A Cal.com alternative for appointments you drive to

The difference in one sentence

Both give your customers a link to pick a time. Cal.com chooses the times to offer from when you are free, with a fixed gap around each booking if you set one. GeoCalendar chooses them from when you are free and where you will be.

For a week of calls that difference is worth nothing, and Cal.com is the broader product. For a week of visits it decides how much of each day goes to driving.

Feature by feature

Where Cal.com is the better tool

Cal.com does more, and charges less for it. One person can use it free, with payments through Stripe or PayPal included. Its Teams plan adds round robin, collective links and routing forms at $12 a seat, where our Team plan is $24 a seat. Workflows send reminders by email, text message or WhatsApp. Its app store lists more than a hundred integrations, and it has video calling of its own.

It also publishes an open-source community edition for people who want to host their own scheduling. GeoCalendar has none of these. If your bookings are calls, or your visits are few and close together, the things GeoCalendar adds are things you would not use.

Where GeoCalendar is the better tool

Cal.com handles travel with a buffer: time kept free before or after each booking of an event type, up to 120 minutes, whatever the two addresses are. Its help center lists travel among the things a buffer after a meeting is for. A buffer long enough for the worst drive wastes time on every short one, and a buffer sized for the short ones makes you late for the long ones. The help center explains why GeoCalendar keeps the two apart: Buffers before and after a visit.

GeoCalendar starts from the address. For each open time it finds the visit before and the visit after, estimates the drive in and the drive out, and subtracts the drive you would have made anyway. The times that add the least are offered first. The others stay available.

• A service area turns away addresses you would never drive to, before they book.
• The drive is blocked on your calendar as its own strip, so the next booking accounts for it.
• With several hosts, each time is offered for whoever could reach it with the least driving.
• A map shows the day as a route, in visiting order.

The limits: drive times are typical-traffic estimates and not live traffic, and the customer can still choose a time that was not suggested.

Using both

Plenty of businesses have both kinds of booking: sales calls and site visits. Nothing stops you keeping Cal.com for the calls and using GeoCalendar for the visits. Both read and write the same Google or Outlook calendar, so a booking made through one shows as busy time in the other.

Moving your in-person bookings

1. Connect the Google or Outlook calendar you already use. What is on it blocks booking right away.
2. Create one event type for each kind of visit, with its length.
3. Set your home base, and the service area on each event type.
4. Replace the link in your emails and the embed on your website.

Visits already on your calendar count toward the ranking as long as each one has an address in its location field. How suggested times are chosen covers the rest.