Calendly Drops Apple iCloud Calendar Support: Best Alternative - OneCal

Calendly is the most well-known appointment-scheduling app, used by millions of professionals and companies worldwide. You can say that Calendly elevated the appointment-scheduling niche with its scheduling links and plenty of features that help individuals and companies get more leads and bookings.

One of the reasons why Calendly is so popular is due to the fact that is has the most integrations out of all scheduling apps, enabling users to connect their favourite apps to Calendly.

One prominent integration was the Apple iCloud Calendar integration, allowing users to connect their iCloud Calendar to Calendly, making sure their personal availability was taken into account on their scheduling links.

Unfortunately, on August 20, 2024, Calendly announced that users won’t be able to connect their iCloud Calendar to the platform.

In this post, we’ll explore the best Calendly alternative that supports iCloud Calendar for scheduling links.

Calendly vs OneCal: How They Compare?

Even though Calendly and OneCal are in the Calendaring niche, there are some differences between them regarding features and integrations.

OneCal blends scheduling links with calendar syncing, allowing users to share scheduling links as well as sync all their calendars.

Calendly, on the other hand, only focuses on scheduling links, allowing users to share their availability through scheduling pages.

Features supported by both Calendly and OneCal

• Scheduling Links: Scheduling links is a feature offered by both Calendly and OneCal, with similar outcomes and inner workings. The premise is clear: You create a scheduling link, configure the availability and other settings, and enable others to book you through a public link.
  
• One-on-one scheduling: Scheduling links can be configured to be one-on-one, meaning that you’re the only host. You can allow the scheduler to invite other people to the meeting, but you’ll be the only host, and the booking link will only check for your availability to display the available slots to meet.
  
• Collective Scheduling: Calendly and OneCal have Team support, allowing you to invite your team to the platform and create scheduling links that take into account the availability of multiple people, hence the name ‘Collective Scheduling’.
  
• Meeting Locations: Both platforms allow you to set your preferred meeting location for each scheduling links. Options include Google Meet, Teams, Zoom, in-person, and more. You’re also able to add custom locations or URLs.
• Brand Customization: Calendly and OneCal allow you to make your scheduling links personal and match your brand. You can customize the booking color, set profile pictures, etc. The specifics might be different, but the point is that you have the ability to make your scheduling links personal.
  
• Time Zone Management: Both platforms are able to smartly manage time zones, displaying your availability in the scheduler’s timezone. The scheduler can also change the timezone as he pleases.
• Custom availability: It’s quite common for professionals and companies to have working hours, so both platforms allow you to set up availability for each booking link. Say you work 9-5; you don’t want to get booked outside of that window. OneCal and Calendly allow you to set an availability schedule, which you can use to set your availability for each day. You can also set exceptions and more.

What sets Calendly and OneCal apart?

Scheduling links solves only a part of the problem of being a professional, as it helps with external meetings. But what about internal meetings? What happens when you manage two company calendars and team members only book through Google Calendar or Outlook?

To account for that, OneCal offers the Calendar Sync feature, allowing a real-time sync of calendars, making sure your availability is reflected in all your calendars. This means that all your calendars have each-others availabilities, thus avoiding double bookings.

Aside from Scheduling Links, OneCal also offers:

• Real-time calendar sync: OneCal’s Calendar Sync feature ensures you don’t get double booked for internal meetings by cloning your events across all your calendars. The synchronization works in the background, so you don’t have to take any actions, and it’s instantaneous.
  
• Configurable Calendar Sync: OneCal also allows you to choose what you sync from one calendar to another, as privacy is quite important when dealing with company calendars. You can choose to sync meeting properties like event titles, descriptions, conference data, and more. To learn more about the Calendar Sync feature, please visit our Calendar Sync page.
• Calendar View: OneCal also allows you to view all your calendars in one view, eliminating the need to open calendar clients separately. You can also use this view to hide clones created by the OneCal Calendar Sync.
  
• Apple iCloud Calendar Support: OneCal has support for iCloud Calendar for all the features like Scheduling Links, Calendar Sync and Calendar View.

How to migrate from Calendly to OneCal

Migrating from Calendly to OneCal is easy, as both platforms have overlaps in terms of features and are quite easy to use.

Here is how to migrate your Booking Links from Calendly to OneCal:

1. Create a Free OneCal Account
   
2. Connect your Google, Outlook, and iCloud Calendars: These are the calendar providers that we support, you do not need to connect all of them.
   
3. Click the Booking Links tab: The booking Links Tab is located on the left sidebar.
   
4. Click ‘Get Started’: The Get Started Button will take you to the flow that creates your booking page.
   
5. Choose your username: The first step is to choose your username. This username will be public, as it’s used for the path of your booking link. For example https://app.onecal.io/b/michael-scott
   
6. Select your primary calendar: This is your Booking Page primary calendar. Each time you create a scheduling link, we’ll use this calendar as the default calendar that events go into. You can change this calendar for each scheduling link.
   
7. Enter your default availability: This availability will be used as a default for all the new booking links. You can always choose a different availability for each booking link.
   
8. Create your first Scheduling Link: After setting up your Booking Page, you can create as many scheduling links as you like by clicking the ‘New Link’ button.
   

We hope this article helps you understand the difference between Calendly and OneCal, and a guide to using OneCal as your appointment scheduling platform.

Sign up for a 14-day free trial to connect your Apple iCloud Calendars to OneCal and set up your scheduling links.