Cal.com vs Chili Piper

Cal has changed the meaning and expectations when it comes to the standalone scheduler app category as it's the most flexible, and modern scheduling software on the market.

While Calendly was the leader in the meeting scheduling space for the past decade, over the past few years Cal has given them a run for their money, and in our opinion, has overtaken them.

Cal is by far the best overall meeting scheduler for individuals, SMBs, startups, sales & customer support teams, and even enterprises because they are incredibly flexible. Schedule meetings & appointments (checking multiple team members calendars), set up recurring appointments, take payments with scheduling, and create custom workflows.

Where meeting schedulers have become more of a feature of a product, like that of Motion, amongst others in the best calendar apps space, Cal has doubled down on that fact by not only making their tool open source core, but by also giving a robust API, allowing you to use their scheduling infrastructure for your own product. This makes it ideal for our more technical friends, enterprises, educational institutions, or even doctors offices.

That said, if you only need a basic meeting scheduler for 1:1 meetings, Cal is likely more than you need. Many of the best daily planner apps, project management tools, and even the best email clients now have a scheduler built in, so it's worth trying what you already pay for before adding another tool.

Unlike other schedulers, Cal has something called weighted round robin scheduling, which lets you distribute meetings based on actual team availability instead of splitting them evenly.

For example, if one sales rep works fewer days than others, you can assign them a lower weight so they receive fewer bookings. You can also create more complex setups, like ensuring one sales rep is always on a call (customer support) while rotating different engineers into each meeting.

Cal is also awesome if you need routing forms. E.g. if your business offers multiple services like bathroom, kitchen, or outdoor remodeling. Based on what a customer selects via a form, they can be routed to the right specialist automatically.

Cal is also open source, which means everything is transparent, and if you want, you can even run it on your own servers. That gives you full control over your data, instead of being locked into a tool you can’t change. This is more relevant to enterprises or companies concerned with security though.

• Free: Best for individuals who need simple scheduling with no usage limits.
• Teams: $12/mo per user (billed yearly). Best for small teams and startups that need collaborative scheduling features.
• Organizations: $28/mo per user (billed yearly). Best for larger teams that need more control, security, and advanced routing.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing. Includes dedicated support, SLAs, advanced integrations, and enterprise-grade infrastructure.

Chili Piper has made their mark in the enterprise scheduling and lead routing space.

We were actually using them back in our search to find the best calendar scheduler on the market, and actually replaced Calendly with Chili Piper.

Since we were quite early on in using it though, we didn't realize that they were building every product decision for that of enterprise companies. So never would they integrate with a non-enterprise CRM like Copper, they focused only on Salesforce.

The long and short of it is that if you're looking for a deeply integrated Salesforce meeting scheduler, and terms like "round robin" come up regularly for your team, Chili Piper is probably the solution for you.

If you're instead looking for deeper integration with your CRM and you're using something like Copper or Pipedrive or HubSpot, you might consider Cal or Calendly instead.

If you're just looking for the best calendar scheduler on the market, and thinks like speed of scheduling, spinning up a new scheduling link, and priority/focus time blocking are important to you, Motion is definitely the winner in this category.

If you are an enterprise company, using Salesforce, and robust lead routing + your company is sales-heavy, you might consider Chili Piper.

That said, when I was first using Chili Piper, I was really just looking for a low-friction scheduler that was super flexible. It wasn't until finally stumbling upon Motion, that I could finally end the hunt.

If you're a smaller team, or not using an enterprise CRM like Salesforce, we'd highly recommend you taking a look at Motion vs Chili Piper, as Motion is likely to check more boxes, as it also has a baked in tasks right inside of your calendar.