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  •   5 min read

The Top 10 Meeting Scheduling Tools to Watch Out for in 2023

Gautham Nagaraj

ByGautham Nagaraj

Published January 23, 2023

meeting scheduling tools

Hunting for meeting scheduling tools a few years ago might not have given you too many options. But things are a lot different now. 

In a marketplace full of trusted as well as emerging tools that promise to automate meeting scheduling, how do you pick one that’s best for you? 

This post lists the top 10 meeting scheduling tools you should have an eye on this year.

Table of Contents

 

Why you need a meeting scheduler tool

Considering how the world has transitioned to a virtual/hybrid work environment, virtual meetings are literally part of a day’s work. Particularly in sales. Anyone who is a salesperson knows that booking a meeting is everything. 

We know how hard you had to work to get there and how many cold calls or emails you had to complete before you got the ‘I’m interested’. But once you do get there, it’s super important to make the process of booking a meeting completely frictionless. For your prospect and for yourself. 

This is best done when it’s automated and locked-in in a few clicks. If it takes more than one step for a meeting to get scheduled, the prospect might just decide it isn’t worth all that effort. This is where a meeting scheduling tool comes in handy. It lets you find a convenient slot for your prospect and yourself or your account executive - without going back and forth a bunch of times. In addition to this, such schedulers can also integrate hybrid meeting options so that those participants checking in remotely can use a QR code to check in while others attend the meeting from the physical location.

So your best bet is to invest in one.

Which one? 

As we said before, there are a lot of tools in the market today. In this post, we list the top 10 meeting scheduling tools you should keep your eye on this year if you’re on the lookout. 

Also, while we’re talking about a sales use case here, meeting scheduling tools are obviously relevant to any other business or function that involves a lot of conversations - recruiting, marketing, and more.

How we picked our top 10 meeting scheduling tools

Before we get into the list, let’s walk through the 3 things that make a meeting scheduling tool great. These three factors helped us narrow down our list to 10. 

Make sure that you have them in mind when you make your final selection as well to make sure you choose right for your specific needs. 

  • Ease - This one is a given. Your meeting scheduling tool has to be easy to implement, navigate and use. You should be able to configure it and add it wherever you need to (your email or website). And it should be able to do what it promised - make scheduling easy and instant. 
  • Value - When budgets are tight, a meeting scheduling tool might not be on the list of investment priorities. It needs to be at a price point that offers strong value for money to even be considered. 
  • Integrations - New tool 101 - anything you add to your current tech stack should integrate seamlessly and perfectly with it. The same goes for a new meeting scheduling tool. It needs to integrate with your existing platform as well as your emails. In the sales scenario, a meeting scheduling tool needs to integrate with every rep or account executive’s email account (Gmail or Outlook) and also with the sales engagement platform the team uses.

The top 10 meeting scheduling tools of 2023

Now let’s get into the list. Here are our picks for the top 10 meeting scheduling tools that should be on everyone’s radar in 2023.

 

1. Calendly

 

Calendly

Calendly is one of the OGs in meeting scheduling tools. It has a simple, calendar-like interface that helps a prospect (or candidate or whoever you’re interacting with) select a date, and pick from the option of available time slots that are displayed against that date. 

Cool features 

  • If there are multiple guests it lets you run polls to select a date and time and convert the top-voted one into a meeting for all
  • Lets you assign incoming meetings to a team member (say an Account Executive) in a round-robin manner based on who has immediate availability
  • Allows you to assign team members for group meetings, and inversely, let invitees book meetings with multiple team members 

Cost: Begins from a free basic plan and ranges to $16 /seat/month for team plans. Enterprise pricing (30+ seats) is on request.

 

2. Calendar

calendar

Calendar is another meeting scheduler tool that allows you to create open time slots and share slot-booking links with your invitees. Something everyone loves about Calendar is the extensive data it offers on the number and time spent on meetings, attendee stats, and so on. 

Cool features

  • Leverages AI to book meetings automatically based on your availability
  • Provides data-backed stats on how and where you spend your time most productively
  • Lets you set up multiple workplaces, each with different meeting rules, scheduling pages, and more - great for larger teams that need more customization

Cost: Begins from a free basic plan and ranges to $8 /seat/mo for the Pro plan (billed annually)

 

3. Outplay Meeting Scheduler

Outplay meeting scheduler

The Outplay Meeting Scheduler is the perfect meeting automation tool for sales teams. It not just offers seamless scheduling and routing capabilities, but it also helps you engage leads with multi-channel sequences and track them to closure. All from a single platform. 

Cool features

  • It has an integration with Outplay - your all-in-one sales stack that lets you prospect, engage, schedule, track, and sell from a single place
  • Embeds your calendar onto your website for quick access
  • Provides a single view of your calendar between invited prospects and teammates to schedules without clashes
  • Offers round-robin scheduling with custom lead routing rules to get the right people on board without liaising back and forth 
  • Lets you auto-distribute new leads to available team members to ensure quick action and equitable distribution
Outplay Meeting scheduler pricing table

Cost: A steal at $29 /month billed annually. Contact us for customizable plans.

 

4. Google Calendar

google calendar

If you have a Google account, you have a free calendar scheduler tool at hand. Along with helping you stay on top of your schedule, it also helps you share your calendar, schedule meetings & appointments, collaborate with teammates, and add Google Meet links seamlessly. While there might be a better fit for larger teams, it is a free tool that packs a punch for smaller teams.

Cool features

  • Let’s you share your calendar with teammates and view it against yours to schedule appropriately
  • The Find a Time  feature allows you to sync with all invitee calendars to propose a slot that works for all
  • It lets you customize time and location and also allows you to set reminders so you don’t miss a thing

Cost: Free but the Google Workspace subscription unlocks more features.

 

5. SavvyCal

savvvycal

SavyCal is a multi-purpose scheduling app that has a whole range of functionalities based on the plan you choose. From customizing meeting duration to locations, SavyCal covers the basics while also offering other use-case solutions like payment schedules. 

Cool features

  • Let you connect to your payment app (like Stipe) to schedule and collect payments 
  • Let you personalize meetings for guests by pre-filling their data 
  • Let’s you create polls to find a common time between invitees, and also allows an  overlay of the polling page on the invitees’ calendars to avoid double booking

Cost: Begins from a free basic plan and ranges to $20 /seat/month for the Premium plan.

 

6. Clara

Clara

We’re in the future and the future is AI. The meeting scheduling tool marketplace has got the memo. Clara is an AI-powered scheduling assistant that handles your meetings and back and forths for you. Down to writing your follow-up emails. It’s like having a virtual full-time team member when you don’t have the budget to hire one.

Cool features

  • Provides an email ID and customizable name for the virtual assistant. You just CC this ID onto your emails and Clara takes over the back and forth on arriving at a time slot and booking the meeting. 
  • Clara also drafts and sends follow-ups and reminder emails to help you stay on top of your schedule

Cost: This is a pricey tool. Pricing starts at $99/user/month. Right up to $399/user/month for the executive plan. And there’s no free plan.

 

7. Sidekick

Sidekick

This is a cool meeting scheduler tool for a hybrid workplace where teams have both in-person as well as virtual meetings as frequently. SideKick lets you schedule meetings using your favorite virtual tools (like Zoom or Google Meet), but it also lets you add the options of physical locations near you.

Cool features

  • Let you add physical locations with addresses to your SideKick dashboard and create specific scheduling pages for those locations 
  • You can sync your contacts and create contact groups 
  • Sidekick has an AI virtual assistant that you can use to schedule meetings when you get a meeting request

Cost: There’s a free plan and a ‘Superhero’ $5/month plan. An affordable option for small teams.

 

8. Motion

Motion

Another AI-powered offering, Motion isn’t just a calendar and meeting scheduler tool. It’s also a project management solution that aims to help you prioritize your meetings and get more productive. It helps you set your productive hours, and customize your bookings page as well.

Cool features

  • Enter your working hours, task, and priority level, and Motion’s AI will break it down for you and schedule it across your specified time-period
  • Motion’s dynamic calendar reorganizes itself based on the new tasks you add
  • Motion generates its own email script while scheduling replies

Cost: Their individual plan comes at $34/user/month ($19 billed annually) and the Team plan comes at $20/user/month ($12 billed annually).

 

9. OnceHub

oncehub

OnceHub is a meeting scheduling tool that works for a variety of different meeting scenarios - groups, panels, or one-on-ones. It also provides comprehensive data on your meetings to help you optimize timing and durations. 

Cool features

  • Has timezone recognition which is particularly handy if your team works in shifts or deals with invitees based in different locations
  • Let’s your invitees between booking a single meeting or multiple meeting sessions at the same time
  • Let you customize the kind of meetings and number of sessions you want to have in a day or week

Cost: Their free plan is up to 3 users and the Scheduled meeting ranges to 10/user/month.

 

10. Doodle

doodle

Doodle is a simple and easy-to-use meeting scheduling tool that solves the back-and-forths by letting you conduct polls. Doodle is the name most synonymous with poll-based meeting scheduling and is a low-effort way to get multiple attendees on the same page.

Cool features

  • Let’s you set poll deadlines and reminders for people who haven’t shared their responses
  • Updates invitees of the selected time slot and also blocks it on your calendar

Cost: Begins from a free basic plan and ranges to $8.95 /seat/month for team plans. Enterprise pricing is on request.

 

Embrace efficiency and master your meetings with Outplay

As you might have noticed, there are a whole bunch of meeting scheduling tools with some really cool capabilities. Each is defined for specific purposes. 

As a salesperson, we get that your aim is not just to schedule meetings as easily as possible, but also to continue the engagement till you convert the prospect into a customer. That’s why we created the Outplay Meeting Scheduler in the first place. 

To help you schedule your meetings, continue the multi-channel engagement, track responses, and sentiment, and swoop in with the finisher. All from a single platform. So check it out with a personalized demo.