Calendso: An open source Calendly alternative | Hacker News Reader

Calendso: An open source Calendly alternative

calendso.com

311 pointsbaileypumfleet91 comments

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I have to echo everyone else here that the homepage could be much more effective.

My first impressions without scrolling:

* Calendso has something to do with calendars, based on the name.

* It has a popular paid competitor called Calendly.

* It's open source, and there is a hosted version as well.

I do not yet know what problem it is solving for me or its existing customers.

Scrolling down slightly further, I see the testimonials, and see people find it when looking for a "scheduling & booking platform". I assume that's what it is, but I don't know why I need a "scheduling & booking platform".

When I scroll further or click "Features", I am jumped down the page, and I find out it is easily customizable, and has a bunch of integrations. I don't entirely understand what I can do with it or how I can interact with it as a user.

I have never heard of Calendly, and thus head over to their website. The first thing I see is "Calendly helps you schedule meetings without the back-and-forth emails". Clicking their "Features" link, I find claims they are "The best automated scheduling software" and without scrolling I learn it "automatically check[s] availability and help[s] you connect with your best contacts, prospects and clients".

Based on my glance at Calendly, I'm not a potential customer or user, but I only learned that from your competitor, and I only learned about your competitor from you.

This is a tangent, but is there somewhere you can get this sort of feedback for your own apps/landing pages?

Clearly you can get it here. :) Post a "Show HN"?

Indiehackers community is sometimes helpful IMO

Find friends, the less familiar with the space the better. Ask them to write down facts about the product, in the order that they learn them. After each navigation, ask them to summarize what the product is and what problems it solves.

That’s basically the approach I took when writing that up.

I think the unfamiliarity is the most important part. It’s incredibly easy to be blind to what you know and others don’t. It also simulates a non interactive cold sell for the product, as opposed to trying to convince your competitor’s customers to jump ship.

You can post and seek feedback at IndieHackers site.

Have a look at https://www.roastmylandingpage.com/ and https://www.usertesting.com/

This describes also my "journey" within the homepage, to the letter.

I see this often on similar small product homepages. Many of them describe the product for someone already familiar with it, and could do with taking a step back and trying to describe it for someone who, figuratively speaking, accidentally stumbled onto it and has no idea what's going on.

Came here to write the same.

Have you considered that in some cases (though probably not Calendso's), that may be on purpose?

The VC crowd would have you believe that every product must disrupt the whole world – for the casual visitor, their gradma and their dog.

But niche products have to ward off tyre-kickers and what-if time-wasters, as much as entice their target audience. Using industry-specific jargon kills both flies at once.

If you "don't get it", you may not be the target audience.

Exactly. Home page belongs to the marketing team, not to engineering, and those wizards of target audiences quite often find counter-intuitive ways to reach their goals. If message „we are like X, but better“ gets visits and reaches the expected conversion rates, then who we are to challenge that work?

This is our strategy exactly. We get a lot of outsiders or investors critiquing that we have industry jargon on our landing page that only insiders understand. That is 100% by design.

Not only does it signal to insiders that we know what we are talking about and that our software was built with them in mind, but it also scares away people that it is not built for. Which helps us avoid answering countless inquiries as to whether this software can work for this or that.

Thanks, I haven't considered this angle. Although I loathe the fact that it works like this - deliberately lowering information value of a page giving you an advantage. It feels scummy.

But hey, if it brings more money, it's justified, right? :/

I'm am curious how it feels scummy, especially in the information age with the world's knowledge available at your fingertips. Seriously, it's 4 clicks, to select the word Calendly, right click, and search Google.

Not to make it personly, but eg, you spent zero space in your comment defining the meaning of the word "scummy". Adding a definition of the word scummy would, from an abstract angle, raise the information content of your comment. It doesn't seem scummy (at least to me) that you assumed all readers would know what that word means, even considering that readers here may not have English as their first language, and thus might NOT know what the word means. At some level, we just accept that people know things, sometimes unevenly, and it's not at all 'scummy' to withhold 'known' information.

The other thing here is that there's a difference between information amount, and information value - and there's an unappreciated value in NOT having something. The principle of "less is more" holds here. Calendly or this clone doesn't explain everything. It doesn't talk about what a Computer is, or what the Internet is or the history of APIs.

This happens to me with so many new services. I guess a lot of people will just leave because they don't understand what it's about even if it's something they might actually want to use.

I think you and others on this thread are being much too harsh on their messaging.

Most people who have the need this product is meeting will have already encountered Calendly as it is ubiquitous in the space. It's basically a generic term like "Zoom" at this point. "I'll send you my Calendly link" is something people will understand to mean send you a meeting scheduling link.

So "An open source Calendly alternative" is quite clear for most people who want to make use of this.

Their messaging is focused on reaching people who might use it, not the people who won't. As you note, after going through the site, the product is not something relevant to you.

yeah, it's pretty much how "Twitter clone" tells you as much about the expected feature set as half a page on microblogging, follow and share protocols, tagging and push notifications.

I think they could improve the below-the-fold description quite a bit, but the two words "Calendly alternative" convey the important bit about it being a customer-facing time-slot picker that connects to all your calendars, CRMs and webconferencing tools more precisely than "appointment scheduler" which might miss these features and lock you into various others, and probably gets more relevant search traffic too.

A strange take to say that was too harsh, when, the whole point was that it could be clearer? That's rather mild and constructive.

The counter argument that clear communication isn't all that necessary, because the people looking to receive this knowledge already should know this?

the message is clear, if you're in the target group.

that's good communication.

filters out non-prospects early.

Maybe I missed a sarcasm tag, but I found your statement to be puzzling, for a lack of less kind words.

What I'm saying, and others are saying, is that even for someone looking for exactly this, it would be easier for that person to know they found exactly this, with a more clear message about what this is.

And what you seem to be saying, unless I misunderstood, is that this is a good thing? Surely the non-prospects as you put it, would also more easily find themselves being non-prospects if they knew what this was?

Just in case this is perceived as stemming from annoyance, I can assure you that I'm not at all invested. However, I do find your take, puzzling. I hope this isn't a trend in IT-solution marketing I'm not aware of.

The 'trend' is that as an open source clone, Calendso doesn't have a marketing team behind it, so it's entirely true to point out that their landing page doesn't have the polish we've come to expect of a VC-backed unicorn company with a time-proven, expensive marketing firm taking pictures and writing website copy, and that it could do better.

What I think some are reacting to is that it's also unfair to expect that. The person looking for an "open-source Calendly alternative" knows they've found that because that's going to be what, by brand name, what they're looking for and will know they've found something that addresses that need, with those three words.

I'm honestly just confused by the comments here. No one is having unmet high expectations. There is also nothing unfair here.

You don't need a marketing team to write a single line giving a high-overview description of a solution. Pointing out that such a thing would be helpful is also absolutely ridiculous to reject to the extent as I've seen here.

If an open source project want to identify themselves exclusively through a competitor, then, I'm sure that's fine. However, to avoid sounding like a parrot, I'll leave it at that. Have a nice day

its not a trend. but when a project is early you don't want mass appeal. you want narrow appeal, only the folks that "lean in". so then you get a solid base to build from.

they are at level-1 and you are clearly a prospect once they are level-3+

and this is a good thing. for an early stage prospects like you are noise. filtering you out early improves their value chain (for now).

their message should (must) change as they grow to eventually attract the L2 and L3 type prospects

Wow. Maybe take a break, walk or smoke. The only thing I can really take from this long post is that you didn't know the category of product before. So, you don't work as coach, consultant, recruiter or similar. That's fine.

If you are not a customer and the page makes you not want to engage further, then it is a good page, isn't it?

Also, what's up with this stock photo suddenly appearing halfway down the page?

https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1556761175-5973dc0f32e7

It's some picture of employees of "proof" (juding by the "proof.quip.com" URL in the guy's browser) watching a presentation by a guy in shorts holding a small statue of a whale with legs? What does that have to do with a calendar?

I think their home page is just fine given Calendly's market position and level of stagnation. Will be trying Calendoso today as it will not only save my company money, but will enable some very powerful new workflows.

I agree with everything you have written and I would also suggest that they improve the video. It has the same shortcomings as the rest of the website and the charts presented are totally meaningless without proper axes and axes titles.

As a counterpoint, I instantly knew 90% what this was by using the term.

Got a laugh out of the header "Works with all of your favourite tools", listing Google Calendar and five "coming soon"s.

The product could do with a better slogan. Calling yourself "like X, but different" is a terrible strategy if someone like myself encounters your website having never heard of X. I don't know what Calendy is and I'd have to Google your competitor to find out what your product is offering...

The demo is intuitive but I have no idea what timezone these times and dates are in. I'd guess they're in my timezone, but if they are, consider explicitly telling users that.

This looks like a very nice tool that a lot of websites can make great use of. Due to covid restrictions, stores in my country need to reserve time slots for a limited amount of visitors if they want to open. This tool can offer exactly what nearly every store here needs for an affordable price, assuming those stores haven't found an alternative solution yet.

> Making calendar scheduling work for everyone.

Well... if that were the case then this would support caldav as an open standard or at the very least mention it- as it stands it only seems to support Google Calendar. And all other (prorietary) solutions this software wants to integrate with are marked "coming soon".

For a claims like

> Our mission is to connect a billion people by 2031.

and

> What email has done to communication, we hope Calendso will do to meetings.

Thats not a lot.

Anyway I tried to run it.

This is a step that should not be neccessary

> 7. Open the prisma schema with [Prisma Studio](https://www.prisma.io/studio)

to manually create a user in the database - presumably there is a way to have prisma create an initial "admin" (or other) user without making me drop into a database shell.

Once in in I tried to add a google calendar, but that gave me a big red JSON error.

This software seems to not be in a usable state.

You skipped the best (worst) part:

> 9. Fill out the fields (remembering to encrypt your password with BCrypt)

That's... A lot of manual work for something that surely is implemented in the code anyway (initialize a user).

This really needs CalDAV integration to be interesting for either enterprise or personal use.

Especially with marketing like "Built for teams that need more control", "we're committed to give developers, small businesses and enterprise the power to connect with anyone and make friends or business", "Calendso comes with plenty of integrations, as well as the ability to build custom integrations for any platform out there"...

When I try the product by clicking on to booking your time [1], my first question that pops up in my head is: What is the time zone? I couldn't find this information anywhere. Thanks

[1] https://app.calendso.com/bailey/1

Also, what an odd calendar layout. Starting with the first day of the month at the top left means all the days are off for most months. Why would Thursday be at the very left side (as is the case in April)??

(I was initially trying to find out if the layout was Sunday or Monday starting, but apparently it's neither)

I have never in my life used a calendar with such an annoying layout. Why would they omit the Day and then misalign the Dates for the month.

This bit makes me think the project is very early days, not ready for adoption - or for the sharp eye of HN feedback - yet. This weirdness is surely an obvious blocker to most/all possible users, but a team (open source or otherwise) can't do everything on day 1.

Still, I'll bookmark Calenso for a look later!

Good catch, I just opened a ticket for this: https://github.com/calendso/calendso/issues/24.

Congrats on launching - this looks very promising!

I immediately understood what this was. That is not a brag at all, but I just happen to be a paying user of Calendly, so "Open source Calendly" was perfect for me.

I an curios to see how complicated it is to wire it up with Coogle Calendar and Office365 connections.

I will take it for a spin. :)

It took me quite a long time to find out what the product actually does. There is a lot of info on why to choose it, but only a quote from a customer mentions that it is a "scheduling & booking platform".

I'm still not sure that's what it is, but I'll take Mehmet Arziman's word for it.

Looking very promising, I'll definitely try this once it develops a bit more. Some things echoed by others as well:

- Need clarity/support for timezones (this is critical)

- Months need to be laid out correctly

- I looked around for a bit and didn't at first find any demo, until then I realized it was embedded in the page! Add a link in the navbar that says "Demo" that takes you to that page, and a big demo above the one on the front page saying "Demo:"

- "Open source Calendly alternative" might be a good start as long as you're still piggy-backing off Calendly's hard work in popularizing this kind of idea, but eventually you want to start defining your own product and stand on your own two legs

- I love the pretty design!

I used to work at Calendly (fantastic company out of atlanta).

Around the "rudeness" of back and forth in Calendly. One of the most powerful features we built was the ability to show availability both ways. Meaning if the person who is booking with you has Calendly too, they will be able to see times where both you and them are available - which I think helps with the booking etiquette since Calendly will save time for both parties. It's a powerful feature since it makes it becomes more useful the more Calendly becomes the de facto scheduling platform (chances that someone you send a Calendly link also has Calendly grows)

I may be wrong, but I think the overwhelming majority of meetings are sufficiently asymmetrical that one side will not have the need to put their free time in a calendar.

Example: my manager is in meetings most of the day, with the meetings scheduled via outlook invites, so his free time is pretty specified in his work calendar. The majority of his direct reports do not have their free time specified in their work calendars.

I'm fine with him sending calendly links though -- and I get the impression that's the common view on the team. None of us want to be in meetings all day, so having to hunt through his calendar from time to time is far preferred.

Your webpage seems nice. But what does it do? The features list mentions a lot of integrations, some only by icon. But I could not where find a succinct description of what it actually does. I've never heard of calendly. So reading it is the same as calendly doesn't really help. Unless you want your visitor go check calendly to find out what it does.

> I've never heard of calendly.

You’re probably not the target audience then. Calendly is a $3 billion bootstrapped company, it has plenty of users. I’m relying on it increasingly week after week.

Yeah, I had to look up Calendly too to find out what this does. Definitely one thing to improve.

Looks promising, was considering using Calendly for a SaaS app I just launched to book demos but will give Calendso a try.

Was wondering if there was an integration with Salesforce via Zapier.

I think you could do that via a webhook

Oh I see now, thank you for having spotted this!

Congratulations on launching. My (small) startup is a Calendly user for our sales and support staff. What would cause me to switch from Calendly to your product?

I would never want to self host this. We're a small team, and no one technical wants to manage yet another server, nor do we want the responsibility for when something screws up and a salesperson misses a demo or a support staff member isn't reminded about a training session.

The pricing isn't that competitive with Calendly ($3/user/month savings) which would translate to a savings of $108 annually for us, not enough to justify switching.

I feel pitching this as an open source alternative to Calendly is the wrong angle. The only people who care about open source are developers who are the least likely people to need scheduling software. And people who do need Calendly aren't going to be moved to switch because Calendly works well enough already.

Finally, the copy at the bottom of the page reads:

> For instance, booking a COVID vaccine shouldn't happen on a server in another country that somebody else is in control of.

Are people using Calendly to book COVID vaccines? If I used your product instead, wouldn't I still be booking a vaccine on someone else's server?

I wish any small competitor success against a large incumbent, but I would radically change my approach to compete against Calendly.

Self Hosting always implies more work, generally its attractive to entities that have data protection requirements. Them offering a hosted alternative is a proven business model (Gitlab for example).

This. I operate in a regulated environment, self-hosting is critical unless I sign a BAA. Even then, I'm risk-averse to allowing PHI to escape the bounds of my sandbox.

Nextcloud also has an app called Appointments now that does this: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/appointments

Might be interesting for people who need CalDAV support.

Fancy website that does not work in my Firefox and does not work in my Chrome and does not work in my Safari.

The content is only shortly visible and then immediately fades away.

Please, less fancy for more better UI and accessibility.

Have to refresh, it did that to me. I think it might be uBlock or decentraleyes, or just a broken site :)

Yeah, on the first load I actually ended up with a completely empty page. Only on a reload I actually saw the content, and it still shows up painfully late when scrolling around (and disappears?!).

Like, it's not even that important. Just disable the effects, and you'll improve the presentation 100x.

it's working for me. even with uBlock

I've tested it on Chrome, Firefox and Safari and all three work. We've removed the animations regardless. Does it work now?

Works great for me, this is of course after you disabled the animations. Quick work! And a much needed idea and nice site :)

FYI: On the landing page I was able to book an appointment without filling in a name or email address - at least it told me that the booking is confirmed - not sure if that is on purpose.

Seems interesting (looked at it on ProductHunt since Website was broken for me as well).

A well working scheduling, open-source tool would be great. And I also read that you can integrate it easily into other stuff?

I applaud this project! I think there's a huge appetite for this sort of thing, and I think you're starting off well.

Some feedback: 1) It seems premature to launch without API docs for an API driven product (or, at least, I couldn't find them)

2) The choice of React for UI seems strange since this is intended to be embedded within other apps. Wouldn't Web Components have been a better choice?

3) Not being able to specify timezone in a calendar app is a deal-killer for most, I would think.

4) The installation instructions state that you add your first user manually in the database. This would be fine for pre-alpha software, but seems a bit rough for 1.0 - though I understand that your business model isn't focused on the self-hosted

5) The primary reason I'm interested in the product is because I'm a CTO for healthcare companies. HIPAA compliance is top of my list of priorities. I love that you call it out in your "enterprise" offering, but it would be helpful (to me) to have more details about what the difference in offering is as well as pricing for HIPAA compliance. What are you doing differently for hosting in that case? Is it single-tenant?

Very cool product, I'm looking forward to seeing it evolve!

Am I the only person who hates receiving calend.ly links?

I know it's unreasonble, but I find it somehow rude when someone asks me to go hunting around in their calendar, even though it's more efficient than agreeing on meeting slots.

I have even passed on some good opportunities simply because I have an aversion to calend.ly!

I have an aversion to sending them and always say: "Hey, I'm happy to work a time out over email, or if it's easier for you here's my [link]"

That problem is being solved by Derrick Reimer with https://savvycal.com/

I'm intrigued by the proposition but I don't understand in which way this is any different from calendly.

That said, despite a brief first negative emotional response (like the parent said, it kind of feels impersonal), my rational side appreciates the convenience of calendly and not having to type more emails to agree on time.

I don't particularly mind it, mostly because as you mentioned, it is much easier, as long as the sender is aware that it doesn't always work; a Calendly link isn't the solution to every scheduling situation.

It also has to be sent with some sort of message/introduction, otherwise yes, it does feel like I'm being pushed aside.

Finally, the person sending the Calendly link has to keep their calendar actually up to date. There is nothing worse than setting an appointment through Calendly, and then being told "Oh sorry, I actually have a conflict".

I think the "rudeness" interpretation comes from an interpretation that the person sending it "doesn't care enough", which isn't always true.

I’m the opposite. I hate when people don’t use Calendly or the like. The back and forth is time consuming. I like the ability to choose a time and always receive a calendar invite (so I don’t have to create one).

I like this, and the fact that it is self-hostable (I have a project that I was considering trying to integrate with Calendly, but this looks like a significantly better option for my use case), but I do have one comment about the pricing: there doesn't seem to be any type of trial/free-tier.

Yes, I could go to the effort of deploying it myself to try it out, but that is still significantly more effort than just signing in and trying it out.

It feels like there is a very large gap between "It's free forever by self hosting" and "12/user/month".

I'm not suggesting that you have to have a free-tier-forever kind of plan, just that the requirement of hosting it yourself just to be able to poke around at it is a pretty high bar (especially if someone had to pay someone else to install/set it up for them).

Rome wasn't built in a day.

imho: * Calendso has the potential to become an interstellar spaceship, whenever it comes to scheduling a meeting without hassle.

* Aggressive marketing/"comparing" is not my style - prefer a more subtil way. Can you push the first version of your spaceship to pole position "comparing". yes. Will it work, maybe. At least you are in the race.

>So "An open source Calendly alternative" is quite clear for most people who want to make use of this.

ack.

* Knowing the team behind, the mentioned shortcomings will be resolved asap

* I18N is on the roadmap/in the pipeline

> 9. Fill out the fields (remembering to encrypt your password with BCrypt)

Find this normal. Do this often. Has room for improvement. Sure. Will be improved, sure.

imho: The most important thing about calendso is how much heart and love the team is putting into it. I can feel that. It makes me feel humble.

Go, go, go ... and stay safe.

I hate Calendly.

I don’t exactly know why. The UI is nice, being able to pick a date is cool, and automated calendar invite does work. There is just something that tickle in the wrong way. Mostly because these don’t get updated seriously, you can’t pick any dates shown as available in reality. It’s also a little passive agressive when finding a date/time that works is really not that hard. It feels like a technological solution to a human communication problem. Just get better at communicating! Suggest two dates/time that works for you well and you think should also work for the other person and it often does!

Communication is the toughest problem to solve in human history.

>Suggest two dates/time that works for you well and you think should also work for the other person and it often does!

This assumes that both participants have their calendars under control and in their mind. This is impossible for someone like myself so I heavily lean on my EAs or automated scheduling tools for individuals to schedule time with me.

Making the assumption you work in software and not in sales. Do you need that many meetings? It feels if your calendar seems uncontrollable, you probably need to start say no to meetings.

I’m in management. The meetings are crucial so my teams can be productive.

It’s impossible to keep my calendar in my head because I require a mandatory 4 days of notice before scheduling a one off meeting so I would be tasked with keeping the next 30 days of events to be able to schedule time on my own.

That's a very quick diagnosis, that all their users just have a communication problem.

Calendly can be used to hold office-hours, and to allow users or customers an easy way to get face time with you.

Also, I have a lot of acquaintances that are always busy, and scheduling with them can often take several ping-pong hits. I like the idea of a software taking care that of that hassle for us.

Love the look and feel, love the page, love that it is open source. The one thing I wonder about is whether this is something anybody would pay for. I mean, if GCal would have a github project, this would be a single `feature request` type Issue. And to most people both GCal (everywhere) and Outlook (at work) are free suites. If a user sees the whole suite as a product, then why would he pay for a single feature? And if the whole suite is already "free" in the mind of the user, doesn't that make it a lot harder?

Maybe it would make sense as component of a niche-market CRM solution?

People pay for Calendly, so obviously there’s a market of people who would pay for it?

As this is HN, to the authors, if they're reading this -- I know you may be getting some pretty critical feedback here (hopefully it's useful!) but I will say this would have handily solved an 8 figure problem for me at a previous company. There are a lot of companies where scheduling appointments in many ways /is/ the product -- being able to have good open source tooling for appointment scheduling is worth its weight in gold. I would definitely have sprung for something like this if it was available in, oh, 2017. Keep going!

Congrats on releasing it. You definitely see how much work went into Calendly once you parse Calendso's source code. But where there's a will there's a way. Super excited what's possible with Calendso.

I made a quick video to explore the open source project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaIQhG8AL0w

Great product, much awaited! Feature request: Maybe consider adding terraform scripts or such for easier self hosting?

There's a long list of simple features that calend.ly users have been asking for a long time. There is a good opportunity to capture by offering them. Top of my list: limit the total number of hours that can be booked per day.

Can doctors use calendly or this? I don't think there are HIPPA concerns with appointment schedules and it sure would be nicer that the existing process where you call 5 places to find they're not accepting patients.

> I don't think there are HIPPA concerns with appointment schedules

I'm not so sure. The frequency/duration of appointments would be juicy information for insurance companies, future employers, etc.

Unfortunately, no, those solutions are not built for medical purposes. Even a small practice usually has different types of appointments with different durations and requiring different resources (e.g. some basics can be done by a nurse and many appointments won’t block your X-rays room). Decent appointment management system (AMS) should be not only compliant with data protection regulations, but also have a good feature set. There are companies like Doctolib in Europe, which build AMS specifically for the healthcare. The company where I work as a CTO decided in the end to build our own AMS to be able to optimize the show rate and to connect AMS to our marketing and ERP - we were not satisfied by anything we have seen on the market. We are still active users on Calendly nevertheless - it is a good tool for scheduling job interviews and calls with external partners. Would be interesting to see UVP of Calendso in this field.

Click on "Get Started" and I have to fill out a survey? And after I finish filling it out, nothing happens. What a horrible workflow. I would expect that "Get Started" take me to installation instructions.

Looks great! A tool like this which a business uses to interact with prospects and customers needs to be rock solid. Please prioritize stability over features.

Does it offer multi-language support, or is it English only? I couldn't find that information anywhere.

https://youtu.be/gPUVKcM4ug8?t=109

"we have a whole host of features on our roadmap that have all been suggested and voted on by the community which we plan to bring in the near future"

One of the features displayed is multilingual support, but may not be available right now according to the vid.

We started investigation on o365 integration.

This is a great start. I’m going to try it.

does calendso provide an api to embed calendly like functionality into an app ?

Thanks for making this

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