Cal.com vs Loom
Pricing
Cal.com: Free for individuals, Team from $15/user/mo
Loom: Free tier, paid from $18/user/mo
Description
Cal.com: Open-source Calendly alternative: free scheduling for individuals, self-hostable
Loom: Quick video messages instead of meetings
Pros
- Free for individual use with no limits, not a trial
- Open source and self-hostable for full control over your data
- Clean booking pages that look professional
- Record screen + face video and share a link in under 60 seconds
- Free tier gives you 25 videos up to 5 minutes each
- Replaces meetings that should have been an email (or a video)
Cons
- Not as polished as Calendly: occasional rough edges in the UI
- Self-hosting requires technical knowledge to set up and maintain
- Fewer native integrations than Calendly
- Owned by Atlassian since 2023. Some features are being gated to paid plans
- Videos longer than 5 minutes or more than 25 videos require Business ($18/user/month)
Details
Cal.com does what Calendly does, but it is free for individuals and open source. You get a booking page, calendar integrations, and the basics of scheduling without paying Calendly’s rates.
If you are a solo founder who just needs a scheduling link, Cal.com saves you $10-20/month compared to Calendly. The tradeoff is polish: Calendly has had years more to smooth out the experience. Cal.com is good enough for most scheduling needs, and the option to self-host appeals to founders who want control over their data. If scheduling is mission-critical to your business and first impressions matter, Calendly or SavvyCal are more refined.
Loom lets you record quick screen + face videos instead of scheduling meetings. Insanely useful for async teams. Started bootstrapped on maxed credit cards, grew to 10M+ users, sold to Atlassian for $975M in 2023. The free tier is still generous enough for most solo use. Business costs $18 per user per month and removes the video and length limits, and Business + AI costs $24 with AI editing; paying annually saves up to 17%.
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