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Calendly vs Clara Labs: What are the differences?
Developers describe Calendly as "Simple, beautiful scheduling. Say goodbye to phone and email tag for finding the perfect meeting time". Spend 1 minute telling Calendly your availability preferences. Share your personal Calendly page with clients, colleagues, students, etc. Invitees visit your Calendly page to pick an acceptable time, and event is added to your calendar. On the other hand, Clara Labs is detailed as "Intelligent personal assistant that manages your calendar". Clara is an intelligent personal assistant that manages your calendar.
Calendly and Clara Labs can be categorized as "Meeting Scheduling" tools.
Some of the features offered by Calendly are:
- Save time - Say goodbye to email and phone tag. Get more done with time saved.
- Sell more - More high quality client interactions in less time = $$$
- Improve service - Make it super easy for customers to connect with you.
On the other hand, Clara Labs provides the following key features:
- Delegate the mental overhead of calendaring. CC Clara on your email thread, let go of anxiety around follow-ups, time-zone conversions, cancellations and rescheduling.
- Specify your preferences and control when and where meetings get scheduled. No more time gaps or context-switching and plenty of time to do productive work.
- Use the tools and processes you're used to. Clara integrates seamlessly with existing CRM tools and automated sales pipelines. Clara is on 24/7, and an account manager is always available.
I'm looking for a solution to help me do calendar management in my system (something like Calendar as a Service).
Some of the features that I would need are:
- Ability to create a calendar for every user in my system.
- Allow everyone to set their availability and Off Days. They should also be able to change the availability for a specific day.
- Ability for the system to book a timeslot on any of the user's calendars.
- Ability to check conflicts before booking a slot.
- Ability to get notified via Webhooks whenever someone cancels the already booked slots.
I don't need a UI. I can use any readily available Calendar UI Component. All I need is a service that can provide APIs to manage multiple calendars (one of each user in my system).
I've explored Calendly, but it requires every user within my system to have an account on Calendly as well. So it's not going to work for me.
Currently, I'm exploring Calendso, but I would appreciate it if you could share any other services you are familiar with that I should explore for this use case.
Good questions, Sarang. Personally, I think your requirements raise more questions. First of all, you've already mentioned that Calendly won't work for you, so I'll not dive further into Calendly for you.
Calendso has rebranded to cal.com and I'm looking into what that service does exactly.
I have a longer list of tools at https://yoursales.com/sales-stack-2021#scheduling with more detailed comparison at https://tech.yoursales.com/scheduling .
Your requirements: Ability to create a calendar for every user in my system: most calendar tools should be able to do that.
Allow everyone to set their availability and Off Days. They should also be able to change the availability for a specific day: This seems quite possible as well with most calendar systems.
Ability for the system to book a timeslot on any of the user's calendars: You mean, in random fashion, like round-robin or as the person scheduling decides???
Ability to check conflicts before booking a slot:: This seems quite possible as well.
Ability to get notified via Webhooks whenever someone cancels the already booked slots: This seems quite possible as well.
For your setup you need a few components. At minimum you need a calendar and a scheduler. Typically those to are separate.
Calendaring would be done by Google Calendar, some sort of Microsoft product, or a CalDav compatible calendar system.
The scheduling system is separate and connects to either of the calendaring systems mentioned above. The tools you mentioned in your original post are scheduling systems, which leaves another question: which calendar system would you like to use?
Pros of Calendly
- Different meeting URLs4
- Google Calendar integration2
- Ability to block off times2
- Great for coordinating across timezones2
- Google analytics integration1
- Easy Payments1
