Booking a slot is the easy part. The question is what becomes of the appointment once booked, and where the information gathered ends up.
A booking link solves a real problem and solves it well: ending the email back-and-forth over a time. The limit shows up later, when the appointment must come with something else — a questionnaire to complete beforehand, a client record to update, a reminder sent from the same address as your other messages, a write-up to attach afterwards. Each of these is handled separately, and you end up hand-stitching what could have lived in one place.
The questions to ask any tool, ours included. The answer given here is Thingsform's.
The booking joins the client record, can trigger a preparatory form and create the preparation task. The appointment stops being an isolated calendar line and becomes a step in the record, with what precedes and follows it.
The Appointments module connects to Forms: the pre-meeting questionnaire goes out with the confirmation and comes back completed before the date. That is what stops you spending the first fifteen minutes of a meeting gathering information you could have had the day before.
Automatic reminders are included, and ThingsMail keeps continuity with your other messages: same sender, same contacts, same segments. A client therefore receives reminders and your communications from a single source, which matters for deliverability.
They feed the CRM and the dashboards: attendance rate, average lead time, most frequent reasons. Those figures exist because the data is already there, with no intermediate export to rebuild in a spreadsheet each quarter.
The Appointments module is included from the Essential plan, public links and reminders included. The free plan already lets you build the associated forms, so you can check the full sequence before committing to anything.
Often, no. Here are both cases, in the honest order.
Yes, that is the basic behaviour: you set your availability and the client picks a slot from a public page, with no account to create. Automatic reminders then go out, and the booking feeds the rest of your workspace.
Automatic reminders help, but the strongest lever is the pre-meeting questionnaire: someone who spent three minutes filling something in shows up far more often. It is a commitment effect rather than a feature — but it is observable.
No, and it is not advisable. Start with one appointment type — usually the one requiring the most preparation — and leave the rest where it is. Two weeks will tell you whether the form, record and reminder sequence genuinely brings you something.
We describe neither the features nor the pricing of another vendor, which change without notice to us. This page sets out the criteria to examine and Thingsform's answers. For the other tool, its current terms are authoritative.
Calendly is a trademark of its publisher, cited here for reference. This page does not describe its features or pricing, which change over time: refer to its current terms.
The right way to decide
Rebuild your hardest form on the free plan, and have it filled in the field. Half a day is enough, and the answer stops being a matter of opinion.