Calendly vs. HubSpot meeting scheduler: Which scheduling tool is best for you?

Your organization needs a scheduling tool that makes managing meetings easier, from sales calls and partner meetings to candidate interviews and customer onboarding.

If your sales team already uses HubSpot CRM, you might consider sticking with HubSpot’s built-in meeting scheduler. While Hubspot’s meeting scheduler works well for basic sales scheduling, a dedicated scheduling platform like Calendly offers more advanced features, customization, and integrations for teams across your entire organization — not just sales and customer success.

In this guide, we’ll walk through the key differences between HubSpot’s meeting scheduler and Calendly, and help you decide if adding Calendly to your tech stack is right for your team and organization.

What do Calendly and HubSpot’s meeting scheduler have in common?

Calendly and HubSpot’s meeting scheduler are both online scheduling tools that save time by eliminating the back-and-forth of finding a time to meet. 

Whether you use Calendly or HubSpot’s meeting scheduler, you can:

• Share scheduling links, making it easier to find a time that works for everyone

• Embed your booking page on your website

• Sync with Office 365 and Google Calendar

• Add suggested times to the body of emails

• Distribute meetings across the team with round-robin scheduling

• Pool multiple team members’ availability for co-hosted meetings

• Connect video conferencing software (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet) to automatically generate meeting links

• Book unlimited meetings and appointments

• Build in buffer time between meetings

• Automatically show available times in invitee’s time zones

• Automate email reminders

Top differences between Calendly and HubSpot’s meeting scheduler

While these tools have several scheduling features in common, they cater to different types of teams and use cases.

Calendly works for all departments, not just sales teams

HubSpot’s meeting scheduler is part of their CRM software, so every user needs a HubSpot Sales or Service Hub license. If you only need scheduling for your sales or customer success team, that may not be a problem.

If your company needs scheduling functionality for other teams, like marketing or recruiting, it doesn’t make much sense to buy HubSpot licenses for everyone, just to use the scheduling feature. Instead, consider choosing a scheduling tool you can integrate with HubSpot CRM and use across departments — like Calendly.

Calendly is the only scheduling tool that offers specific solutions for departments across your organization, including sales, marketing, recruiting, customer success, and more.

Teams of all sizes use Calendly to bring together … 

• Sales, marketing, and customer success collaborating on a deal

• Recruiting, HR, and hiring managers interviewing candidates to fill roles

• Customer success, IT, and engineering teams resolving customer issues

… just to name a few! (Check out more specific Calendly use cases here.)

With 100+ integrations, Calendly also connects with the tools teams across your organization use every day, including:

• Sales and marketing tools (HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Gong)

• Recruiting software and ATSs (Greenhouse and JazzHR)

• Collaboration and project management (Slack and Microsoft Teams chat)

• Payment processing (Stripe and PayPal)

• Workflow automation (Zapier and Microsoft Power Automate)

Calendly can handle more complex team scheduling scenarios

No one meeting type fits all. Calendly’s team scheduling features make it easy to schedule multi-person meetings with any combination of attendees — whether you’re booking client consultations, sales calls with inbound leads, group interviews, product demos, vendor and partner meetings, or all of the above. HubSpot also offers basic scheduling features, but the options are more limited, especially when scheduling with more than one external stakeholder.

Real-time scheduling: Calendly lets you book your next meeting on the spot, right from the browser extension, so you don’t have to chase down an invitee with a scheduling link later on. For example, sales reps can schedule a product demo live at the end of the discovery call, so the deal keeps moving. HubSpot doesn’t offer real-time scheduling.

Group meetings: Calendly’s Group events let multiple people sign up to meet with you at once for a webinar, training, onboarding, or other one-to-many meetings. You can offer multiple meeting time options, so people can get the information they need at a time that fits their schedule. HubSpot doesn’t support meetings with multiple invitees.

Round-robin scheduling: With Calendly’s Round Robin meeting distribution, you can automatically assign new meetings to team members based on availability, team member priorities, or equal meeting distribution. This feature lets you respond to customers faster and offer them more available meeting times.

“We feel confident that when a lead comes in, it goes reliably to different team members. Calendly’s Round Robin feature saves a lot of headaches, especially when assigning which appointment goes to whom.”

Donald Kelly

Founder at The Sales Evangelist

HubSpot offers round-robin scheduling, but users must have a Sales Hub or Service Hub license, which can get expensive — especially for large teams. Unlike Calendly, HubSpot doesn’t let you optimize for equal distribution. The logic will prioritize the person who’s gone the longest without a meeting booked or be assigned to the owner of the account if HubSpot lookup is enabled.

Meeting polls: Use Calendly Meeting Polls to find the best time for one-off meetings with up to 40 people. Invitees vote on preferred times. Once everyone votes, you choose a meeting time, and Calendly sends calendar invites and meeting details to everyone who voted. HubSpot doesn’t include a meeting poll feature.

Lead routing: Instantly qualify, route, and book leads through your HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, or Calendly forms with Calendly Routing. Automatically route known leads or customers to their account rep’s booking page with Salesforce and HubSpot CRM account lookup. Leads can book appointments with the right team member, on the spot, at the height of their buying interest.

“Our HubSpot form conversion rates have skyrocketed with Calendly Routing. We’re now seeing 70% of qualified leads booking demos directly from our website. Our entire team is thrilled.”

Max Friedman

CEO at Givebutter

Calendly is more flexible, scalable, and customizable

Managed Events: For admins, team leads, and IT teams, Calendly’s admin management features and dashboard make it easy to standardize and scale scheduling across the organization. Admins can create a consistent meeting experience across the team with Managed Events: lockable templates for meeting types. HubSpot doesn’t offer cloning or templates, so scaling across the team takes more manual work.

One-off meetings and single-use links: When a high priority meeting pops up, Calendly lets you create one-off meetings, a quick and flexible way to host a one-time meeting that doesn't match your regular meeting templates. You can offer your invitee times that fall outside of your regular availability, or give a meeting higher priority over your existing meetings. You can also create single-use scheduling links that expire as soon as an invitee books with you, so you have more control over who can book with you.

HubSpot doesn’t support one-off meetings or single-use links, and you can’t book over busy times if a meeting of higher priority arises.

Meeting reminders and follow-ups: Calendly Workflows let you automate any pre- and post-meeting communications, including customizable templates for reminder texts, thank-you emails, follow-up meeting requests, and more.

HubSpot’s meeting scheduler only offers email reminders; you’ll need a third-party tool to send texts. HubSpot’s automations and workflows aren’t centralized in the scheduling tool, so follow-up emails require more manual setup in HubSpot CRM.

“Setting up a Workflow and being able to assign it to many different Event Types saves the advisors significant time and money. We even started using the thank-you email as a digital business card.”

Asiya Khan

Manager, Branch and Business Practice at CI Assante Wealth Management

How does Calendly work with HubSpot?

Calendly’s HubSpot integration is one of the most popular Apps in the HubSpot Marketplace. Integrating Calendly and HubSpot automates time-consuming gaps in the marketing and sales process, so you can connect with more qualified leads and close deals faster.

What can your team do with Calendly + HubSpot?

• Keep customer records up-to-date in your HubSpot CRM: Customer information and meeting activity sync automatically to HubSpot CRM every time customers and prospects book meetings with Calendly. Records and workflows stay up to date and sales reps have the info they need every step of the way.

• Qualify, route, and book leads from your HubSpot forms: When you add Calendly Routing to your HubSpot forms, qualified buyers can schedule directly from your marketing forms and landing pages. Create a better customer experience and connect your team with valuable prospects before the competition.

• Make it easy for known leads and customers to book with the right person: When a known contact fills out your forms, Calendly Routing uses a HubSpot CRM lookup to match them with their account rep. Leads instantly schedule with the right person. eliminating manual reassignment tasks and delayed follow-up times.

“As one of the most used Apps in the HubSpot Marketplace, we love to see Calendly offering new features that streamline inbound sales and marketing in a fully integrated way. With Calendly Routing, sales and marketing teams now get an automated, inbound scheduling process that connects HubSpot contacts to account owners at the peak of their interest.”

Scott Brinker

VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot

Learn more about Calendly’s HubSpot integration.

Calendly + HubSpot Pro Tips

Learn how to get the most out of Calendly's HubSpot integration, including real-world use cases for sales and marketing teams.

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Calendly vs. HubSpot pricing

Calendly is a standalone scheduling tool, while HubSpot’s meetings tool is built into HubSpot CRM.

Calendly has four pricing tiers:

• Free: Includes one connected calendar, unlimited event scheduling, and Meeting Polls

• Standard: $10 per user per month (billed annually)

• Teams: $16 per user per month (billed annually)

• Enterprise: Custom pricing for larger organizations

Explore Calendly’s Teams features with a 14-day free trial.

HubSpot’s meeting scheduler is included for Sales and Service Hub users. It’s not a standalone scheduling tool, which can make it pricey to buy a HubSpot seat for every team member who needs a scheduling app.

There are several Sales and Service Hub pricing plans for individuals, small businesses, and enterprises:

• Free Tools (One personal meeting link)

• Starter: $15 per seat per month, billed annually

• Professional: $90 per seat per month, billed annually

• Enterprise: $150 per seat per month, billed annually

Calendly + HubSpot: Better scheduling across your entire organization

If your sales or customer success team already uses HubSpot CRM, sticking with the built-in meeting scheduler might seem like your best bet. But for organizations looking for easy, efficient scheduling across departments, adding Calendly to your tech stack is a smart choice. 

Calendly is intuitive enough for individual users, scalable enough for small businesses, and powerful enough to meet the needs of enterprise organizations — including four out of five Fortune 500 companies. And when you integrate Calendly with your HubSpot CRM, your team can save time, close deals faster, and create a better customer experience.

See how more than 100,000 companies simplify scheduling and delight their customers. Request a Calendly demo.