Microsoft Bookings vs Calendly: Which solution is better for your business?

Microsoft Bookings and Calendly are two tools that can help manage your appointments. In this article we will compare the two scheduling services and provide our recommendation for which one might better suit the needs of your organization.

The purpose of both scheduling services is to easily schedule a meeting with your customers and staff, and reduce the time it takes to do so. This is especially true for organizations that rely on clients making appointments, such as service shops, accounting firms, and consultants.

Calendly:

Calendly is a stand-alone product with a wide range of features and integrations that doesn’t require you to use Microsoft Office 365 and is well suited for organizations of all sizes.

Calendly helps you automate your scheduled meetings with your team or clients with its easy-to-use web interface and automatically syncs with your personal calendar. Some of its key features include Activity tracking, automated reminders, mobile alerts, group events and team scheduling. It has both desktop and mobile versions and integrates with third-party platforms like Gmail and Mailchimp. You can easily import your existing schedule into the platform if you already use a calendar program like Google Calendar.

Calendly lets you create your own scheduler without the need for a subscription service like Microsoft Office 365. However, it does have a paid version starting at $8/month, that offers features beyond the limitations of the free version.

Microsoft Bookings:

Microsoft Bookings is an online appointment booking and scheduling application included with a Microsoft Office 365 subscription. Reminder emails, appointment rescheduling, a consolidated booking calendar, automatic contact creation, and real-time staff availability are a few of its important features. Users can also build templates for reoccurring appointments in Microsoft Bookings, making scheduling faster and easier for both business owners and their clients.

It features both desktop and mobile versions and includes third-party integrations, such as Google Calendar and AskCody.

In terms of ease-of-use, Microsoft Bookings has a higher learning curve compared to Calendly that can take more time to understand. However, there are several helpful guides that can make the process easy.

Conclusion:

The easiest way to determine if you should use Calendly or Microsoft Bookings as your scheduling tool is to see which platform best meets the needs of your organization.

Both scheduling services enable employees and clients to easily modify, cancel, and reschedule their appointments.

If your organization is already a subscriber to Microsoft Office 365, then Microsoft Bookings is already included in your environment and integrates well with Outlook and Microsoft Teams. Then Microsoft Bookings may be the best option for you if you already use Microsoft Office 365 and only need the scheduling tools.

Calendly, on the other hand, is a great option if you want complete flexibility over your scheduling without being tied to a single platform.

You really cannot go wrong with any of these scheduling services, but only one will fit the bill based on the needs of your organization. Contact SimplePowerIT at (509) 433-7606 if you would like more information on either of these services.