Calendly vs GoReminders: Which is the Better Appointment Scheduling Software?

Calendly is a big name in the appointment scheduling industry. In fact, you’ve probably received a Calendly invite or two. However, the fact that a platform is well known doesn’t necessarily make it the best appointment booking solution. When you peel back the layers of Calendly’s popularity, you’ll find cracks in its platform that should make you reconsider using it.

Our GoReminders platform may not enjoy the level of fame that Calendly does (for the time being at least!) Despite that, you’ll find it packed with powerful features perfect for your appointment booking and reminder needs, regardless of your business size or industry. Here’s what we mean:

Flexible Booking and Filtering of Appointments

Let customers book appointments anytime and anywhere with the GoReminders Booking form.

With GoReminders, booking new appointments is a simple process. Open either the desktop or mobile app version of the platform and fill out a short form, and you’ll have your appointment created in 10 seconds or less.

Alternatively, set up a Booking form for customers to book appointments with you themselves. Two booking modes are available: Instant Book will immediately add their appointment to your calendar, while Appointment Request requires you to review and approve the appointment before it’s confirmed. You can then share the link to your Booking Form in places such as your emails, reminder messages, website, and social media pages.

All your appointments will then appear in our built-in appointments calendar, which lets you view your appointments in a month, week, day, or agenda view. Appointment filtering options, such as filtering by customer, staff, or a custom label you’ve created, are also available. Use these features to locate the exact appointments you’re looking for, and browse them in the view that best matches your workflow. You can also integrate GoReminders with Google Calendar, iCal, and more to have your appointments appear in your preferred external calendar app.

On the other hand, when customers book new events with you through Calendly, these events are automatically added to your calendar. There is no option for manual approval of appointments. This might be a problem if you need to confirm your availability—such as the availability of a requested staff member—before accepting an appointment.

In addition, Calendly lets you view your events only in a list. Viewing them by the week or month isn’t possible. Event filtering options are also rather limited: you can’t filter your events by location, staff, or service, for example. Neither can you create custom event filters.

Powerful and User-Friendly Appointment Reminder Features

GoReminders helps you give customers a friendly nudge about upcoming appointments.

Help customers stay on top of their appointments with your business by sending appointment reminders. We offer both text reminders and email reminders, plus a fully automated reminder system to save you the time and trouble of manually sending reminders yourself.

To set up automated appointment reminders, create a new Reminder Template containing your reminder message and specify a Reminder Schedule for it. You can schedule your reminder as far ahead as 30 days before the appointment, or even just one hour before the appointment time.

Through this method, you can send up to three text and three email reminders—for a total of six reminders per appointment—with the same message contents. However, if you need a more advanced setup, then tap on our Message Sequence feature. It allows for the automation of up to six reminder messages, all with different Reminder Template contents and different Reminder Schedules. With Message Sequences, you’ll be able to create highly customized reminder flows for any situation.

While Calendly has a similar automated event notification feature called Workflows, it isn’t as user-friendly. That’s because the platform’s Workflows interface doesn’t display event notifications in chronological order. Trying to navigate and understand the full reminder flow for any particular event can thus get rather confusing.

Effortless Mass-Messaging With Message Blasts

While our reminder messages help automate one-to-one interactions between you and your customers, you may need to send one-off messages to a single customer, or a group of them, at once. This is where our Message Blasts feature comes in handy.

Compose your one-off message as a Message Blast—whether to promote an exclusive discount code, announce a temporary business closure, or something else—then select your message recipients. Customers will receive your message as either a text blast or an email blast depending on their communication preferences.

If you need such an ad hoc mass-messaging feature in Calendly, however, you’d unfortunately be out of luck as Calendly doesn’t have one. You’d need to do a workaround by mass-emailing your event attendees outside of Calendly, though this would be a hassle—not to mention the potential embarrassment if you mistyped your attendees’ email addresses. An alternative is to mass-text your attendees, but mass-texting is difficult to do without a dedicated text blast platform (such as GoReminders).

Two-Way Messaging for Enhanced Customer Interactions

Thanks to GoReminders’ two-way messaging feature, formal customer communications can feel like chats with a friend.

Whether you’re sending reminders or mass messages to your customers, they should have a way of writing back. After all, they might have a question about their appointment, or need to reschedule it because something else cropped up. You don’t want a customer to respond about postponing their appointment, only for their reply to disappear into the void. As a result, they become a no-show. With GoReminders’ two-way messaging feature, you’ll never have to worry about such a situation happening, because when you send an email or SMS reminder , customers will be able to directly reply to you. You will receive these replies in the GoReminders platform, and to either your business email address or the phone number we’ve assigned to you. That will be your cue to promptly respond to your customers and ensure their needs are attended to. Your customers will love such five-star service!

In contrast, Calendly’s communication features are more of a one-way street. Customers will be able to reply to your Calendly email notifications only if you haven’t enabled a no-reply email address for your account. As for texts, Calendly sends text messages using a randomly generated phone number from your country, with replies going unmonitored. This makes receiving customer replies by text—much less responding to them—impossible.

Attentive and Top-Notch Customer Service

Users of our outstanding GoReminders platform enjoy outstanding customer service. If you have any questions on the GoReminders platform, drop us a message using the chat support button in your dashboard. Our friendly customer support staff will be right with you to lend a helping hand.

Check out this testimonial by Janelle Lynn of Lush Hair Salon, for instance:

“I’ve been using [GoReminders] for several months and my clients comment about it daily. They love the reminders and I love that I can add a message for particular clients. They also make changes that I love all the time!!! Quick and wonderful customer service. A+++++!”

Janelle’s review is just one of the many glowing reviews that satisfied GoReminders users have left us—feel free to browse more reviews here.

However, Calendly’s customer service isn’t as stellar. Live chat is only available to businesses on Calendly’s higher-tiered plans. For everyone else, the only way to get help is to send an email.

If you’re a free user, expect “standard” response time. Calendly doesn’t define what this is, but users have complained of “slow” replies and long waits to have issues resolved. For one particular user, he was still waiting on a fix for his syncing issue, four months after contacting support!

Calendly vs GoReminders: The Verdict

Calendly may be touted as a top appointment booking app, but that’s probably just because it is one of the most popular ones. Examining the Calendly platform in greater detail, it’s apparent that its appointment scheduling features are lacking in various areas. Poor customer service also only further reduces the platform’s attractiveness.

For a truly exceptional appointment booking and reminder experience, use GoReminders instead. We’ve built a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use, appointment scheduling platform that’s been proven to help businesses to take control of their appointments, interact with customers, and prevent appointment no-shows. Our fantastic customer support team also stands ready to ensure your success with our platform.

Regardless of your use case, business size, or industry, we’re confident you’ll find GoReminders a great choice—and you can get started with a 14-day free trial here (credit card not required).