Effective, well-managed communication is a critical component of business success, and in today’s fast-paced business arena, companies cannot afford to drop the ball on client interaction and communication.
Both Calendly and HubSpot offer solutions to ensure businesses stay on top of their calendars with management and scheduling of appointments, meetings, and calls. In this article, we’ll explore both platforms and assess the benefits and drawbacks of each, helping you decide which is best for your business.
Scheduling software is becoming increasingly recognised as an important tool to have in your martech stack. Utilising platforms like HubSpot and Calendly is creating higher levels of efficiency for businesses, taking care of the finer details so you don’t have to; never miss a meeting again!
Not convinced about the appeal and benefits of these tools? Here are some quick facts about the rise of scheduling software, and martech platforms in general:
- The appointment scheduling software market is predicted to increase by $633.47 million USD between 2021 and 2025 (PR Newswire, 2021).
- Self-scheduling via scheduling platforms has lessened appointment “no-shows” by 17% (The Becker, 2023).
- Businesses offering appointment scheduling options online observed a 24% increase in call volume (Healthgrades, 2023).
- Businesses can achieve a 30% to 45% revenue increase by implementing appointment scheduling software (Yolantis, 2023).
- Between 2019 and 2020, marketing technology tools were the fastest growing out of all martech solutions, growing by 25% over a one-year period, and usage is continuing to grow today. (Statista, 2023)
- 77% of companies using marketing automation tools have seen an increase in conversions. (Invesp, 2023)
- 75% of all companies utilise at least one type of marketing automation tool. (StartupBonsai, 2023)
The statistics paint the picture. More and more businesses are implementing martech tools, and scheduling software is growing in popularity for both customers and businesses. So, how do we choose the perfect platform? Let’s unpack HubSpot and Calendly and explore their respective features.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is a comprehensive marketing, sales, and customer service platform that aims to provide all-in-one solutions to businesses. It has an array of features that can help businesses grow, such as lead management, customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, social media management, and analytics. One of the key benefits of HubSpot is that it centralises all customer interactions, enabling businesses to have a 360-degree view of their customers. This means that businesses can track interactions, analyse data, and gain insights into behaviour, which can help improve sales and customer service.
HubSpot's scheduling features go beyond just setting up meetings and appointments, they also make it easier for your team members to manage their time and organize their marketing and sales activities. Here are some of the capabilities you can utilise:
- Meetings: Allows users to easily schedule and book meetings with prospects and customers. This feature allows users to set up a custom meeting link, display availability, and send automated reminders
- Tasks: Users can create and assign tasks to team members, set due dates and reminders, and track progress
- Email scheduling: Schedule emails to be sent at a later date and time. This feature is useful for users who want to prepare emails in advance
- Social media scheduling: Social media posts can also be scheduled for publishing at a later date and time, allowing users to prepare posts in advance
- Content calendar: The content calendar feature allows users to plan and schedule content across different channels, including social media, blog, and email. This feature is useful for users who want to organise their content marketing efforts and ensure a consistent publishing schedule.
HubSpot’s scheduling features also include:
- Unlimited meetings
- Integration with Gmail, Outlook, or Office365
- Teamwide collaboration
- Reporting and analytics
- Personalisation
- Localisation of languages, time zones, date style, and number formatting
- Buffer time and time increments
- Shareable and embeddable meetings links
- Email notifications
- Automatic CRM logging
- Mobile and desktop usage
HubSpot has also won numerous awards, including the #1 Global Software Company at G2’s 2023 Best Software Awards, G2’s Overall Best Product for Marketers, and the Gartner Peer Customer Choice Awards in 2022. In terms of reviews, HubSpot’s Meeting Scheduler is highly rated, with one reviewer on Software Reviews responding:
“What differentiates HubSpot Meeting Scheduler from other similar products?
It's aligned to everything including our CRM, Website and more.
What is your favourite aspect of this product?
Simplicity and flexibility of adding meeting links to webpages, emails etc.”
What is Calendly?
Calendly is a scheduling software that helps businesses manage appointments, meetings, and calls. It integrates with calendars like Google, Outlook, and Apple, making it easy for clients to schedule appointments. Calendly's main objective is to make scheduling easier and more efficient by eliminating the back-and-forth email communication that typically occurs when setting up client appointments. It provides a simple interface that allows businesses to set their availability and lets clients choose a time that works best for them. Let’s take a look at some of the features Calendly has to offer:
- Automated scheduling: Calendly automates scheduling by syncing with users' calendars and automatically suggesting available meeting times.
- Customisable availability: Users can set their availability preferences and block out time slots when they are not available.
- Calendar integrations: Calendly integrates with a variety of calendar apps, including Google Calendar, Office 365, and Outlook.
- Time zone detection: Calendly detects the time zone of the user and their invitee, ensuring that scheduled meetings are accurate.
- Personalised links: Users can create personalized scheduling links that they can share with others, allowing them to schedule a meeting or appointment directly.
- Group scheduling: Calendly allows users to schedule meetings with multiple people at once, making it easy to coordinate group meetings.
- Reminder notifications: Calendly sends automated email reminders to invitees to ensure that they don't forget about the scheduled meeting.
- Customisable branding: Users can customize the look and feel of their scheduling page to match their brand.
- Reporting and analytics: Calendly provides detailed reporting and analytics, allowing users to track their scheduling activity and identify trends.
- Integration with other tools: Calendly integrates with a variety of other tools, including Zapier, Salesforce, and Slack
Calendly with the recipient of G2’s Best Software Awards Winner for 2022, and has also received great reviews. A G2 reviewer commented on the ease of use with Calendly’s platform. “Every single thing that may be required is thought of. The zoom details are received by clients. They can fill a form so that I may know beforehand what it is that they seek from me. The client also perceives my work to be serious and professional.
Neither my client nor I have to bother about time zone conversions. Calendly manages that. Saves me a lot of bother going back and forth about time scheduling. The Calendly link does that. Very happy with the product. Been using it for the 4th year now.”
It’s clear that both platforms have been well-received by users, and are each widely recognised as industry heavyweights. This doesn’t make choosing between the two any easier! Let’s delve a little deeper.
How are Calendly and HubSpot different, and the same?
Both HubSpot and Calendly aim to simplify business processes and increase productivity. They are cloud-based software that integrates with other applications, making it easier to manage and automate workflows. Both tools provide a user-friendly interface and are designed to enhance customer relationships by streamlining communication.
While both tools have some similar features, they differ significantly in their scope and purpose. HubSpot is a complete marketing and sales platform that provides a full range of tools for customer engagement, while Calendly is a scheduling software designed to automate the appointment scheduling process. HubSpot provides features such as lead management, email marketing, social media management, and analytics, while Calendly focuses mainly on appointment scheduling.
Ultimately, there are pros and cons to each platform. Let’s take a look at both of them by comparing their features in the following areas:
- Ease of use
- Integration
- Analytics
- Automation
- Personalisation and customisation
Ease of use
HubSpot’s meeting scheduler is a feature integrated into the wider HubSpot CRM platform. This means that if you’re already on HubSpot, adding and learning the scheduling tool to your arsenal will be a simple task. HubSpot’s meeting tool is generally considered easy to use. It has a user-friendly interface for creating, scheduling, and managing appointments. The platform is also highly customisable, allowing you to set up your availability, create meeting types, and customise confirmation emails.
The added benefit of using HubSpot for your scheduling is, of course, that all of HubSpot’s other features are available to you too. The tool integrates seamlessly with HubSpot's other features and hubs, providing you with more data and resources to run your schedule. The platform also supports various integrations with other third-party applications, making it highly versatile and flexible. Integrating the meeting scheduler with your current email marketing software is simple, especially for existing HubSpot users. For those just starting out with HubSpot as a whole, the platform is intuitive to use, and HubSpot also provides an enormous wealth of information through guides, customer support channels, and HubSpot Academy.
Calendly is also considered a user-friendly platform, with an intuitive interface and simple functions. However, it is a standalone app that requires integration with other software should you need this. If you are purely seeking a scheduling solution, Calendly is potentially the right platform for you. That said, most businesses are looking for a holistic solution to all of their digital operations requirements. This is where HubSpot shines, given its prowess as a “one-stop-shop.” Instead of bringing together a selection of different platforms that have to be integrated together to work in conjunction, HubSpot can provide the same features and services on one platform. Overall, ease of use includes convenience, which HubSpot certainly provides.
Integration
HubSpot’s scheduling tool integrates easily with Gmail, Outlook, and your Google or Office365 calendar. This makes it easy for prospects to receive your up-to-date calendar and book time with you. And, of course, the scheduling tool integrates with the rest of the HubSpot platform, giving you access to all the features the software offers. Calendly, on the other hand, will rely on integrations completely, and is therefore compatible with most major platforms.
Analytics
We’ve established that HubSpot’s meeting scheduler is a tool in the wider HubSpot offering, meaning that, as with all the features we are discussing here, users have access to all other HubSpot tools, and the analytics and reporting capabilities are part of that.
One of HubSpot’s most attractive features is its built-in CRM (customer relationship management) system. This makes a massive difference to the depth and quality of data reporting and insight that HubSpot’s analytics can provide and places it miles ahead of competitors across the board for this element of digital operations software. HubSpot provides analytics for email, social media, website, and sales, among others. The reporting structure and dashboard are fully customisable, allowing you to specify the information and insight you require. HubSpot also automatically updates your CRM data when contacts book meetings with you, and you can also create custom reporting and logging parameters.
Calendly also offers some analytics features to help users track their scheduling activity and gain insights into their scheduling habits. A scheduling activity dashboard provides a dashboard displaying activity over a specified period and includes information such as the number of scheduled meetings, cancelled meetings, no-shows, and rescheduled meetings. Users can also view metrics for events and team-wide scheduling activity. The platform can also be put to work in its third-party integration capacity by connecting with external analytics tools such as Google Analytics.
Automation
Calendly offers several helpful automation features. These include automated scheduling based on your availability and preferences, and sending reminder notifications to invitees before the scheduled appointment. Additionally, the platform has an automatic timezone detection feature and formats the scheduling accordingly.
Automation in general is another one of HubSpot’s specialities, and there are a number of tools that can be used to streamline your calendar and scheduling processes. At the basic level, the scheduling feature allows you to schedule appointments, set up your availability, and share a link with your contacts to book a time that works for both of you. You can also enable automatic reminders and follow-up emails.
HubSpot can automate various workflow tasks. The tool allows users to automatically create a task when a contact requests a meeting and assign it to the appropriate team member or action a trigger when a prospect fills out a form on your website, automatically sending them an email with a link to schedule a meeting.
Personalisation and customisation
Calendly offers a variety of customisation options, allowing you to tailor your scheduling settings to your specific needs. Users can set different availability for different types of appointments, add buffer time between meetings, and customise email and reminder notifications. You can create custom event types with their own unique settings and availability, accounting for different types of meetings, such as consultations, demos, or interviews. You can then customise the length, buffer time, and various other parameters of each event type.
Calendly also allows you to customise the appearance of your scheduling page with your own branding, including colours, fonts, logos, and images. You can also add custom messages, descriptions, and instructions to your scheduling page.
With HubSpot, you can create custom scheduling links to share with your customers, which can be used to schedule meetings, appointments, demos, etc. In addition to this, all of HubSpot’s general customisation features are available to the user. This includes custom templates for your emails and scheduling page, as well as all custom scheduling parameters to create your meeting preferences easily.
Pricing
Both HubSpot and Calendly offer free plans and a tiered pricing plan for premium versions. Let's take a look at what each has to offer.
Calendly
HubSpot
Choosing the right software ultimately comes down to your business needs. While both options are excellent software applications, Calendly is focused on scheduling only. Businesses looking for a complete, comprehensive marketing and sales platform that centralises customer interactions and provides extensive data analysis will benefit from HubSpot’s all-in-one solution. Get in touch with us today and find out more about how HubSpot can help you.
