Everyone deserves access to good calendar scheduling.
Cal.com is a people-focused scheduling infrastructure product. It has been built to accommodate humanity's ever-changing calendar scheduling needs. This means we've designed a product that's not only highly customizable but also affordable. We know that human interaction, especially when it takes the form of a meeting, is an essential component of societal and cultural growth and economic stability.
From parents to students, working professionals, and retirees, the only way a great idea goes from inspiration to a finished product is when people can communicate about the steps needed to manifest that transformation. To ensure that as many people as possible can benefit from genuinely transparent, customizable, and privacy-friendly scheduling, Cal.com provides a basic plan that is free for all individuals, regardless of geographical location, socioeconomic class, or cultural background.
While Cal.com is the world's premier open-source calendar scheduling product, we are not your only solution. There are plenty of fish in the sea of calendar scheduling infrastructure, and many of them come with free plans. In fact, why don't we look at one of our contemporaries, Lemcal, and see how their free plans compare to ours?
What is Lemcal?
Lemcal is one of many products offered by Lempire, a French startup that has grown its valuation from $0 to $150 million in only three and a half years. Lempire's business model is based on acquiring and creating a wide variety of products that cater to the needs of entrepreneurs worldwide. In addition to Lemcal, the Lempire ecosystem includes tools like Lemverse, Lemwarm, Lempod, and Lemlist.
How does Lemcal compare to Cal.com?
To fully understand the difference between Lemcal and Cal.com, we must take a quick look at what Lemcal offers free users. You could get this information by simply visiting Lemcal's website and clicking on their Lemcal versus Cal.com comparison page; unfortunately, that's not the case. While Lemcal offers several pages that allude to case studies explaining why their product is superior to others (Cal.com, Doodle, or HubSpot), when you actually click on those pages, all you'll find is vague and generic text. This approach, while common within a certain segment of the digital landscape, is lackluster. This lack of specifics can, at times, be a bit frustrating, especially if you're a person who's trying to find in-depth and reliable information so that you can discern and discover the best service to meet your needs. Luckily, Cal.com is here to help you understand our contemporaries and their products.
Lemcal's free plan lets you have one single calendar connection, up to three availability schedules, and three different bookable event types. This is great for someone with minimal scheduling needs and doesn't anticipate needing a wide variety of customization. Lemcal also supports Zapier integrations, as well as Google Meet and Zoom. In terms of customizations, Lemcal offers customized questions and is working towards letting users add custom profile videos.
Now, let's talk about what Lemcal doesn't do. The first thing you need to know is that Lemcal is only available in one language: English. In addition, Lemcal doesn't offer options for paid bookings or website embeds. Lemcal also lacks CRM integrations, as well as opportunities for white-labeling or using a self-hosted version of the product. One of the most significant issues with Lemcal, however, is the fact that it doesn't offer any options for enterprise-grade security and compliance.
How is Cal.com different from Lemcal?
The first thing you need to know about Cal.com's free individual plan is that it is truly unlimited. You can have as many calendar connections, bookable event types, availability schedules, workflows, routing forms, and integrations as you'd like. In addition, Cal.com offers all users the ability to monetize their meetings through paid bookings, as well as add booking pages to their website via both traditional and pop-up style embeds.
If all of that wasn't enough, Cal.com is available in 37 different languages and comes with ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, CCPA, GDPR, EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and HIPAA certifications.
Cal.com also has paid plans ideal for large-scale enterprises, time-based marketplaces, and multi-member teams. These plans support round-robin scheduling, collective events, and managed meeting templates.
In addition, all Cal.com users, regardless of subscription level, have access to Cal.com's app store, which helps facilitate simple and efficient modular customization. Using the app store means that Cal.com users can add integrations for CRM software like Close and SendGrid, as well as advanced automation and analytics solutions.
How can Cal.com offer so much for free?
At this point, you might wonder how Cal.com can offer so much for free. Well, it's simple. Cal.com is a dedicated calendar scheduling infrastructure company that lives and breathes its product. We can do this because we have yet to have other projects competing for our attention.
Cal.com isn't splitting its focus or trying to acquire different entrepreneur-centered products right and left. Our team can give our scheduling infrastructure 100% of their time and attention rather than having to run themselves ragged trying to create an in-house alternative to every business or sales-related app in the book. Instead, Cal.com members can take the time and energy needed to focus on doing one thing and doing it right.
For us, part of doing things right means being an open startup. As an open startup, not only are we transparent regarding our core metrics and our wage scale, but we're also open source. This means that in addition to having a passionate and committed full-time staff, we also have a dynamic developer community. This community contributes to Cal.com's evolution by fixing bugs, finding security issues, and helping drive the product forward as they share innovative insights and solutions.
In addition, Cal.com's unique business model means that we don't have to arbitrarily restrict basic features within our free plan to make a profit. You see, the reason why Cal.com can offer individuals a free, unlimited scheduling product is because Cal.com makes its money by offering competitive and affordable scheduling to larger organizations and multinational enterprises.
These larger contracts offset the cost of ensuring that the everyday person can access robust, reliable, and truly free unlimited calendar scheduling.
Truly, the choice is up to you when it comes to calendar scheduling. However, it is crucial to stay informed about what each software offers when making a decision.
