If you’re stuck deciding between Calendly and Reclaim.ai, you’re really deciding how you want to think about your time.

Calendly is your classic “send-a-link, book-a-meeting” appointment scheduling tool. It’s perfect if your calendar is pretty light, and you occasionally need to send a booking link to external contacts to find a time to meet. They typically cater to sales reps chasing leads, recruiters coordinating interviews, or customer success teams managing onboarding might make use of it a lot.

On the other hand, Reclaim.ai is a full AI calendar with AI-powered meeting scheduling links that can flexibly surface more availability over lower-priority events (because it knows which events you’d be willing to reschedule to book an important meeting sooner). It doesn’t just manage your scheduling links – Reclaim also automatically finds the best time for recurring team meetings and one-on-ones, focus time, habits, tasks, and breaks in your schedule. This allows it to fully understand your priorities so it can optimize your workweek around your most urgent and important work.

92.4% of people prefer Reclaim’s scheduling links over Calendly – here’s why:

• 524% more open time slots on scheduling links
• 15.3% earlier meeting booking
• 75.2% better ease of use 
• 78.8% fewer issues rescheduling & canceling meetings
• 64.5% fewer meeting prioritization issues
• 77.4% better scheduling link flexibility

Let’s start with a side-by-side overview, move into the feature deep dive and real-world workflows, cover pricing, and finish with a quick setup so you can try Reclaim today.

Key differences at-a-glance

Which scheduling tool is best for you?

Calendly – best for light to moderately-busy calendars

Calendly is the best fit for individuals and teams who:

• Don’t have busy calendars (have tons of open time slots)
• Don’t require priority scheduling (all meetings are the same importance)
• Only scheduling external meetings
• Need to collect payment for each meeting booked

If most of your meeting events are with people outside your org (prospects, candidates, customers), Calendly’s meeting booking capabilities can streamline scheduling for your external contacts. It also handles internal workflows (round-robin screens, panel interviews, collective events), but its sweet spot is external booking with routing, distribution, and a polished invitee experience.

Common Calendly use cases:

• Solopreneurs: Collect payment for appointments booked through Calendly links.
• Sales meetings: Use Routing Forms to quickly qualify leads and automatically direct them to the right sales reps.
• Recruiting interviews: Coordinate interviews with Round Robin pools for initial screening and team scheduling for group interviews. 

Reclaim.ai – best for busy calendars & AI optimization

If you’re used to Calendly’s entire process of “share a link, book a meeting”, you’ll feel at home with Reclaim. Reclaim’s AI-powered Scheduling Links are best for individuals and teams who:

• Have busy calendars
• Need to book important meetings fast (especially across multiple team members busy calendars)
• Need to prioritize their most important meetings first
• Also want to automate internal meeting scheduling
• Also want to flexibly protect time for heads-down work
• Also want to auto-reschedule conflicts over lower-priority events
• Also want to sync availability across calendars
• Also want to analyze productivity across all event types (not just scheduling links)

While Calendly works for people who have a ton of free time on their calendars to offer up for scheduling links, Reclaim is the go-to solution for busy calendars that need AI to help them prioritize their schedules to make more space. It automatically schedules your internal meetings, focus time, habits, tasks, and breaks, and knows which events are lower-priority so it can offer more time slots over events you’d be willing to auto-reschedule to book important interviews, customer success, or sales meetings way sooner‍

Common Reclaim.ai use cases:

• Sales meetings: Book sales calls faster by offering high-priority links, distribute meetings across your sales team, and route meeting activity to your CRM via webhooks.
• Recruiting interviews: Fast-track interview scheduling with high-priority scheduling links, use Round Robin links for interview panels, and Team Links for group interviews.
• Founders & startup leaders: Schedule fundraising calls and new business opportunities faster with high-priority links.
• Support teams: Book customer support calls instantly to troubleshoot issues, while still protecting flexible heads-down time to stay on top of your support queue. 
• Account management: Automatically find the best time for recurring weekly check-in, MBRs, and QBRs with key accounts without any back-and-forth.
• Managers & executives: Automatically find the best time for recurring one-on-one meetings and team meetings across your work group.
• Cross-functional teams: Automate recurring meeting scheduling across teams to find the best time for all attendees, maximizing availability for mutual free time.

Deep dive: Reclaim vs. Calendly

Priority scheduling links

Calendly

Calendly only offers basic scheduling links that do not support priority levels – every link is weighted the same. They don’t have any ability to determine priority levels of other events on your calendar to show more open time slots over less important events to book meetings sooner.

This limitation works well enough for people who have really open calendars, and plenty of free time to offer up for meetings. But that’s not the case for most busy professionals. Outside of their external scheduling, they also have tons of internal one-on-ones, team meetings, company meetings, and focus time that occupy their calendars. 

So if you’re trying to book an urgent sales meeting with someone who only has availability at 3:00pm, but you have a daily standup that conflicts with this, you’re losing out on the opportunity to meet that lead today – often resulting in deals getting lost to competitors who can get time with them before you.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim offers AI-powered scheduling links with priority levels so you can book urgent and important meetings fast. It allows you to set a priority level for each of your scheduling links so it can show additional open time slots over lower-priority events. Reclaim will never book over another scheduling link meeting – they offer more availability over AI event types you’d be willing to move: internal one-on-ones, team meetings, focus time, tasks, habits, and breaks.

These priority levels allow you to share 524% more availability than a Calendly link, which is often the difference between closing a hot lead or applicant before your competitors. 

Because Reclaim is a full AI calendar, it understands the priority level of everything on your schedule. Any new AI event you create through Reclaim can be set to a custom priority level, and you can even set regular calendar events to a lower priority to create more availability.

Single use links

Calendly

Calendly offers single-use links that are designed to expire after one booking. These links are essentially temporary copies of an existing event type, created to prevent reuse rather than to deeply personalize the scheduling experience.

With Calendly single-use links, customization is limited:

• You can pre-fill the invitee’s name and email
• You can sometimes adjust duration or availability (primarily for 1:1 event types)
• The link expires automatically after the meeting is booked

However, the underlying scheduling logic remains unchanged. Calendly’s one-off links still use the same availability rules as the base event type, treats all meetings equally (with no awareness of priority), and cannot dynamically surface additional availability by moving lower-priority work.

This works fine when the goal is simply to prevent link reuse — for example, sending a one-time intro call link to a prospect. But it breaks down quickly for busy professionals who need context-aware scheduling, such as making exceptions for VIPs, offering more availability for urgent conversations, or personalizing meeting context without creating new permanent event types.

In practice, Calendly’s single-use links are transactional, not adaptive. They solve the problem of link hygiene, not the problem of getting meetings booked faster when calendars are full.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim’s personalized one-off Scheduling Links are built for contextual, high-stakes scheduling, not just one-time use. Instead of simply expiring after a booking, Reclaim lets you create fully customized, temporary scheduling experiences for a specific person — without affecting your main Scheduling Links or public availability.

With Reclaim one-off links, you can personalize:

• The meeting title and booking page title
• The invitee’s name and email
• Which organizers or co-hosts are included
• The allowed date range and time window
• Default and optional meeting lengths
• Buffers before and after the meeting
• Reminders and booking behavior
• The priority level of the link itself

That last point is the key differentiator. Because Reclaim is a full AI calendar, each one-off link can be assigned a priority level. This allows Reclaim to show additional availability by flexing lower-priority events, preserve higher-priority commitments automatically, and surface same-day options that you can’t get with a Calendly link.

This means a personalized one-off link isn’t just a courtesy — it’s a strategic scheduling tool. You can safely share it with hot sales leads, high-quality candidates, customers escalating an issue, or even internal stakeholders who need time now. All without manually rearranging your calendar or creating one-off event types that clutter your setup.

Team links & group meetings scheduling

Calendly

Calendly’s team links allow you to schedule meetings that require multiple people to attend by only showing times when everyone is simultaneously free. On paper, this sounds ideal — but in practice, it quickly becomes a major bottleneck for busy teams.

The challenge is mathematical. As soon as you require overlap across two or more busy calendars, availability collapses exponentially. Each person has their own meetings, focus blocks, and recurring commitments, and since Calendly only considers explicitly free time, one conflicting event from any attendee removes that slot entirely.

For teams with packed calendars, this often results in:

• Little to no availability showing up on team links
• Scheduling pages that appear “fully booked” for weeks
• Missed momentum with leads, customers, candidates, or internal stakeholders

At that point, Calendly’s team link becomes unusable. To fix it, teams are effectively asked to manually cancel or move meetings on their calendars, delete their focus time, and make personal tradeoffs for a meeting they may not even own.

Most people simply won’t do this. So instead of self-serve scheduling, teams using Calendly often fall back to:

• Long email threads
• Slack back-and-forth
• “Can you do Tuesday at 3?” guessing games
• Coordinators manually polling availability

Ironically, this is the exact problem team scheduling tools are supposed to eliminate — but Calendly’s strict “free time only” model means the busier your team is, the less useful team links become.

Additionally, Calendly’s team links only allow you to include paid team members. So if you’re suddenly recruiting in engineering and want to create a group interview through a team link, you have to buy a bunch of new Calendly seats which these team members won’t have any use for again after this meeting. 

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim’s Team Scheduling Links are built specifically for the reality that busy teams don’t have empty calendars — they have flexible ones. Instead of asking “When is everyone free?”, Reclaim asks “What can move so this meeting can happen sooner?”

Because Reclaim is a full AI calendar, it understands the priority of every event on each participant’s schedule. When you create a team link, Reclaim can:

• Analyze 100% of events and their priority levels across all team members calendars
• Identify earlier mutual free time over lower-priority events
• Offer real-time open time slots across all team members
• Automatically reschedule flexible events for team members if that time is selected

This means Reclaim can instantly surface bookable time through AI — even when each person’s calendar looks completely full and there’s no obvious overlap at first glance. This is crucial for time-sensitive meetings that need to get scheduled in hours or days (not weeks), and Reclaim does this without manual intervention:

• No one has to cancel meetings
• No one has to delete focus time
• No one has to micromanage their calendar for the sake of scheduling

Reclaim will never book over another scheduling-link meeting or a higher-priority commitment. Instead, it intelligently flexes AI-managed events like internal 1:1s, team syncs, focus time, tasks, habits, and breaks. As a result, team links save teams hundreds of hours of coordination — even as calendars get more crowded.

Reclaim team links also allow you to add team members who are not Reclaim users, saving you thousands of dollars a year on short-term scheduling periods like recruiting. Their team links can analyze the availability of non-Reclaim members by viewing their free time through the account holders calendar (just like you’d view your teammates calendar in Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar).

Round robin links

Calendly

Calendly’s round robin links are designed to distribute meetings evenly across a team. When someone books a meeting, Calendly assigns it to the next available team member based on predefined rules (availability-first or load-balancing).

This works well in theory — and in practice, as long as calendars are relatively open. But the effectiveness of Calendly’s round robin logic depends on how “free” your team members' calendars are. As teams get busier, this creates compounding problems:

• Fewer team members appear “available” at any given time
• The round robin pool shrinks unevenly
• Meetings concentrate on the few people with lighter calendars
• Or worse — no one appears available at all

‍

At that point, the system breaks down. If you’re using Calendly’s “availability first” approach, busier team members won’t get scheduled for new meetings. But if you use “load balancing” instead, leads may not be offered time slots for weeks into the future. This makes for a poor scheduling experience for your invitees – and an unfair setup for your team members. And once again, teams using Calendly revert to manual scheduling or ad hoc coordination to get meetings on the calendar.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim’s round robin scheduling links are built for the reality that busy teams don’t have spare time — they have flexible time. These AI-powered links allow you to automatically optimize for both load balancing and availability so you don’t have to choose between the invitees booking experience vs. fairness to your team.

Since Reclaim’s round robin links use AI to set and understand priorities, it allows you to maximize the availability pool across all team members, spreading out meetings proportionally, reducing meeting fatigue on your team and equally balancing new sales deals to your SDRs. 

And if your invitee needs to reschedule a meeting, they can leverage the same max-availability round robin pool to get back on the calendar ASAP vs. waiting weeks to get time again with the same person. But if you want to try to keep a meeting with the same person, you can elect to prefer that person for scheduling.

Reclaim keeps teams flexible and agile with round robin scheduling links – booking meetings faster while still aligning capacity and meeting distribution equitably across your team.

Multiple meeting lengths

Calendly

Calendly allows you to offer multiple meeting lengths from a single scheduling link on paid plans only. When enabled, invitees see a dropdown on the booking page that lets them choose from predefined durations — for example, 30, 45, or 60 minutes — before selecting a time.

This is a helpful step forward from requiring separate links for each duration, and it works well when calendars have plenty of open space. However, Calendly’s duration flexibility is still constrained by its underlying availability model. Each duration option must fit cleanly into existing free time on the calendar. As soon as availability tightens, longer meeting options often disappear entirely — leaving invitees with only the shortest option, or no options at all.

This becomes especially noticeable for busy professionals or team links, where overlapping availability is already limited. While Calendly technically supports multiple durations, it doesn’t adjust availability differently based on the length selected. The system simply checks whether a contiguous block of free time exists, and if it doesn’t, that duration isn’t offered.

As a result, multiple meeting lengths in Calendly often feel more theoretical than practical. The option exists, but invitees are frequently funneled into the shortest meeting length — not because it’s ideal, but because it’s the only one that fits without manual calendar changes.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim also lets you offer multiple meeting lengths within a single scheduling link (even on their free plan), optimizing the booking experience for busy calendars where flexibility is a critical must-have.

When an invitee selects a longer meeting length in Reclaim, the system doesn’t just look for empty time — it evaluates whether that time can be made available without disrupting higher-priority commitments. Shorter meetings may fit cleanly into existing gaps, while longer meetings can surface additional options by flexing lower-priority work behind the scenes.

This means multiple durations are actually usable, even for busy calendars. Instead of defaulting everyone to the shortest meeting possible, Reclaim allows the meeting length to reflect the true needs of the conversation — whether that’s a quick check-in or a deeper working session. The result is a more natural scheduling experience:

• Invitees choose the length that matches the meeting’s purpose
• Hosts don’t have to pre-decide or guess
• Longer meetings don’t quietly disappear from the booking page

Because this logic is consistent across individual and team links, multiple durations remain viable even when scheduling involves multiple stakeholders with packed schedules.

Screening questions & routing

Calendly

Calendly allows you to add custom questions to your scheduling pages so you can collect information from invitees before a meeting is booked. These questions can be marked as required or optional and are commonly used to gather basic context like role, company, or meeting goals.

Calendly also offers Routing Forms, which expand on this idea by letting teams route invitees to different event types based on their answers. This works well for high-volume inbound workflows, such as sales qualification or support triage, where the goal is to send people to the right calendar.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim also supports custom questions on Scheduling Links to help you gather information and qualify new meetings in the booking process. You can create custom fields across single line, multi-line, dropdown, radio buttons, phone number and email property types to screen attendees so you’re always prepared for your next meeting. And the option to set them as optional or required so you don’t have to force an overly-long submission process when it’s not needed.

The questions themselves stay lightweight and human — not long, form-heavy workflows — which keeps conversion high while still giving hosts meaningful insight before the meeting happens. In practice, this makes Reclaim’s screening questions feel less like a gate and more like a conversation starter. You get the context you need without turning scheduling into a multi-step form fill or forcing invitees through complex logic. Routing is coming soon for advanced scheduling workflows.

Post-booking redirects

Calendly

Calendly supports post-booking redirects, but they are strictly limited to the event-type level. This means you can configure one redirect URL per event type, and that same redirect applies to every booking made from that event type — including reusable links, team links, and single-use links derived from it.

So even if you generate multiple one-off or single-use links from the same event type, they all share the exact same post-booking redirect. There’s no way to tailor the redirect, and as a result, teams that want different post-booking experiences are forced to create:

• Duplicate event types
• Parallel scheduling setups
• Or external workarounds using embeds and custom scripts

This adds operational overhead and makes scheduling systems harder to maintain. What starts as a simple redirect feature quickly turns into a structural limitation when teams try to personalize workflows at scale. Calendly’s redirect capability works best when:

• Every meeting of a given type has the same next step
• The post-booking experience is generic
• Context and urgency don’t meaningfully change what should happen next

Calendly’s event-type–level redirects assume that all meetings of a given type are fundamentally the same. That assumption breaks down quickly as soon as teams want personalization, segmentation, or flexibility without complexity.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim approaches post-booking redirects from the opposite direction — treating them as part of a link-level, contextual scheduling experience, not a global setting.

In Reclaim, redirects are configured per Scheduling Link, including personalized one-off links. This means different links — even if they’re based on the same underlying meeting type — can each send invitees to a different destination after booking. That flexibility enables teams to:

• Send VIPs to tailored prep or agenda pages
• Route candidates to role-specific next steps
• Direct customers to onboarding, payment, or support flows
• Share internal links that point to the exact doc or workspace needed

Because Reclaim links are designed to be personalized without cloning core configurations, redirects stay clean and intentional. You don’t need to duplicate event types or manage brittle workarounds — the redirect simply matches the purpose of the link you shared.

Most importantly, the post-booking experience feels continuous, not generic. The redirect reflects the same context that shaped the scheduling itself, reinforcing momentum instead of flattening it.

Automated meeting reminders

Calendly

Calendly offers automated email and SMS reminders that are configured at the event-type level. Once set, every meeting booked through that event type receives the same reminder cadence and messaging. This works well for standardized workflows like sales demos or support calls, where consistency matters and every meeting follows the same pattern. However, because reminders are tied to the event type, they can’t easily adapt to different contexts without duplicating event types or layering in external automation. 

As a result, reminders tend to be reliable but uniform — optimized for scale rather than nuance.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim.ai also provides automated reminders, but with link-level flexibility that mirrors how its scheduling links work. Different links can have different reminder timing and messaging, even when they’re based on the same underlying meeting structure. This allows reminders to reflect the urgency or purpose of the meeting without adding complexity to the setup. 

Because reminders are part of Reclaim’s broader calendar-aware system, they stay aligned as meetings move or change — keeping communication accurate without manual updates.

Target calendar support

Calendly

Calendly only allows their users to create scheduling links for a single calendar. That means you can’t choose different destination calendars for different links — every meeting created through Calendly lands on the same primary calendar. This works for simple setups, but it becomes limiting for people who manage multiple calendars across roles, teams, or brands. 

To truly separate scheduling across calendars, users are forced to create additional Calendly accounts or seats, adding cost and operational overhead.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim.ai supports unlimited calendars and lets you control which calendar a scheduling link writes to. Different links can target different calendars without duplicating accounts or restructuring your setup. This makes it easy to keep work, recruiting, customer, and personal calendars cleanly separated while still offering self-serve scheduling. 

Because target calendar selection is built directly into Reclaim’s scheduling links, teams get flexibility without complexity — and their calendars stay organized as scheduling scales.

Email integrations

Calendly

Calendly integrates smoothly with major email platforms like Gmail and Outlook, including browser extensions and add-ins that let you insert scheduling links or available time slots directly into emails. This makes it easy to work scheduling into your existing inbox workflow without switching apps. 

But beyond link insertion and basic calendar availability checks, Calendly’s native email integrations don’t extend deeply into your email ecosystem — advanced workflows typically require external automation or CRM tooling to connect reminders, follow-ups, and contextual data back into your email sequences.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim.ai also supports email workflows, letting you share Scheduling Links directly from your inbox and connect to email clients for sending, tracking, and managing scheduling communication. Because Reclaim links can be personalized and contextualized at the link level, email outreach feels more tailored without extra tooling. 

Additionally, Reclaim’s email integration naturally tie into its broader calendar logic — so rules around priorities, buffers, and availability flow through to what your invitees see in email. You can even create tasks for follow-ups on meetings right from your inbox. This gives teams flexibility in how they use email for scheduling while keeping the calendar context intact.

Custom branding

Calendly

Calendly offers custom branding options that let teams add their logo, colors, and basic visual styling to booking pages. This works well for maintaining brand consistency across externally shared scheduling links. But branding is generally applied at the event type or account level, which means all links of that type share the same look and feel. Customization is primarily cosmetic and doesn’t vary meaningfully based on who the link is for or how it’s being used.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim.ai also supports custom branding, but extends it naturally to individual scheduling links, including personalized one-off links. This makes it easy to align the booking experience with the specific context of the meeting — whether that’s a customer call, recruiting interview, or internal workflow — without duplicating configurations. Branding becomes part of the overall scheduling experience rather than a global setting, allowing teams to stay on-brand while still tailoring how meetings are presented.

Payment links

Calendly

Calendly supports native payment collection through integrations with providers like Stripe and PayPal. This allows teams to require payment at the time of booking for certain event types, which is commonly used for coaching sessions, consultations, classes, or other paid appointments. Payment settings are configured at the event-type level, and once enabled, booking and payment are tightly coupled — the meeting isn’t confirmed until payment is completed. This makes Calendly a good fit for straightforward, transactional scheduling use cases.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim.ai does not currently offer native payment links within Scheduling Links. Reclaim’s focus today is on intelligent scheduling, prioritization, and calendar optimization rather than transactional booking flows. While payment can be handled externally via redirects or follow-up workflows, it’s not enforced as part of the booking step itself. That said, payment support is a logical extension of Reclaim’s scheduling platform and may be introduced in the future as the product expands into more revenue-driven use cases.

Multi-calendar availability

Calendly

Calendly allows users to connect multiple calendars so it can check availability across all of them when offering time slots. This helps prevent double-booking by ensuring that if a meeting exists on any connected calendar, that time won’t be shown as available. 

But this capability is largely passive: Calendly treats all connected calendars as read-only signals for free/busy time. It doesn’t unify those calendars into a single system or provide deeper control beyond conflict detection, and availability is still limited to time that is already open.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim.ai takes a more active approach with its connected calendars capability. Reclaim can connect to multiple calendars simultaneously and treat them as part of a single scheduling system, not just conflict checks. This allows Reclaim to understand your full availability across work, personal, and shared calendars — and intelligently coordinate scheduling around them. Instead of simply blocking time, Reclaim uses connected calendars to create a more accurate, flexible picture of when meetings can happen, helping users offer more realistic availability without manual calendar management.

Analytics

Calendly

Calendly only offers analytics on meetings booked through Calendly scheduling links. The dashboard shows metrics like number of meetings booked, cancellations, no-shows, popular event types, and booking trends over time. This is useful for understanding the performance of scheduling links, but it does not analyze all the other meetings in your schedule or your broader time management health. 

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim’s analytics take a much wider view. Because Reclaim is a full AI calendar and planner, it analyzes all meetings and calendar activity, regardless of how they were scheduled. This includes internal meetings, external meetings, tasks, focus time, breaks, and routines. Reclaim surfaces insights around productivity, meeting load, focus time protection, and work-life balance, helping individuals and teams understand not just how meetings are booked — but how time is actually spent.

Instead of optimizing for scheduling volume alone, Reclaim’s analytics help teams answer deeper questions like:

• Are we spending too much time in meetings?
• How much focus time do we really have? 
• Are workloads balanced across the week?
• Are meetings encroaching on personal time?

Reclaim also offers deep enterprise reporting to give leaders true insight into their workforce health, with exportable reports to leverage these insights along their other systems of record.

Smart Meetings

Calendly

Calendly does not offer a feature comparable to Smart Meetings. Its scheduling automation is limited to the point of booking: once a meeting is scheduled, Calendly does not actively manage or optimize it over time. 

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim offers AI-powered Smart Meetings that automatically find the best time for any recurring meetings based on availability, priorities, and preferences of every single attendee. So instead of having a recurring one-on-one every Tuesday at 2:00pm, you can create a Smart Meeting that automatically finds the best time within your smart scheduling window, allowing you to stay flexible for changes and maximize your availability for new meetings booked with scheduling links.

If conflicts arise, Reclaim intelligently reschedules the meeting instead of canceling it or forcing manual coordination. The result is meetings that stay on the calendar and stay useful, without creating ongoing scheduling work for the people involved.

Calendar sync

Calendly

Calendly does not offer a calendar sync feature. It only checks availability across calendars, it does not help you defend events across calendars to prevent double-booking.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim offers unlimited calendar syncs and bi-directional syncing to protect your availability across multiple calendars. Reclaim can sync events across calendars, creating smart copies that stay up to date as changes happen. This ensures availability stays accurate everywhere without requiring manual duplication or cleanup. Calendar sync in Reclaim isn’t just about avoiding conflicts — it’s about maintaining a coherent, unified schedule across work, personal, and shared calendars so scheduling links, planning, and analytics all reflect reality.

Focus Time

Calendly

Calendly does not offer a focus time or time-blocking feature. In fact, its scheduling model unintentionally discourages time blocking. Any focus time you block off in your calendar immediately reduces the availability shown on your scheduling links. As a result, people who rely heavily on Calendly often feel pressure to leave their calendars more open than they’d like — effectively penalizing people for trying to protect deep work time.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim.ai offers AI-powered focus time that flexibly protects time for deep work, without destroying your scheduling link availability. Simply set your weekly focus time goal, and automatically schedule focus blocks while still allowing important meetings to be booked when needed. Focus time can be prioritized, moved, or resized intelligently so it doesn’t disappear — even as calendars change. Instead of forcing users to choose between availability and productivity, Reclaim balances both, ensuring deep work remains protected without blocking progress.

Habits

Calendly

Calendly does not offer a habit or routine time blocking feature. Their platform again unintentionally discourages time blocking, as it eliminates the usability of their scheduling link feature.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim offers AI-powered Habits, or flexible recurring events, that automatically defend time for things like planning, exercise, lunch, or work routines that find the best time within your smart scheduling windows. They’re designed to adapt — staying on the calendar without requiring rigid time blocking. As meetings shift, Reclaim intelligently moves habits to preserve consistency rather than letting them disappear.

For example, say you want to eat lunch every day between 11:30am and 2:00pm (don’t care when within that window), and you’d like 60 minutes but would take as little as 30 minutes, Reclaim flexibly defends your lunch every day, shifting the time as your calendar fills up, and then locks your lunch into place when you run out of room to reschedule.

They offer hundreds of Habit templates to explore and activate in one click, designed for your unique role (sales, marketing, HR, engineering, etc.) as well as healthy personal and family routines.

Tasks

Calendly

Calendly does not offer a task scheduling feature. Their platform again unintentionally discourages time blocking, as it eliminates the usability of their scheduling link feature.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim offers AI-powered Task scheduling that automatically finds the best time for your tasks in your calendar, by priority, before your due dates. Tasks are continuously prioritized against meetings, and instantly rescheduled as calendars change. Instead of living in a separate system, tasks show up as flexible blocks of real work time — ensuring that planning, execution, and meetings are all balanced together. The result is a calendar that reflects not just commitments, but capacity.

Buffer Time

Calendly

Calendly supports buffer time before or after meetings, configured at the event-type level. This prevents back-to-back bookings by reserving fixed blocks of time around meetings scheduled through Calendly. Buffers work well for basic needs like travel time or note-taking, but they only apply to Calendly-booked meetings, don’t adapt to how busy a day becomes, and don’t help rebalance time when schedules change. If calendars get overloaded, buffers are often reduced or removed entirely to reclaim availability.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim’s buffer time feature automatically defends time for breaks and travel time around both your meetings and heads-down work. Breaks can be automatically placed throughout the day and intelligently moved as meetings shift, ensuring they don’t disappear when calendars fill up. Instead of simply blocking time around meetings, Reclaim helps maintain spacing across the day so energy and focus are preserved, even as schedules change. Breaks are protected without permanently shrinking availability, striking a balance between productivity and sustainability.

Planner

Calendly

Calendly does not offer a planner or in-app calendar experience for managing your day. You have to work through your main calendar to see and plan your time.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim.ai includes a full planner experience that brings meetings, tasks, habits, focus time, and breaks into a single, dynamic view. The planner is interactive and adaptive: as meetings are added or moved, Reclaim continuously rebalances the rest of the schedule to protect priorities and capacity. 

Instead of just showing availability, Reclaim helps users actively shape their day and week — making planning an ongoing, intelligent process rather than a manual exercise.

Integrations

Calendly

Calendly offers a broad ecosystem of integrations across calendars, video conferencing tools, CRMs, marketing platforms, and automation tools. This makes it easy to plug Calendly into existing sales, recruiting, or support workflows, especially for teams that rely on tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoom, or Slack. Calendly’s integrations are largely centered around event creation and workflow automation — triggering actions when meetings are booked, rescheduled, or canceled.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim also integrates with key workplace tools, but with a different emphasis. Reclaim’s integrations are designed to support time management and planning, in addition to meeting workflows. Integrations connect calendars, task systems, and collaboration tools so Reclaim can understand how work actually happens and continuously rebalance schedules. Rather than triggering actions around meetings alone, Reclaim’s integrations help coordinate tasks, focus time, routines, and meetings as part of a single system.

Security

Calendly

Calendly offers enterprise-grade security, including support for SSO/SAML, SCIM user provisioning, role-based access controls, audit logs, and compliance with standards like SOC 2 Type II. These features make Calendly easy to deploy and manage at scale, particularly for sales, recruiting, and support teams operating across large user bases.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim also offers mature enterprise-grade security across an even broader surface area: the calendar itself. In addition to SSO and enterprise access controls, Reclaim’s security model accounts for the fact that it touches all calendar data, including meetings, tasks, habits, and personal time. This includes granular permissioning, privacy controls for synced and AI-managed events, and safeguards designed to protect sensitive calendar context while still enabling intelligent scheduling.

Where Calendly focuses on securing scheduling infrastructure, Reclaim focuses on securing time data and planning intelligence — ensuring enterprises can safely adopt AI-driven calendar management without exposing sensitive information.

Supported calendars

Calendly

Calendly supports the major enterprise calendar platforms, including Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook / Office 365, which covers the vast majority of business users. Its calendar support is designed to ensure accurate availability checking and reliable event creation, but is largely limited to these primary providers.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim.ai also supports Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook calendars, but is built to work across multiple connected calendars simultaneously as part of a unified system. This allows users to manage complex setups — such as work, personal, and shared calendars — more effectively, with consistent availability and planning across all of them.

Free plan

Calendly

On Calendly’s free plan, users get access to basic one-on-one scheduling links with limited customization. Availability is strictly based on existing free time, links support a single meeting duration, and more advanced features — like multiple event types, workflows, branding controls, and richer customization — are gated behind paid plans. For simple scheduling, this works well, but the free plan is intentionally constrained to prevent meaningful flexibility.

Reclaim.ai

Reclaim’s free plan, by contrast, gives users access to AI-powered Scheduling Links from day one. Even on the free tier, Reclaim links benefit from priority-aware availability — meaning users can surface more realistic time options without manually clearing their calendar. Free users can also experience how Scheduling Links interact with focus time and other flexible calendar blocks, making it easier to stay bookable without sacrificing productivity.

The key difference is philosophical:

• Calendly’s free plan shows you how scheduling links work.
• Reclaim’s free plan shows you how scheduling should work when calendars are full.

This makes Reclaim’s free Scheduling Links especially compelling for busy professionals who want smarter availability immediately — not just a stripped-down version of a paid product.

Pricing

Calendly

Here’s a breakdown of Calendly’s paid plans (billed annually): 

• Standard: $10/user/month 
• Teams: $15/user/month
• Enterprise: starts at $15,000/year

Paid tiers unlock core scheduling enhancements like multiple event types, team scheduling (round robin/collective), automated workflows, custom branding, CRM integrations, and admin controls. Calendly’s pricing is per seat, making it easy for individuals and small teams to adopt, but the cost scales with headcount and advanced capabilities.

Reclaim.ai

Here’s a breakdown of Reclaim’s paid plans (billed annually):

• Starter: $10/user/month
• Business: $15/user/month
• Enterprise: $22/user/month

Paid tiers expand access to unlimited Scheduling Links, Smart Meetings, Habits, calendar Syncs, analytics, integrations, delegated access, and enterprise admin features. Reclaim’s pricing structure is designed around enabling deeper calendar intelligence and team productivity rather than solely unlocking more event types.

Compare G2 reviews

Calendly: 4.7/5 stars on G2

✅ Positives:

• “Calendly makes scheduling calls and appointments for my business incredibly easy. I can set up different types of appointments and even accept payments, and set up an availability calendar that works across different events, so I don't have to make myself unavailable 5 different times. I was able to integrate it in my website incredibly easily as well. I truly can't imagine using anything else.” (source)
• “Calendly’s new updates have made it the entire scheduling experience smarter and smoother. The redesigned navigation makes it easy to locate things and live preview helps me see how my booking page looks like. The new workflows, holiday blocking, and improved contacts view has made planning a breeze for me.” (source)

🔴 Negatives:

• “Their tool and support are totally unreliable. We've been using it for years, but now a lot of clients are reporting that they cannot book a meeting through calendly link. Their support is totally unresponsive, they are not giving any reasonable timeline for fixing this and we're simply loosing money because Calendly is not doing what it was supposed to do. We are currently in the evaluation phase of competitors..” (source)
• “Terrible customer service, the product has major flaws and issues with integrations. If you need a booking system for sporadic interviews or calls, Calendly will do. If you need a solid software to handle 20+ appointments per day, look for something else.” (source)

Reclaim.ai: 4.8/5 stars on G2

✅ Positives:

• “Unlike most people (possibly), I started using Reclaim.ai for it’s meeting links feature (think Calendly) and was pleased to learn that they had smart scheduling (think Clockwise), and integration with external calendars (Outlook, Gmail). I love the interface, aesthetics, and the idea of recurring tasks, habits, and focus time that are dynamically rescheduled by AI. I also found the multiple priority levels concept for the purpose of automated rescheduling to be immediately intuitive.“ (source)
• “Pricing was what convinced us to switch. Although the free plan is excellent for a business that just requires one link, the option to have flexible duration scheduling links, and a target calendar for each schedule is fantastic to keep your workday organized. They also offer recurring meeting options and automatic travel time and "decompress" time in between your meetings, which are really helpful.” (source)

🔴 Negatives:

• “Some of the main features, such as integration with various calendars, are inevitably paid. The cost is not high, however, there are other similar free tools.” (source)
• “You have to log in to their website to manage many stuff and it creates one more thing to do.” (source)

Final verdict: Calendly vs. Reclaim.ai ✅

If you’re choosing between Calendly and Reclaim, the decision comes down to how busy your calendar is.

Calendly is a great fit when scheduling is mostly about giving people a clean link to pick from truly open time – especially if you rely on payments, routing, or a polished appointment flow. But if you’re tired of sending scheduling links with no near-term availability, and booking important meetings weeks out, Calendly is not for you.

Reclaim is built for the opposite reality: packed calendars where availability needs to be created, not just displayed. With priority-aware AI-powered scheduling links, Reclaim can surface more bookable options by flexing lower-priority holds while keeping higher-priority commitments intact.

If your goal is to maximize open time slots available for meetings, without giving up focus time, tasks, and the rest of your workweek, Reclaim is the better long-term system. Try a Scheduling Link, set a priority level, and see how much sooner people can actually get on your calendar.

Already using Calendly links? Switch to Reclaim, and save 20% on Starter and Business plans.