Calendly vs. HubSpot Meetings: Which meeting scheduling app is best for you?

Meeting scheduling is a fact of life for marketing, sales and customer success teams. Connecting with prospects, customers, team members and other stakeholders keeps your business moving forward — but inefficient scheduling drags productivity backward. 

In fact, Calendly’s 2022 Time Economy report revealed that time spent on inefficient productivity and collaboration tools is the No. 1 factor that negatively impacts productivity. To make scheduling meetings easier, many teams turn to appointment scheduling software. 

This guide compares Calendly vs. HubSpot Meetings so you can easily decide which is best for your team and organization.

Calendly vs. HubSpot Meetings

Calendly and HubSpot Meetings are appointment scheduling software options that businesses can use to set up meetings without back-and-forth emailing. While there are feature overlaps between the online scheduling tools, they cater to different types of teams and use cases. 

Calendly overview — who is it for?

Calendly is a dynamic, automated scheduling tool that empowers your team to hit goals faster. G2 ranks Calendly as the easiest-to-use appointment scheduling software.

Calendly has powerful scheduling functionality, letting you customize exactly how and when you’re booked. Advanced features for teams create a consistent meeting experience: locked templates, screening forms, and intelligent multi-person scheduling. 

Even small businesses can use Calendly, since free and low-cost pricing options exist. The app is also a perfect companion to most tech stacks since Calendly integrates with many CRMs including Salesforce, calendar apps, video conference tools, Google Analytics, Meta Pixel (formerly Facebook Pixel), and more. 

If you’re already a HubSpot user, you’ll be happy to hear that Calendly integrates with HubSpot, and there are benefits to using those tools together that aren’t available through HubSpot Meetings alone. 

Calendly is great for teams who:

1. Need to create consistent experiences at scale. Calendly is highly customizable. This means you can create a cohesive and automatic meeting experience across and within teams. 

2. Want to improve their entire meeting lifecycle. Calendly’s team scheduling features go far beyond appointment scheduling. You can bring people together faster and more efficiently — and that helps you boost productivity, increase revenue, and create value.

3. Have preferred tools or tech stack. Calendly is a neutral appointment scheduling app that plays nicely with popular tools. You and your guests won’t be forced to use a single app you don’t like.

HubSpot Meetings overview — who is it for?

HubSpot Meetings is an available feature within the HubSpot CRM. The company added appointment scheduling to its CRM in 2016, and it’s free to use with a HubSpot account. Since HubSpot Meetings was added to the platform 10 years after its inception, it’s not built to be a standalone meeting scheduler. While a free HubSpot account gives you limited access to Meetings, it’s a better fit for teams that have paid accounts. 

HubSpot Meetings is great for teams that:

1. Already have a HubSpot CRM account. HubSpot Meetings is a free component of a HubSpot account, so if your team already uses the HubSpot Sales, Marketing Hub, Service, CMS, or Operations Hub, you won’t need to buy anything extra.

2. Want basic meeting scheduling to manage customer relationships. HubSpot Meetings has the core tools you’ll need to save time setting up meetings. However, efficient scheduling and collaboration aren’t the company’s core focus, so functions aren’t as robust as they are in dedicated scheduling apps. 

Scheduling usability and features for Calendly vs. HubSpot Meetings

You’re probably considering Calendly versus HubSpot to make managing your schedule easier — not just booking meetings, but automating confirmations and follow-ups.

Both tools make scheduling easier by giving attendees the power to choose a meeting time that works for them, based on the host’s real-time availability. All you have to do is link your calendars, create an event, and share your availability.

Manage calendars

One of the best reasons to use scheduling software is that, once connected to all of your calendars, your booking page only shows available times based on your linked calendars. This way, your sales meeting on your work Outlook calendar can’t interfere with the dentist appointment on your personal iPhone calendar.

Unfortunately, HubSpot Meetings only works with two types of calendars, Outlook and Google. 

If you or your team wants maximum flexibility to work across calendar apps, Calendly is the easier choice. You can connect to up to six calendars to manage your visible availability. Your calendar options include Google, and Microsoft (Desktop, Office 365, Outlook.com, and Exchange).

Create an event

Whether you meet with people across the country or around the globe, HubSpot hosts can only show an event in a single time zone. This means attendees outside that time zone need to calculate the difference manually.

Patrick C., a marketing executive and Calendly user, shared on G2 that “because of my job role, I sometimes get people outside of my geographical location booking appointments with me. I like how Calendly addresses the differences in time zones by allowing visitors to see my available time schedules in their local time zone, and convert their choices to my own time zone.”

When you need to set up a multi-person meeting, Calendly even lets you create Meeting Polls in the meeting invite, where everyone can vote on preferred times.

With Calendly you’ll never forget to include a videoconferencing link again, because it integrates with Zoom, Webex, GoToMeeting, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. With HubSpot Meetings, you’re limited to fewer options. 

Calendly is built to scale, so you can easily clone Event Types and create templates for your recurring meeting types, such as check-ins with your ad agency, campaign kickoffs, and team brainstorming sessions. HubSpot doesn’t offer cloning or templates, so it requires you to do more things manually.

Both tools offer meeting buffers, automatically adding breathing room before and after events to avoid back-to-back bookings. And both tools offer emailed meeting reminders and follow-ups, although Calendly’s Workflows are more customizable (and can be communicated via text, too). 

Share availability

You might want to let some people schedule time with you whenever they want, while others only need to schedule just one meeting. And if you’re meeting with a group of people, you might want to let everyone vote on their preferred time before writing a meeting invitation.

That’s why Calendly offers different ways to share when you’re available. From evergreen Event Types to one-off meetings and Meeting Polls, Calendly’s scheduling automation gives you much more flexibility than Meetings. Calendly even offers single-use links for ad-hoc meetings, if you want to offer more availability to a VIP. 

Cari D., a marketing coordinator, summarized Calendly’s ease of use and value in her G2 review: 

“Calendly was simple to set up right away when I signed up. It has been more than a year since I started using it. Hundreds of customers have used Calendly to schedule appointments for me with no problems. Calendly keeps me informed about my assignments via email notifications. Thanks to the fact that Calendly sends out customer notifications, they don't forget about appointments.”

Teamwork for Calendly vs. HubSpot Meetings

Both Calendly and HubSpot Meetings know that marketing teams and sales teams need to work together to tackle projects. That’s why both apps have some level of team scheduling to share the workload.

For example, HubSpot Meetings lets you equally distribute appointments. Unfortunately, you can’t create specific team scheduling rules or priorities, such as time zone or area of expertise. There are also no meeting limits.

This could cause a mismatch between hosts and attendees, or an overworked team member. While your organization can have separate scheduling pages for marketing or sales, you can’t set up groups or teams within departments. 

On the other hand, Calendly has advanced collaboration features. Routing Forms perfectly pair hosts and invitees, and you can create groups and Teams for multi-department or more complex organizational needs. 

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Integrations for Calendly vs. HubSpot Meetings

At the very least, you’ll need your appointment scheduling software to connect with your calendars and video conferencing apps. After all, a meeting needs a time and a place. However, there are plenty of other tools that marketing and sales teams use, which is where integrations help. 

HubSpot Meetings works seamlessly with HubSpot CRM since both tools are under the same umbrella. To track your availability, HubSpot Meetings connects with Google Calendar and Office 365, which is helpful but limited. HubSpot Meetings users can only give attendees one video meeting option to choose from.

The Calendly and HubSpot integration automatically updates your HubSpot contacts with information, so using both tools is seamless.

Unlike HubSpot Meetings, Calendly is not locked into one CRM. Calendly integrates with popular tools, including: 

• Marketing and sales tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Typeform, and ActiveCampaign

• Multiple calendars including Google Calendar, Outlook 365 Calendar, and Exchange

• The places you spend your work day, such as Slack, Google Chrome, and Google Analytics

If you already have a paid HubSpot plan, their meetings tool is included. HubSpot meetings doesn’t function well as a standalone scheduling tool, which means it’s pricey if you’re buying a HubSpot plan just for meeting scheduling: Minimum $45 a month if you commit to a year contract. You can find more details on HubSpot’s pricing page.

Calendly offers a basic scheduling plan that’s guaranteed to be free forever. If you want additional functionality, you’ll pay $8-16 a month, no annual contract required. You can find more details on Calendly’s pricing page. 

Calendly vs. HubSpot Meetings: choose scheduling software to meet your specific goals

Calendly and HubSpot are highly rated by users on G2 — both tools empower teams to spend less time coordinating appointments. Which is better for your organization is a matter of priorities and goals. 

Suppose your organization already uses HubSpot, and you want to test the waters of automatic appointment scheduling. In that case, the built-in Meetings function is a simple way to do that. However, you may find that you quickly outgrow the limited features, or run into headaches working with team members in different time zones. 

Calendly is a separate tool, which means it’s entirely focused on making scheduling easy for you. Calendly offers more control, allows customizations so you can design your ideal workflow, and integrates with the apps workers love — including HubSpot! The integration exists due to the many teams who already use HubSpot, but who need more robust scheduling functionality.

Calendly is also built to scale: As you achieve success and your company grows, your scheduling automation grows alongside you, enabling you to hit goals even faster.