Best Calendly Alternatives and Competitors (2025)

Any updates on Telegram?

* if you CANNOT attract MRR in the near future ..

Hello @BrightspaceGroup.com, Thanks for the feedback and for sharing your thought process transparently.

I think we do have something special. We provide a conversion-optimized approach to service sales, and we knew that to achieve this, we needed to build an excellent admin/back office suite, which is a service business ERP. I shared more details about this below.

As to transaction fees, when we attract our users to pass online paid transactions via our platform we already see it as a huge win. I don’t agree with MRRs being the defining success criteria, if a client doesn’t make revenues through our platform, then we are fine to not charge them a monthly fee anyway. Our target is to increase your revenues, and we are fine to only make money if you do so.

It would be unfair of me to name any particular competitors as they won’t get the chance to share counter-arguments, but I have built service marketplaces and bring some knowledge of service sales, and before building kiwilaunch, I tried 20+ paid/free alternative products. I am still trying every time I come across a new one.
Most of the time what disappointed me were:

1. Meeting schedulers’ positioning: 
Existing products didn’t think beyond simple meetings, and adding a payment field to the end. They reduce the domain to calendar events and participants are an attribute of that event. For us staff/booking/purchases/customers are different entities and calendar events are just an extension of bookings and pre-defined schedules. If you are a product-led growth expert with a client base, and selling a one-off $800 consultancy, it works for you. If you are a personal trainer, who wants to manage the client lifecycle, then you should reconsider.

2. Online booking products focusing only on Salon/Spa:
Existing products reduce the whole booking domain to ‘salon/spa’. and the moment you introduce things like proper repeating appointments, session packages, at-home services, and fixed-dated courses/experiences, they claim they solve it, but they failed in terms of usability or functionality.

3. Not having a vertically integrated system:
Showing real-time availability to the clients is very important, which means the online booking should be fed from staff calendars. For freelancers, Google Calendar integration just seems to solve it, but even for slightly larger companies this requires almost a service company ERP. We tried to design kiwi to be very simple and intuitive to work for smaller companies, but still have enough complexity to manage their day-to-day operations. 80% of our development efforts are going into the admin panel although the actual hook value proposition is the online booking functionality. What happens is after getting 2-3 bookings, users start to appreciate the admin panel functionality for day-to-day operations.

So all in all I do believe we do have something special, but of course, if you gave it a fair try, and your experience didn’t reflect our vision, then you indeed should get a refund, especially if the pricing felt unfair. Either way, we appreciate the interaction and the feedback.

I just bought and love the Ai feature as I am setting this up. I am not worried about the 1% fee because I will use this to book services with a deposit. That deposit goes toward service being booked for, or it's non refundable for any no-show. The deposit is only $45, so the 1% would would .45, which is worth getting a new client for me. They will pay the reminder at time of service.

Hello, Thanks for taking the time to write your thoughts extensively, I am picking up the feature requests and suggestions.

We are trying to be very careful while judging the need for granularity, as sometimes things that look like necessities don’t increase either our Sales or our clients’ sales.

For example, for you it might sound even hard to grasp, but we don’t even have a portal for the end users to log in and manage their bookings. We found out that the logged-in user percentage is so low, it doesn’t tick the needle. That’s why we doubled down on guest checkout and the admin panel functionality to manage the lifecycle.

You mentioned that another software has a shortcoming that the refund policy is at the account level and cannot be overridden, my experience with microbusinesses is, when they look eye to eye with the customer they never honor the refund policy window, and the last minute so-called emergencies are almost always accomodated. We see it, understand it, and say, “Why put a cancel button inside the email to call for the action, if the cancellation window won’t be honored anyhow?”. It becomes a negative sum.

We are not trying to claim we always know what’s best for our clients of course. But there is also the fact that agencies most of the time are judged by their ability to accommodate change requests and customization demands. And it sure should be hard to re-sell a product only to say after “It is not possible to achieve this config.”. It is easy for us to defend a product design choice (even if it is a restriction) heartfully by explaining the reasoning that we have their interest in mind. But it is hard to expect an agency to buy into this reasoning, believe as much as we do, and resell that reasoning to their clients.

I agree with the risk of buying products that don’t build sustainable models, selling lifetime deals, and then failing to fulfill. We are trying to make sure that doesn’t happen through the transaction fees and I really liked the idea of capping it (we offered this in the early days to larger clients who were expecting large volume). We just need to think about how to communicate it, as if we say it is capped to $X, people may perceive it as $X additional cost without putting the $100X online revenues in perspective. But it is a good idea nevertheless.
Thanks for the interaction and good wishes!