OneCal Free Alternatives
- Authors
- Name
- Eraldo Forgoli
- Published on
Table of Contents
Ready to Sync Your Calendars?
Create a OneCal account to sync multiple Outlook, iCloud and Google Calendars, create Booking Links, and much more.
OneCal is one of the best all-around scheduling platforms, used by thousands of professionals and companies to solve their scheduling needs.
OneCal supports iCloud, Outlook, and Google Calendars, making it easier for users to streamline their schedule across all their calendars.
Even though it’s hard to find a free OneCal alternative that offers the same features, customer support, and reliability, we’ll do our best to list as many free alternatives that cover individual features.
What are the main OneCal features and offerings?
OneCal offers three main features: Calendar Sync, Scheduling Links, and Calendar view. Let’s go over each one to understand the function and what it’s used for.
- Calendar Sync: Allows users to synchronize calendars in real-time, automatically. Think of the calendar sync feature as having a personal assistant who clones meetings between calendars, so your availability is reflected across all your calendars.
- Scheduling Links: Through the Scheduling Links feature, users can share their availability via a link, allowing guests to book them. OneCal is one of the few platforms that supports iCloud Calendar for appointment scheduling.
- Calendar View: As the name suggests, the OneCal Calendar View feature is a calendar that displays your events across all your connected calendars. You can view your daily/weekly/monthly schedule and quickly join meetings.
If you synchronize your calendars through the OneCal Calendar Sync Feature, you can use the Calendar View to hide the clones/duplicate events by toggling the ‘Hide Clone Events’ switch.
What are the best OneCal Free Alternatives?
1. Calendar Sharing/Exporting - For syncing calendars
Syncing through calendar sharing is a topic that we’ve extensively covered in our blog posts, as it’s often a viable solution for cloning events between calendars.
Note that this method is not real calendar sync, as depending on the calendar providers you want to synchronize, there might be delays or issues that lead to calendars not syncing.
One example is exporting a Google Calendar and importing it into Outlook. Although initially all Google Calendar events are imported to Outlook, sequential updates take up to 24 hours to update, or don’t update at all.
Another downside to consider is that this method doesn’t directly sync events between two calendars, as it creates a separate calendar. This means that team members still won’t be able to see your availability when using the ‘Find a Time’ feature in Google Calendar or Outlook.
To learn more about syncing calendars by exporting and importing, please follow the links below for each calendar combination:
2. Outlook Google Calendar Sync - For syncing calendars
Outlook Google Calendar Sync (OGCS) is an open-source application available on Windows that allows users to synchronize Outlook and Google Calendars.
Unlike OneCal or other Calendar sync tools, OGCS needs to be running on your machine to sync your calendars. You can set syncing intervals or manually click a button to re-trigger the calendar synchronization.
One thing to consider is that OGCS does not currently support the New Outlook, although the team is working to add support for it.
Aside from the synchronization being manual or periodical, another downside is that you need a Windows device to run the application.
3. Calendly - For Scheduling Links
If you’re using OneCal for scheduling links, you can switch to the Calendly free plan, which offers one free scheduling link.
Calendly is the OG of scheduling, so you won’t have any issues in terms of reliability, features, or customer support.
The Calendly Free Plan includes one free scheduling link (event type), one calendar connection, video conferencing, booking page customization, and more.
If you need to pull your availability from more than one calendar or more event types, you’ll need to upgrade to one of the paid plans.
4. Github Script - For syncing calendars
If you’re a tech nerd and want to get your hands dirty, you can try a couple of GitHub scripts that synchronize calendars.
Based on my research, these are the best calendar synchronization scripts on GitHub:
Bear in mind that each script uses its programming language and set of instructions, so please go through the Readme of each project and follow the instructions on how to run the script to sync your calendars.
Similar to the other solutions we recommended, this alternative is also manual, as you’ll need to run the scripts each time you want to sync your calendars.
Please be careful when using scripts to sync your calendars, as you might end up in an infinite loop, leading to your calendars getting populated with thousands of events.
5. Fantastical - For Calendar View
If you’re using OneCal to view all your calendars in a simple interface, you can try Fantastical.
Fantastical is a great calendar client, available on iOS (iPhone, iPad), Mac, and Windows, and is packed with all the features you’ll ever need to manage your calendars.
Fantastical integrates seamlessly with OneCal’s Calendar Sync feature and will automatically merge OneCal’s clone events with the real events, making it way less cluttered when viewing all your calendars in one place. This may not work if you are using a different syncing solution.