Bookafy is an online appointment scheduling solution targeted at a variety of industries. The vendor’s value proposition is that their solution is simple to use, fully customizable, has an elegant user interface and can be embedded into the business user’s website. Support is available via phone, email or chat.
$9
per month
Zoho Calendar
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Zoho Calendar is an online business calendar designed to make scheduling easy. It can be used to stay on top of a schedule, or to share scheduled events with peers.
In my experience, Bookafy has pretty much the same features as the other well-known scheduling apps. In terms of functionality, the two obstacles I experience were setting up a hidden (not shown on the main booking page) meeting for special bonus calls you don't want anyone to have access to. Yes, you can set up a paid meeting and give someone a coupon to access it free but that seems like an extra unnecessary step. The other limitation was how ugly it looks to embed meetings on a website. The scheduler looks fine inside Bookafy, but when embedded, it doesn't flow as well. For everything else, it works well. If you want to sync the scheduler with email marketing systems, most of the integrations work through Zapier so that can be an additional cost. Bookafy focuses on the meeting schedules.
It is good for office use for keeping track of meetings and various important events. It is very nice to share a calendar with the whole team and the whole team has access to it, everyone can modify and update events. Furthermore, it is less appropriate when you use it on mobile, and it also cannot record the meetings.
I subscribe to Zoho One so I use many of the modules that come with that single subscription. I've had intermittent issues with scheduled Zoho Meetings through Zoho CRM not appearing in my Zoho Calendar. Zoho has been working on the issue but it will be fixed for a while and then I'll miss a meeting because it wasn't appearing.
Since there are lots of preference options, it can be a little confusing when setting up. It does integrate with other calendars where you can choose one or two way syncing which is helpful if you keep separate personal and work calendars. You can set your start day of the week which for me I have it set to Monday. There are also time zone options which are great but still a bit confusing to me.
Support has been excellent. As always, they are quickly responsive, and I feel they genuinely wish to address and fix any issues. It's unfortunate that my issues with meetings created in Zoho CRM don't always appear in my Zoho Calendar. While they mostly appear, my confidence level on any given week that I can see what is on my schedule is decidedly lacking.
Bookafy is more advanced and has more features that I need comparing to these other brands. Calendly is very basic while Bookfy offers more robust features.
Zoho calendar allows us to schedule, manage and track your appointment, meetings, birthdays, and other important dates. And also collaborate, share and publish your daily activities. Zoho Calendar also provides you to make it more creative by changing the themes. Event reminders are also available on Zoho Calendar, so we can be reminded either via email or through a pop-up about appointments, dates, milestones, and events. Reminders can pop up as early as 30 days before an event.
Once the meeting is created on the Zoho calendar, you don't need to remind invitees to join the meeting at a particular time or day. Zoho calendar does that for you.
If any invitees are unable to join the meeting, they can ask for a different time prior to that meeting.
Sometimes if many meetings are in the pipeline then there can be overlap.
