The best Scheduling & Booking
Every option ranked — open-source, self-hostable, and commercial — by our transparent Sovereignty Score, with honest trade-offs so you choose what fits you, not us.
Tools for sharing availability and letting others book meetings or appointments without email back-and-forth — booking-link platforms, group meeting-time polls, and appointment systems for service businesses.
L5Applications — layer 5 of the AI stack- 1
Easy!Appointments
Top pickOpen sourceMature, self-hosted appointment booking with Google Calendar sync.
Free, self-hosted (own server/hosting cost only). Optional paid add-ons: SMS reminders, payment processing, custom development, and managed hosting from the maintainer. · in our Calendly comparison →
What is Easy!Appointments? →91sovereignty - 2
Appointments for Nextcloud
Open sourceCalendly-style booking pages built into your existing Nextcloud.
Free; installed from the Nextcloud App Store into an existing Nextcloud instance. Optional donations support the solo maintainer. · in our Calendly comparison →
What is Appointments for Nextcloud? →88sovereignty - 3
Cal.diy
Open sourceMIT-licensed community edition of the Cal.com scheduling codebase.
Free, self-hosted. No official managed hosting or support channel; Cal.com's paid hosted product is a separate, now closed-source, offering. · in our Calendly comparison →
What is Cal.diy? →85sovereignty - 4
Rallly
Open sourceOpen-source group scheduling and meeting-time polling.
Free, self-hosted via Docker. A hosted version exists at rallly.co with an optional paid Pro tier for extra features. · in our Calendly comparison →
What is Rallly? →84sovereignty
Is it free?
The free tier, its real limits and where you start paying — read from each vendor's own pricing page and dated.
Run these yourself
What each one actually needs — real RAM, honest running cost, and the setup time nobody quotes.
- Self-hosting Easy!Appointments 1 GB on a VPS covers PHP and MySQL for one business's booking traffic
- Self-hosting Appointments for Nextcloud Whatever your Nextcloud already uses, since the app adds no services. A Nextcloud stood up just for booking still means running all of Nextcloud; 4 GB is comfortable
- Self-hosting Cal.diy 2 GB to run the built image with PostgreSQL and Redis; 8 GB on whichever machine does the build
- Self-hosting Rallly 2 GB covers the bundled stack (Traefik, PostgreSQL, Garage object storage and the app) for a team's polls
Replacing a specific tool?
Head-to-head comparisons for each popular scheduling & booking product.
Straight head-to-heads
Two scheduling & booking tools, side by side — verified facts and a plain verdict.