What’s the most used appointment scheduling tool on the internet?

Appointment scheduling tools allow businesses to automate appointment booking, scheduling and cancellation processes, saving valuable time and resources. Often, these tools integrate seamlessly with company websites to enable a smooth customer experience. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, such as HubSpot and HoneyBook, typically offer an appointment scheduling feature as part of their software suite. Besides CRM systems, there are individual tools specifically focusing on scheduling automation.

A popular individual tool for appointment scheduling is Calendly. Calendly was founded in Atlanta in 2013 by Tope Awotona, who was displeased with the difficulty of scheduling sales calls. In January 2021, Calendly was valued at 3 billion USD. On the company’s website, Calendly claims to have over 10 million users. How popular is the platform exactly, and what are the main competitors? 

Popularity measured by embedding

We can measure the popularity of an appointment scheduling tool by counting the number of unique websites that have embedded it. Looking at the data, we find that Calendly has roughly 43,000 widget installments at the time of writing. We can break down this number by the SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) major group to get an insight into the industries in which Calendly is used. We observe that Calendly is most frequently used in Business Services (SIC 73), followed by Engineering, Accounting, Research and Management services (SIC 87). 

Calendly is predominantly used in the United States (48%), followed by Canada (10%). Analyzing our historical data, we see that Calendly has seen massive growth in implementation rates over the last two years. From roughly 14,500 installments in June 2020, the number has tripled.

Now we take a look at Calendly’s main competitors. Can we observe similar growth trends? With almost 9000 widget deployments, Squarespace Scheduling (previously Acuity Scheduling) is the second most embedded tool according to our data, followed by SetMore, Timely and SimplyBook.me respectively.

Calendly most popular, Squarespace on the rise

Since June 2020, the number of installments of Squarespace Scheduling has slightly increased, while the installments for SetMore have decreased. At the same time, the number of Timely and SimplyBook.me widget installments have remained similar. Compared with its competitors, it becomes clear that Calendly is the most popular platform in terms of widget installments.

We can also use our data to get an estimate of businesses that can potentially benefit from using an appointment scheduling tool. We filter websites of for-profit companies that don’t have any of the discussed appointment widgets embedded and have similar features. This results in over 1,600,000 unique websites. Although not all of these results represent potential clients, we can conclude that the market is clearly not saturated yet and further growth can be expected.

Here, we’ve identified the most popular appointment scheduling tools by number of installments. While there’s a clear winner, there’s also still ample space for these tools to grow, with numerous business websites not leveraging appointment tools yet.

Take a look at our relevant Recipes for a more profound understanding of the trends and more in-depth analytics.