Cal.com vs TidyCal

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.

TidyCal might have caught your attention because it offers a one-time payment of $29 instead of a subscription model. It includes scheduling and payment features, which can be tempting...but let us tell you, it's not worth it.

First, we generally don’t recommend purchasing software with one-time payments because they often lack ongoing updates and support. Subscriptions ensure that a team is continuously improving the product and driving innovation, whereas a one-time fee usually means little to no advancement.

The other reason it's not worth it is because a newer scheduler called Cal.com offers everything that TidyCal does on their free tier 😅

TidyCal was more appealing when it only competed with Calendly, but now, with Cal.com on the market —well — you do the math.