30-minute phone interview” or “initial client intake meeting.” Calendly has a slew of details you can add to each meeting type you offer. Finally, you send a link to people who need to schedule meetings with you so that they can see when you’re available and request the meetings they need. A free plan supports one type of meeting, but starting on the Premium plan, you can make as many types of meetings as you need.
Calendly syncs all the confirmed appointments to your calendar and offers to create an event on your invitees’ calendars as well. There are tools for setting up an automatic reminder email to attendees, too.
While Calendly works well for scheduling meetings with individuals or team members within an organization, its custom events and outgoing links make it ideal for connecting with external clients, customers, and colleagues. Calendly has extensive integration options, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Zapier, but you do need to subscribe to a paid plan to get the full benefits here.
By connecting Calendly to Zapier, you can do things like create new Zoom meetings whenever a new meeting is scheduled or add new meeting attendees to your email marketing list. Here are some examples to get started with, but you can customize the workflow to use your favorite apps.
Create Zoom meetings for new Calendly events
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Calendly, Zoom
Calendly + Zoom
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Create Mailchimp subscribers from new Calendly invitees
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Calendly, Mailchimp
Calendly + Mailchimp
More details
To get even more out of Calendly, take a look at these 4 automated workflows to help you be a Calendly pro.
Calendly Pricing: Free with limited features; paid plans from $8/month
Best free meeting scheduler built into a calendar app
Calendar (Web, iOS, Android)
The interface of Calendar, our pick for the best free meeting scheduler built into a calendar app
Calendar is more than a meeting scheduler: it’s a full-fledged calendar app. It offers web and mobile versions, and the whole interface feels very reminiscent of Google Calendar. It also offers meeting scheduler features, like creating customizable time slots and shareable booking links.
However, where Google puts some of its best appointment scheduling tools behind a paywall, Calendar gives them away for free. You can create up to two customizable scheduling time slots with the free plan, and connect the app to one of your existing calendar services.
Where Calendar stands out from the crowd is its extensive statistics section. It tracks every one of your meetings, spotting where trends develop. Besides obvious stats like how long you’ve spent in meetings over the past day, week, month, or even year, it also spots attendance records, noting what percentage of people rejected or missed a meeting. It even highlights who you’re most likely to have meetings with. It’s the kind of thing that could be immensely useful when trying to work toward better engagement. And it’s all bundled up in a neat overview section that’s attractive and informative.
Using yet another calendar app might feel a little redundant, but if you want to analyze your meetings in depth and get some meeting scheduling without shelling out money, this is the place to go.
When you connect Calendar to Zapier, you can do things like get Slack notifications whenever someone schedules a new meeting with you, or even add every meeting to a new row in Google Sheets.
Send direct messages in Slack when new meetings are scheduled in Calendar
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Calendar, Slack
Calendar + Slack
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Create Google Sheets rows from new scheduled Calendar events
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Calendar, Google Sheets
Calendar + Google Sheets
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Calendar pricing: Free; from $10/month for more connected calendars and scheduling time slots
Best meeting scheduler for scheduling multiple meeting types
CalendarHero (Web)
The interface for CalendarHero, our pick for the best meeting scheduler for scheduling multiple meeting types.
CalendarHero (formerly Zoom.ai) is similar to Calendly, in that you can create different meeting types of varying durations and share links so people can schedule meetings with you. You can integrate it with your calendar so it automatically learns when you’re free, or you can manually set availability.
The service also comes with a litany of features to customize your event, including adding location details (if you’re meeting in a physical location) or video conferencing details (if you’re meeting online). If you use Google or Microsoft single sign-on to log in to your CalendarHero account, then it can automatically create video chat meetings without any extra setup.
If you upgrade to one of CalendarHero’s paid plans—starting at $8/month—you can get additional features like the ability to collect payments for your events, or get more than two meeting reminders per month.
CalendarHero has a lot of overlap with Calendly, but it comes with more built-in meeting types in the free tier and has a few more tools for customizing your meeting details. If you’re looking for a step up to manage all the various kinds of meetings you need to schedule, CalendarHero is a great option.
By connecting CalendarHero to Zapier, you can automatically add people who schedule a meeting with you to your email marketing list, or send yourself a text whenever you get a new meeting request.
Adds subscribers to Mailchimp from new CalendarHero meeting requests
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CalendarHero, Mailchimp
CalendarHero + Mailchimp
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Send SMS messages for new CalendarHero meetings
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CalendarHero, SMS by Zapier
CalendarHero + SMS by Zapier
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CalendarHero Pricing: Free with limited features, paid plan from $8/month
Best free meeting scheduler
ScheduleOnce (Web)
The interface for ScheduleOnce, our pick for the best free meeting scheduler.
ScheduleOnce, by OnceHub, lets you create multiple meeting types—including the default 15-, 30-, and 60- minute meeting types—and share one link that guests can use to schedule a meeting with you. Then, people can pick a date and one of your available time slots to book an appointment.
So yes, it’s similar to many of the other services we tested, but what makes it stand out is that it has one of the most generous free tiers among all the meeting scheduler apps we looked at. It’s free for up to 25 users, you can create unlimited meetings and meeting types, and even sync with various video meeting services.
This app syncs with Google Calendar, iCloud, and all of Microsoft’s calendar services, including Exchange, Outlook, and Office 365. For video conferencing, it can also connect to Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting, and Webex Meetings. On top of being a wider list of video services than many of the other apps we tested, this is also included in the free tier.
If you want to upgrade to the paid tiers, you can get unlimited users, integration to tools like Salesforce, and the ability to customize the branding for your meeting schedule pages. At that point, you’re almost certainly looking at corporate use cases.
You can get even more out of ScheduleOnce by connecting it to Zapier. With these integrations, you can do things like email your customers with a Zoom link whenever new meetings are scheduled or create new contacts in HubSpot from your bookings.
Email Zoom meeting links to customers when new bookings are made via OnceHub
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Email by Zapier, OnceHub, Zoom
Email by Zapier + OnceHub + Zoom
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Create HubSpot contacts from new OnceHub bookings
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HubSpot, OnceHub
HubSpot + OnceHub
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ScheduleOnce Pricing: Free for 25 user licenses; paid plans from $9/month per user license
Best free meeting scheduler for quickly picking a date
Rallly (Web)
The interface for Rallly, our pick for the best free meeting scheduler for quickly picking a date.
Show of hands: Who’s available Monday? How about Tuesday? That’s the concept behind the very simple web app Rallly—yes, with three L’s—which helps you and your associates find an agreeable date to get together.
If you’re looking for Doodle alternatives, Rallly is a great place to start.
There’s an elegant simplicity to a tool that does one thing and does it well. Rallly lets everyone—including the person who set up the poll—submit their answers completely anonymously. There’s no need to create accounts, and only the organizer needs to submit an email address. The site promises that your data is “never used for any commercial purposes,” and the project is open source, so it’s possible to inspect the code.
You enter a few suggestions for when you’d like to meet and invite people to answer your poll by either entering their email addresses or sending them a link. For every poll you create, a discussion box appears below it where anyone can leave comments.
The main drawback to Rallly is it only lets you suggest dates, not times. It doesn’t have any management tools or advanced scheduling features, either, let alone connectivity with your calendar. But sometimes simpler is better. If you and your friends just need a way to schedule a movie night, this is the way to go.
Rallly Pricing: Free
Best meeting scheduler for organizing meetings anonymously
When2meet (Web)
The interface for When2meet, our pick for the best meeting scheduler for organizing meetings anonymously.
When2meet isn’t much to look at, but if you want to plan a meet-up with people without handing over a single piece of personal information, there are no better options online. This tool lets you anonymously create an event, set available dates and times, and then share the link to the event with anyone else.
When someone else clicks the link, they’ll come to the event page where they can enter their name—or any name if they want to be super careful—and mark when, out of the available time slots, they’re available. Hovering over a time slot will show which people are available and which ones aren’t.
Of course, this complete anonymity means that there’s no way to verify that anyone who responds is who they say they are. If you’re just planning an event with your friends who you trust, that should be fine, though. However, users can enter a password along with their name so that they, and only they, can come back and change their answers later.
When2meet is entirely free, although the site includes a donation link if you feel like tossing a few bucks to the developer.
When2meet Pricing: Free
Best meeting scheduler you already own
Google Calendar (Web, iOS, Android)
The interface for Google Calendar, our pick for the best meeting scheduler you already own.
If you already have a Google account like everyone else on the planet, that gives you access to one of the most straightforward meeting schedulers out there: Google Calendar. When you create an event, add your guests and click Find a time—then Google does all the hard work. It will show you each person’s calendar side-by-side and even offer suggested times, letting you know how many people in the group can make each time slot. It’s the only solution you need if you’re trying to schedule meetings with people within your organization.
Google has also recently stepped up its game when it comes to more advanced scheduling tools. The new Google Workspace Individual plan—which starts at $10/month—includes advanced appointment scheduling tools like a booking page you can share with others. This lets anyone with an email address create an appointment with you, which shows up directly in your Google Calendar, no third-party services required.
Google Calendar integrates tightly with all other Google apps, and because Google probably already has all your contacts and valuable information stored anyway, there’s no added security risk. But the best part is that you won’t need a new app—Google Calendar is already there.
When you use Google Calendar with Zapier, you can do things like automatically create to-do list items whenever you have a new meeting, or get notifications in your chat app when a meeting is about to start. Learn more about the most popular and useful ways to automate Google Calendar.
Create new Trello cards from new Google Calendar events
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Google Calendar, Trello
Google Calendar + Trello
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Get Slackbot notifications for approaching Google Calendar events
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Google Calendar, Slack
Google Calendar + Slack
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Google Calendar pricing: Free for basic scheduling, $10/month for Google Workspace with appointment tools
Best meeting scheduler app for detailed meeting invites
Arrangr (Web)
The interface for Arrangr, our pick for the best meeting scheduler app for detailed meeting invites.
The downside to a lot of meeting scheduler apps is that they often require access to your calendar, which can be a pretty big privacy concern. Some of the tools we tested even asked for permission to delete entire calendars. While this can be normal for some services, it would be understandable if you’re not comfortable taking that step. Arrangr agrees, and it offers a unique guest mode that can help bridge that confidence gap.
Go to Arrangr’s site, click Start Now (Free), and the service will ask if you want to try setting up events in guest mode. You’ll then be walked through a wizard that will help you set up every detail of your event, including who you want to invite, what time slots are available, and where the event will take place (online or in person).
You still have to enter an email address when you’re done, so it’s not the most private tool online, but it offers a ton of features to customize every detail of your appointments. Its free tier offers unlimited 1:1 meetings, unlimited group meetings (for up to 15 recipients), and one booking page.
Paid tiers start at $4/month and offer more booking pages and more group meeting recipients. Combined with the guest mode, that makes Arrangr one of the most friendly services to new users who want to ease into using a meeting scheduler more regularly.
You can connect Arrangr to Zapier to get even more out of the service: automatically take action when you create events, receive an event invitation, or receive an RSVP to your events.
Arrangr pricing: Free, from $4/month for more group meeting recipients and more booking pages
Make meetings better
The right meeting scheduler helps you get meetings onto your calendar quickly and efficiently. You can keep the productivity going by automating your scheduling workflows and even automating meeting action items. That way, it’s not just the scheduling that’s a breeze, but the entire process that follows.
This article was originally published in January 2019 by Jill Duffy and has had contributions from Jennifer Allen. The most recent review of apps was done in August 2021, and the article has since been updated for clarity.
meeting scheduling tool
HR professionals have a lot on their plates. They are often in charge of recruiting and employee onboarding, processing mountains of paperwork related to payroll and pensions, ensuring the employees’ mental health is taken care of, while also devising a good offboarding strategy for layoffs. All of this juggling requires a copious amount of meetings — to formulate a game-plan, track progress, collect feedback, correct course accordingly and meet deadlines.
While most people hate the time wasted in endless meetings, some of them simply cannot be avoided. But the time spent scheduling meetings — the back and forth between people trying to figure out the best day and time — can be avoided using meeting scheduling tools. With the help of a simple online meeting scheduling tool instead of a group email, you can make one part of your job less painful. And we’re here with the best meeting scheduling tools for 2022, to save you time on research as well.
Top Online Scheduling Tools in 2022
Calendar
- Calendar
Integrating with Apple, Google, and Outlook Calendars, as well as various sales and productivity tools, this online meeting scheduling tool does more than just book appointments. Calendar uses AI to allow you to automatically book meetings according to your availability and everyone else’s, while also providing transcriptions and analytics that break down where you waste most of your time.
Doodle
- Doodle
You’re probably already familiar with this online meeting scheduling tool, as many people use its free version. With a simple interface, Doodle lets you set your availabilities for a specific group meeting, and allows every participant to choose their preferred dates. With the paid version, you can automatically create a meeting in everyone’s calendar at the chosen time.
Bookafy Logo
- Bookafy
This product is great for scheduling appointments with candidates, employees or partners. Every staff in your organization can sync their calendar to Bookafy to show real time availability. Bookafy automatically sends confirmation emails, text message reminders, syncs to Teams, Zoom and Webex (plus others) to make for a really great automated appointment setting process. Bookafy syncs with Google, iCloud, Outlook and Exchange. Book one on one appointments (customer/staff), group events (multiple customers/staff) or multi staff appointments (multiple staff/one customer) which is a great combination for HR teams that need to book initial interviews as well as group meetings or panel interviews.
Rally
- Rally
Similarly to Doodle, Rally lets you create a poll, where the participants decide on the best time for the meeting. Apart from being completely free to use, Rally’s added bonus which put it on our list of best meeting scheduling tools for 2022 is the comment box on the poll page. This allows the participants to discuss the meeting details and talk about the agenda beforehand.
NeedToMeet
- NeedToMeet
Yet one more on our top online scheduling tools that lets your attendees know your availabilities. Instead of creating a poll like the previous apps on this list, NeedToMeet lets you block the hours you prefer in your calendar and send the options off. Then, you can book the meeting that gets the most votes. You can use their free account, but if you want the Outlook integration, you will have to pay.
Calendly
- Calendly
Some meeting scheduling apps are more about keeping your calendar organized; making sure you don’t double-book or spread yourself too thin. Calendly is on our list of meeting scheduling tools for 2022 as it’s an easy and user-friendly solution to allow people a window into your availabilities. With a custom URL, people can book an appointment with you, which will integrate with your Google or Office 365 calendar. It sends automatic reminders before the appointment, reducing no-shows — which makes it a great tool for sales, as well as HR. It also allows for group scheduling.
Pick
- Pick
While everyone on your team needs to be using both Pick and Google Calendar for this solution to work, it’s well worth it. This app will schedule a group meeting by automatically scanning your team’s Google calendars to find availabilities, and then send you a list of options. You can also invite everyone directly from the app, which rightfully earns it a spot on the meeting scheduling tools in 2022.
ScheduleOnce
- ScheduleOnce
If your team mainly works remotely, ScheduleOnce is a must-have. With timezone recognition, this online meeting scheduling tool will ensure that you never have to attend another 6 am catch-up with Australia. It also offers several comprehensive features for teamwork for customer-facing scheduling, such as pooled availability, round-robin assignment, as well as reporting.
Assistantto
- Assistant.to
While only allowing one-to-one meetings, Assistant.to is still one of the most used meeting scheduling apps out there. It’s easy to use as a Google Chrome extension, and it’s free for Gmail. You start by blocking the times you’re free on your calendar. Your participants can then choose the best time for them and by that confirm the meeting. The solution also remembers your most common locations and availability, as well as sends notifications.
Calendar Hero Logo
- CalendarHero
Next on the list of top online scheduling tools, we have two AI-based meeting scheduling apps. CalendarHero boasts several scheduling options for 1:1, group, and remote meetings, including scheduling links, an AI assistant for your inbox, and a standalone web scheduler. With CalendarHero, your invitees can book time using your real-time availability, or CalendarHero can send automated meeting requests for you. It sends your invitees automatic reminders, helps you balance your time with daily meeting limits, and keeps you on track with meeting briefings. To simplify remote scheduling, CalendarHero has 10+ direct video integrations, including Zoom, Webex, and Microsoft Teams, and adds conferencing details to your calendar events without you having to do a thing.
xai
- X.ai
Next on the list of top online scheduling tools, we have two AI-based meeting scheduling apps. But unlike Calendar, these are next-level. By CCing AI scheduling assistants Amy and Andrew on the initial email, you are allowing the software to take over the back-and-forth of booking the appointment. This AI is so clever, that some have even mistaken them for actual assistants. While other meeting scheduling apps may be able to set an appointment, this adds a personal touch, with dozens of customizations.
Clara
- Clara
This is definitely not the cheapest option for the best meeting scheduling tools for 2022 but by far the most advanced. Clara is the closest to a human assistant that you can get, with the ability to learn your scheduling patterns and preferences — such as meeting durations, locations, times of the day and more. The future is already here.
Cogsworth Logo
- Cogsworth
Cogsworth is an online appointment scheduling and booking software designed to help businesses create booking pages and accept appointments from your customers. The Cogsworth platform caters to all service businesses such as doctors, schools, auto, repairs, beauty therapists, spas, gyms, clinics, pet services, restaurants, universities, child care providers, financial advisers, consultants and more.
MeetFox Logo
- MeetFox
MeetFox is more than just a scheduling tool. You can schedule appointments, host in-browser video calls, charge for your meetings, bill clients with automatic invoicing, and process instant payments. MeetFox is highly customizable and can be completely white-labeled. You can create a professional booking page with your own logo and brand colors, customize confirmation emails, and embed a booking button into your email signature. MeetFox is popular with freelancers and startups that want an all-in-one solution that saves time and helps them automate their workflow.
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