For years the case for Cal.com wrote itself: it was the open-source alternative, you could self-host it, and its free tier gave away what Calendly charged for. On 15 April 2026 Cal.com moved its production codebase private. The public repository was renamed cal.diy and relicensed from AGPLv3 to MIT, and the team features were removed from it. If you were planning to self-host Cal.com to get round-robin scheduling for free, that plan no longer works.
What they cost
| Tier | Calendly | Cal.com |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 event type, 1 calendar connection, 1-on-1 only | 1 user, unlimited event types and calendars, Stripe and PayPal |
| Individual paid | Standard — $10/seat/mo annual ($12 monthly) | — |
| Team | Teams — $16/seat/mo annual ($20 monthly) | Teams — $12/user/mo yearly |
| Top tier | Enterprise — from $15,000/year, 50-seat minimum | Organizations — $28/user/mo yearly |
Note the billing toggle, because it catches people out. Calendly’s $12 is the monthly rate; on an annual plan Standard is $10. Cal.com publishes yearly pricing only.
The free tiers decide this for most people
Calendly’s free plan is deliberately thin: one event type, one calendar connection, one-on-one meetings only. No payment collection, no CRM integrations, no group events, no round-robin, and you cannot remove Calendly branding. If you need a 15-minute intro call and a 45-minute deep dive, Calendly free cannot do it.
Cal.com’s free plan gives one user unlimited event types, unlimited calendar connections, 100+ app integrations, two-way Salesforce and HubSpot sync, and payment collection through Stripe and PayPal. That last one is the sharpest difference in the whole comparison: Cal.com takes payments on free; Calendly wants $10 a seat a month for the same thing.
The pattern behind the pricing is worth naming. Cal.com’s paywall is team size; Calendly’s is feature depth. One person doing sophisticated scheduling pays nothing on Cal.com and $10 a month on Calendly. Five people doing simple scheduling pay on both.
Team features are closer than the price suggests
At the team tier the feature lists nearly match. Round-robin, collective availability, routing forms and centrally managed event types all sit on Calendly Teams at $16 and Cal.com Teams at $12. Cal.com is 25% cheaper for broadly the same capability.
The divergence is at the top. Calendly’s Enterprise tier starts at $15,000 a year with a 50-seat minimum — a genuine barrier for a mid-sized company that only wants SSO. Cal.com’s Organizations tier is $28 a user with SAML SSO, SCIM, sub-teams and a company subdomain, and no seat floor. For a 20-person team needing SSO, that is roughly $6,700 a year against a $15,000 minimum.
What the licence change means for you
Cal.diy, the surviving open-source project, is MIT-licensed — more permissive than AGPL for what remains, with no copyleft obligation. But teams, organizations, insights and analytics, workflows, routing forms, instant booking, AI phone and SSO/SAML have all been removed from it. What you can self-host now is a capable single-user scheduler, not a Calendly replacement for a company.
If you do want to run it, cal.diy needs PostgreSQL 13+, Node.js 18+, Yarn and Git, with one-click deploys available on Railway, Render, Northflank and others. Runtime hardware demands are modest; the build is the heavy part.
The strategic point matters more than the technical one. Part of Cal.com’s appeal was that you could never be locked in — worst case, you host it yourself. That escape hatch is now much narrower, and anyone who chose Cal.com for that reason should re-evaluate.
If you are building scheduling into your own product
Both offer APIs, with meaningfully different limits. Calendly allows 500 requests per user per minute on paid plans and 50 on free, but throttles invitee creation separately and tightly — 10 per minute, 50 per hour and 100 per day on paid non-Enterprise plans. If your product creates bookings programmatically at volume, check that daily cap before you build.
Cal.com’s v2 API allows 120 requests a minute on an API key, raisable to 200 on request and up to 800 for enterprise. One caution: Cal.com deprecated Platform OAuth on 15 December 2025, and the Platform plan is currently closed to new signups pending restructuring. If embedding is your reason for choosing Cal.com, confirm the plan you need is available before committing.
Calendly’s AI push
On 19 August 2026 Calendly announced an AI suite: Callie, an assistant you CC on an email thread that reads the exchange, checks your availability and handles non-standard requests; and Notetaker, which joins Zoom, Meet or Teams calls for transcripts, summaries and follow-ups. Calendly’s press release says access will align to new “Standard Plus” and “Teams Plus” plans — but those tiers are not on the live pricing page yet, where both appear as add-ons. Treat them as announced rather than available, and do not budget around a price nobody has published.
The thing neither will fix
A scheduling link only removes friction if the recipient is happy to be scheduled. Sending one to a senior person who expected three proposed times reads as “my calendar matters more than yours”, and no feature in either product solves that. Both are best pointed at inbound — people who already want to book you — and used sparingly outbound.
What we would pick
- Solo, multiple meeting types, taking payments: Cal.com free, comfortably. Calendly would cost $120 a year for the same thing.
- Client-facing, want the recognisable link and deepest CRM integrations: Calendly Standard at $10 annual.
- A team of 5–30 needing SSO: Cal.com Organizations, and it is not close — Calendly’s 50-seat Enterprise minimum rules it out.
- Embedding scheduling in your own product: still Cal.com, but verify the Platform plan is open before you commit.
Once the meeting is booked, where does the conversation live? See Slack vs Teams vs Discord.
Prices verified against both vendors’ pricing pages in September 2026, with annual and monthly rates checked separately. Both change regularly.
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