Calendly vs. Conga Advantage CPQ vs. Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace company

It's well suited for music students' lessons. It's well suited for online coaching, primarily through places like Zoom and more. It helps simplify things for your clients, lets you program your schedule, and allows it all to go automatically! If you are working with a senior population, it may be a little tricky for them to sign up and then really hard for them to cancel lessons. There isn't a way to go to the site and cancel. You have to pull up the confirmed email and cancel from there, but people can lose emails.

Incentivized

It is well suited to providing quick pricing recommendations, allowing those who are quoting to get our agreements out efficiently. Where I find there may be some limitations is around the details that it uses to establish recommendations and the overrides. For example it would be nice to have a way to set overrides for those criteria like length of agreement, etc. and have it apply across the board

Incentivized

I think any business can benefit from Acuity Scheduling. In my experience, however, and maybe I just haven’t found the correct settings yet, it’s been difficult to manage 4 business schedules with multiple employees and varying hours that change day-to-day and week-to-week. So I definitely would recommend it to more simple business models with set hours, as it seems like it would have all the functions one might need. I still would recommend to more complex businesses like mine as well, but also include discussion of some of the potential drawbacks.

Incentivized

• Sync with multiple calendar types so my schedule is always current.
• Integration with Zoom to schedule meetings, send invites, and populate my Zoom app accordingly.
• Automatic email communication to all parties with all relevant details in a clear format.
• Allowing team members to do the same in a way that I'm also notified of what meetings are taking place saves a lot of time in terms of coordinating to find out what other people are doing.
• Well-designed interface that simplifies everything down to its clearest expression. Language instruction and interaction are wonderfully simple and clear.

Incentivized

• The perceived power strength is that it is supposed to contain CPQ, Contract Management, Document generation and template manipulation, and cash/invoice process all in one wrapped package.
• It was developed on the Force.com platform.
• They provide multiple releases of their product per year.

Incentivized

• Clicking on the link opens up my calendar, which has an uncluttered look, making it easy for my prospects and clients to review their options and make their choice.
• I am able to customize my schedule, the types of appointments I want to offer, and even decide how many appointments I want in a day. There are so many details that I can customize.
• I can customize how my calendar and emails look for my prospects and clients so that I come across professional and coordinated. I want the look of my business, website, etc. to have a polished, cohesive, and interesting presence.
• I love that there is a workshop/class/series option for my workshops. My attendees reserve their place and pay upfront. I can duplicate these events or add future dates. It's wonderful. This saves us a lot of time and is so convenient.
• I haven't had any trouble with my scheduler. It works flawlessly, so I don't have to take time out of my day to fix, troubleshoot or call customer service.
• I love that I can add questions for my prospects to answer right away before booking a call. This means 3 fewer steps for me. 1. They answer these questions without an email from me. 2. They make their reservation and get a follow-up email, right away. 3. I customized the follow-up email with more details and actions to take to prepare for our call.

Incentivized

• After a meeting is booked, having the ability to change the location without canceling the entire booking.
• Being able to offer 2 different locked in locations for certain time periods of the day within the same event. So you're not having to create 2 events for the same thing, only different locations.
• Giving users permission to create their own routing forms. We run an independent business model where our users like to have control over their subscriptions.

Incentivized

• Our number one complaint with Conga CPQ has been speed. In my experience, Conga CPQ is extremely slow, especially for large orders.
• In my opinion, the configuration methods of Conga CPQ are outdated and error-prone. One literally puts configurations into string-based custom settings, including the API field names. This often leads to deployment issues and run-time configuration errors.
• In my experience, Conga CPQ is everything but simple to develop. You need things like a 12-step pricing callback to support custom pricing.
• In my experience, Conga CPQ support is not responsive.
• When it comes time to lock in a renewal contract for Conga CPQ, in my experience, they delay engagement, so you are truly behind the 8 ball when it comes time to decide if you are going to continue with Conga CPQ.

Incentivized

• Administrator interface is tricky to use. It is not easy to add new types of meetings or edit the settings on the current types of meetings we have
• I'd like to see them send out more reminder emails leading up to the meeting scheduled to reduce the number of no-shows and reschedules
• Make it easier to customize the confirmation emails-- easier ability to add videos and customizable text

Incentivized

For all reasons like workflows, UI, and the way Calendly keeps all of us engaged through the Collective forum. It's indeed undeniable that no other product covers all business needs like Calendly does. On the other side, this has also reduced the workload by enabling us to focus more on other tasks for the day

Incentivized

The rating is based on several things: 1) Ongoing support requirements being able to be addressed by cross training existing Salesforce administrators 2) Apttus superior corporate vision for the quote to cash space 3) Apttus execution of the corporate vision with automated agents (Max), and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning offerings to leverage the investment in Configure Price Quote 4) Apttus corporate health and investment in the product line

Incentivized

Acuity Scheduling has been very reliable. If you don't believe me, check out their status page here. They do a pretty decent job maintaining their app. To be fair, it's a pretty simple tool so they shouldn't run into too many hiccups given it doesn't feature near as many options as other applications on the market run.

Incentivized

Calendly is extremely easy to use for selecting times and days for meetings. From my end, it's very easy to indicate the days and times that I am available for meetings. I have used other scheduling products, but Calendly has the smoothest way of operating. I highly recommend it for scheduling meetings

Conga CPQ is a great tool but lacks good support and [a] very limited knowledge base which doesn't include day to day errors which users face, thus leading us to support and take more time in turn. Also cart performance can be improved drastically which will enhance the user experience as the user doesn't have to wait for the pricing.

Incentivized

It is very easy to use once you get to know the program but with years of working with the program I am still finding new things that I had wished I knew about earlier. I feel like aspects of the website become hidden that would help productivity a lot if I knew they existed beforehand.

Incentivized

I have not heard of any issue

There is a lot of support for Calendly. Whenever I have had issues navigating through it, especially as a new user, I found multiple support on the web addressing my questions or concerns. There is a lot of in app informative notes accessible to users to navigate through Calendly when needed.

Incentivized

Tier1/tier 2 support can only handle native functionality. Customizations have to be escalated to developers which aren’t included in the support program.

I go ahead and copy the people I directly worked with on implementation for assistance. I would rate them an 8 for support assistance.

Every time I had a question on how to do something or had any issues with Acuity Scheduling, mainly in the very beginning, when I was learning the platform, customer service was excellent. They were prompt to respond, friendly, and very helpful until I had the right solution.

Incentivized

We attended 5 hours worth of webinars early on.

We had to understand how objects worked to figure out how to structure our data.

I would have liked more in-depth training but it would have been an additional cost

Be iterative. Take the opportunity to build a catalog based on how Apttus works well. Learn the tool yourself or use an SI. Take the time to build a configuration / pricing migration tool with X-Author for Excel or roll your own. Stick with OOTB Apttus as any customization will cost you every time a new version is released

Incentivized

When I started using it, there were not many competitors in this space. I've seen some like Mixmax that seem to work well for solopreneurs or where free version might be better than Calendly's free version. I use the paid version of Calendly and it's just kept serving us well so why change?

Incentivized

We selected Apttus CPQ over SteelBrick due to the simplicity of SteelBrick's out of the box pricing and ability to customize quoted products. As a global organization with selling a highly configurable products, we felt the ability of Apttus to handle our requirements as standard functionalty rather than a customization was a material difference between the platforms.

In the case of Schedulicity, the system was awesome (very easy to set up and had some nice features) but did not offer the functionality and flexibility that AcuityScheduling does. In the case of SimplyBook.me, they offer lots of functionality but the interface is extremely complex and you pay a la carte for features so you're going to pay exponentially more for the same set of features as compared to AcuityScheduling. Their customer service was also lacking, in my opinion.

Incentivized

• Positive: When people want to meet, I can simply send my Calendly link and it takes less than 5 seconds to do.
• Positive: It integrates well with Zoom, which means that by default all my appointments include Zoom information for a remote call.

Incentivized

• The ability to generate engineered configurations that is right by construction has reduced the cycle time of the customer engagement. The fact that we are able to guide the process and end up with a validated bill of material reduces the iterations with the customers.
• As long as the validations rules are correct the generated bill of material is accurate. We are now looking at using Apttus to perform quality checks in our product rules since the tool is able to test different configurations quickly and efficiently.
• Configuration that use to take weeks and consumed valuable engineering resources has been transformed to become a customer facing application that is simple enough for customer to self-service.

• Minimizing no shows
• Giving me back time by taking tasks off my mind/to-do list to focus on bigger more important things
• Payment management (it helps me make sure I receive my payments/recurring payments and follow up with clients if a payment has failed)
• Honestly just saving me from scheduling nightmares and headaches
• Timezones! It does it for you! (I work internationally)

Incentivized