Calendly vs. Doodle: Which scheduling tool should you choose?

Calendly and Doodle are two of the most popular group scheduling apps on the market. While both tools offer solutions to streamline your scheduling process, there are some notable differences when it comes to meeting types, integrations, automation, and user experience. 

In this guide, we’ll break down the main differences between Calendly and Doodle, so you can choose the best tool for your business.

What scheduling features do Calendly and Doodle have in common? 

Calendly and Doodle save time by eliminating the hassle of scheduling meetings. Both online scheduling tools offer:

• Booking pages and scheduling links that make it easy for invitees to see your availability and schedule meetings

• Calendar connections to avoid double bookings

• Scheduling for one-on-one meetings

• Pooled availability for co-hosted meetings

• Meeting poll features that let invitees vote on group meeting times

• Automatic time zone detection

• Control over your schedule with buffer times, daily meeting limits, and minimum booking notice

• Custom branding options

• An integration with Stripe to collect payments at booking

• Mobile apps for easy scheduling on the go

• A free plan with basic scheduling features

Top differences between Calendly and Doodle

Calendly supports more complex scheduling scenarios

While Doodle and Calendly both support one-on-one and team scheduling, Doodle is known first and foremost for its polling functionality. Calendly’s team scheduling features make it easy to schedule multi-person meetings with any combination of attendees. 

Here are a few examples of complex scheduling situations where Calendly has the edge:

Round-robin scheduling: With Calendly’s Round Robin Event Types, 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. Doodle doesn’t offer round-robin scheduling.

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.

“Now that we’ve implemented Calendly’s routing feature with Salesforce integration, demos are always booked with the correct AE, reducing friction for both our team and the customer.”

Abbie Deaver

Director of Marketing at RCReports

Doodle doesn’t have any built-in routing capabilities.

Single-use links: Want more control over who can book with you? With Calendly, you can create single-use scheduling links that expire as soon as an invitee schedules a meeting. Doodle doesn’t support single-use links, so anyone who has your booking link can schedule a meeting with you, whether they’re your intended invitee or not.

Calendly works where you work (100+ integrations)

Doodle offers native integrations with video conferencing software and Stripe payment processing. You’ll need to use Zapier to connect any other tools.

Calendly offers 100+ integrations, including the software you and your team use every day:

• Calendar integrations (Office 365, Google Calendar, Outlook, Exchange)

• Video conferencing (Zoom, GoToMeeting, Webex, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams)

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

• Recruiting software and applicant tracking systems (ATSs) (Greenhouse and JazzHR)

• PayPal and Stripe, so you can collect payments at booking (Doodle only offers Stripe)

“There is so much to love! The ease of use for you and your customers, the integrations … these tools will absolutely save you time and help you become more efficient in how you operationalize your calls and meetings across the board.”

Tiffany Keel

Head of Customer Advocacy, Product Marketing at ClickUp

Website embed options: Calendly also makes it easy to add appointment scheduling to your website, so visitors can book with you at the height of their interest. Website embeds are available on all Calendly plans — including the free plan! — and they’re easy to add with a simple line of code. No extra plugins necessary. Doodle doesn’t offer a website embed option.

Apps and extensions: With mobile apps for iOS and Android, and browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, Calendly works where you work. Calendly for Gmail (part of the Chrome extension) and the Outlook add-in make it easy to add available times to emails, so recipients can instantly book meetings right from their inbox.

Doodle only offers a mobile app for Android and iOS and an Outlook add-in. Without the browser extensions, you’ll be doing a whole lot of toggling between tabs to find your scheduling links.

Calendly offers an easier, more professional scheduling experience

Automated meeting reminders and follow-ups: Calendly Workflows let you automate any pre- and post-meeting communications, including reminder texts, thank-you emails, follow-up meeting requests, and more. You can automatically send notifications to hosts and attendees before and after meetings, which is a great way to reduce no-shows, share helpful resources, and move deals forward.

The only automated notification you can send via Doodle is a confirmation email when a meeting is booked. Doodle offers no text message reminders, and you can’t automate any post-event communications, including follow-ups. 

User experience: The free version of Doodle shows third-party ads across the scheduling experience for both hosts and invitees, so you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan for a more professional scheduling experience. Calendly’s clean UI — including on the free plan — makes it easy to use and scalable for organizations of any size.

Cancellations and rescheduling are also part of the scheduling experience, especially as your business grows and you’re booking more meetings. If you need to cancel or reschedule a meeting booked through Doodle, the UX gets a little tricky:

• Meeting organizers can’t reschedule meetings themselves — they need to cancel the meeting and book a new one, or ask the participant to do it using the rescheduling link in the invite.

• A booked one-on-one event can’t be canceled through Doodle; instead, both host and invitee need to delete it from their calendars.

• When you delete that event from your calendar, Doodle won’t free up that time slot for others to book.

You shouldn’t have to spend time on manual workarounds. Calendly lets meeting hosts reschedule and cancel meetings directly from their calendar or from the app. Calendly also offers the option to include cancellation and rescheduling links in your calendar invites and notifications. When something comes up, it’s easy to make adjustments and keep scheduling simple for hosts and invitees.

“When we presented [scheduling platform] options, Calendly was the one that was simultaneously the easiest to use and the friendliest. It had the best UX, but also, it was the thing that resonated with people the most: 'I like to work in this application.'”

Zlatko Unger

IT Director at Alation, Inc.

Doodle vs. Calendly: Which tool should you choose?

If you’re looking for group polling and simple scheduling, and you don’t mind a more limited feature set, Doodle can be an OK Calendly alternative. However, as your business and scheduling needs grow, Doodle may feel restrictive, especially when it comes to integrations, automations, and a professional scheduling experience.

With 100+ integrations, lead routing, website embeds, automated notifications, and more, Calendly is designed to tackle your team’s most complex scheduling scenarios. The platform is user-friendly enough for individuals, scalable enough for small businesses, and powerful enough to meet the needs of enterprise organizations — including four out of five Fortune 500 companies.

See why over 20 million people rely on Calendly to simplify their scheduling. Request a demo.