Calendly helps organizations globally automate the meeting lifecycle by removing the scheduling back and forth, with the goal of enabling companies to close deals, hire candidates faster, and build relationships.
$10
per month per seat
Event Espresso
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Event Espresso headquartered in Utah offers an event registration and management platform supplying automated help for ticketing and ticket purchases, registration forms and pricing, promotions and correspondences (e.g. email), multiple attendee registration, and other features.
$79.95
per year
Pricing
Calendly
Event Espresso
Editions & Modules
Standard
$10
per month (billed annually) per seat
Teams
$16
per month (billed annually) per seat
Enterprise
Starts at $15k
per year
Personal Support License
$79.95
per year
Everything Support License
$299.95
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Calendly
Event Espresso
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Monthly billing also available.
Tiered, volume-based pricing available on the annual Teams plan.
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.
As far as I have found, Event Espresso has no peer. Yes, there are other WordPress plugins that provide for event registration, including a few available through Code Canyon, but none of them promise the rich feature set and robust support of Event Espresso. It seems to be the only real game in town, but luckily it's a good product. It's highly extensible, so it should scale well to any size or type of event. Through add-ons, it's doubtful there is an event scenario it can't handle. And because it runs on WordPress, you can incorporate it as part of your site--the plugin even does a good job of picking up design cues from your theme, or you can customize it using CSS.
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.
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.
Integrating account creation with WordPress should be included in the core product, not an add-on. It's extremely frustrating to have to pay extra for that, especially when that add-on is not as flexible as it needs to be (for example, if someone is enrolling for a class on behalf of someone else).
The data visualization is a mess. That feature doesn't seem to ever work and it should be left out until it does.
The ability to show participant data on the front end is extremely limited. Event Espresso does provide a few hooks and some limited documentation on this feature, but I feel it should be more robust. Perhaps that can be a focus of future releases.
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
I gave Calendly an 8 because overall I think it is very much user friendly even for someone who has never used anything similar. The only issue I have had with usability is what I already stated about how the settings are in sub categories making some things difficult to find at first.
I only reached out to Support once but they were very prompt and easy to work with. I had some questions about setting up the follow-up emails for after people would do the interview. They were very helpful and gave assistance and we solved the issue very fast. I would definitely recommend.
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?
I looked at EventBrite, but it wasn't customizable enough for our needs and didn't provide the level of integration with our website that I desired. I also looked at the ticketing system offered by The Events Calendar for WordPress (by Modern Tribe), but it too lacked the feature set we needed. Only Event Espresso offered all the features, customization, and integration we desired and needed.
Event Espresso has literally changed the lives of our volunteer organization, saving hundreds of hours of time and eliminating the frustration of paper enrollment.
The add-ons allow you to accomplish just about any event registration goals you might have. It's an extremely powerful product.
Integrating the plugin into our website was a breeze, and it's approachable enough where volunteers can create the classes and conduct the online enrollment all in a web browser.
