Easy!Appointments vs Cal.diy
Both are alternatives to Calendly. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Cal.diy vs Easy!Appointments — same comparison, one verdict.
Easy!Appointments and Cal.diy are closely matched on ownership (91 vs 85) — this one comes down to pricing and to which trade-offs below you can live with.
Easy!Appointments
TOP PICKMature, self-hosted appointment booking with Google Calendar sync.
Easy!Appointments is a PHP/MySQL scheduling app that's been in active development for roughly a decade. It gives staff/service businesses a public booking page with configurable providers, services, working hours, and Google Calendar two-way sync. It's a closer match to Calendly's single-provider booking-page model than group-polling tools, and it's popular with clinics, salons, and consultants who want a no-subscription booking page.
Cal.diy
MIT-licensed community edition of the Cal.com scheduling codebase.
Cal.diy is the free, permissively-licensed fork Cal.com released in April 2026 after taking its commercial product closed-source. It carries over Cal.com's core booking engine — event types, buffer/booking-limit rules, Stripe/PayPal payments, and calendar/video integrations — under the MIT license, but the maintainers themselves describe it as community-maintained and recommend it for personal, non-production use rather than as a supported business tool.
Side by side
10 points of comparison, every one read from a verified field. Green marks the side that wins a row outright. A dash means we do not hold that fact — never that it is zero.
| Easy!Appointments | Cal.diy | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty ScoreOur transparent 0–100 composite for data ownership and exit cost. | 91 | 85 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first data | Yes | Yes |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Pricing | Free, self-hosted (own server/hosting cost only). Optional paid add-ons: SMS reminders, payment processing, custom development, and managed hosting from the maintainer. | Free, self-hosted. No official managed hosting or support channel; Cal.com's paid hosted product is a separate, now closed-source, offering. |
| RAM to run it wellThe figure that actually matters, not the vendor's minimum. | 1 GB on a VPS covers PHP and MySQL for one business's booking traffic | 2 GB to run the built image with PostgreSQL and Redis; 8 GB on whichever machine does the build |
| Realistic running costWhat the box costs each month if you run it yourself. | $0 extra on PHP hosting you already pay for, or $5–10/mo on a 1 GB VPS | $6–12/mo on a 2 GB VPS, as long as you build the image on an 8 GB machine you already own and push it to a registry |
| Setup timeHonest first-install estimate, not the marketing quickstart. | An hour on shared hosting, plus an hour for Google Calendar sync | Half a day for the first build and deploy, and every upgrade or domain change means another rebuild |
| Ongoing maintenanceThe part nobody budgets for. | Set two cron jobs and leave them: console sync and console cleanup. Add console backup for the database. Upgrading means replacing files and running the migrate command. Read the release notes first, because settings have moved between config files in recent releases. | There are no tagged cal.diy releases since the April 2026 fork, so upgrading means pulling main, rebuilding and running database migrations. Some features need cron jobs you set up yourself, and each integration (Google, Microsoft, Zoom) needs developer credentials you create. |
Easy!Appointments is Macrostack's recommended Calendly alternative, so it's our pick here.
Weighing both against staying on Calendly? Is Calendly free? What it actually costs →
Easy!Appointments
Strengths
- +Long track record (in development since 2015) with a large, active community (4,200+ GitHub stars, commits within the last week)
- +Straightforward LAMP-stack deployment most hosts already support, no exotic infra
- +Google Calendar two-way sync and multi-language support out of the box
- +No enterprise paywall — team/multi-provider features are in the free core
Trade-offs
- −UI is functional rather than polished compared to Calendly's consumer-grade design
- −No native video-conferencing integration (Zoom/Meet) — you wire that up separately
- −SMS reminders and payment processing require paid add-ons or your own integration work
- −You own patching, backups, and uptime — there's no managed cloud fallback if self-hosting isn't for you
Cal.diy
Strengths
- +Fully MIT-licensed — no open-core split, no feature paywall, free to modify or redistribute
- +Inherits a feature-rich booking engine: recurring events, seated events, payments, wide calendar/video integration list
- +REST API and embeddable booking widgets for building your own booking flow
- +Active repo (46k+ stars, commits within days) even post-fork
Trade-offs
- −Its own docs recommend it for personal use only and disclaim production readiness — 'use at your own risk'
- −No official support; the parent company no longer backs this codebase
- −Missing team/organization features, SSO/SAML, workflows, and routing forms that stayed in Cal.com's closed-source enterprise edition
- −Requires running Postgres + Redis + a Node.js host yourself — more moving parts than a single-binary app
- −Young as an independent project (forked April 2026); long-term maintenance commitment is unproven
Which one fits you
The trade-offs above, turned into a decision. Find the line that describes your team.
Choose Easy!Appointments
if a lower exit cost matters more to you than any single feature, and long track record (in development since 2015) with a large, active community (4,200+ GitHub stars, commits within the last week).
Choose Cal.diy
if fully MIT-licensed — no open-core split, no feature paywall, free to modify or redistribute.
Neither, yet
if both carry a real cost you should weigh first — uI is functional rather than polished compared to Calendly's consumer-grade design, and its own docs recommend it for personal use only and disclaim production readiness — 'use at your own risk'. If either of those is a dealbreaker for your team, the shortlist is wrong rather than the choice.
What it takes to run these yourself
Real requirements and honest running costs, not the vendor quickstart.
Self-hosting Easy!Appointments
1 GB on a VPS covers PHP and MySQL for one business's booking traffic RAM · An hour on shared hosting, plus an hour for Google Calendar sync
$0 extra on PHP hosting you already pay for, or $5–10/mo on a 1 GB VPS
Self-hosting Cal.diy
2 GB to run the built image with PostgreSQL and Redis; 8 GB on whichever machine does the build RAM · Half a day for the first build and deploy, and every upgrade or domain change means another rebuild
$6–12/mo on a 2 GB VPS, as long as you build the image on an 8 GB machine you already own and push it to a registry
Easy!Appointments vs Cal.diy — common questions
Is Easy!Appointments a better fit than Cal.diy for scheduling & booking?
It depends on what you are optimising for, and the honest split is this: Easy!Appointments scores 91 to Cal.diy's 85 on data ownership and exit cost, so it is the safer choice if you care about being able to leave. Cal.diy earns its place on a different axis — fully MIT-licensed — no open-core split, no feature paywall, free to modify or redistribute. Neither is a wrong answer for every team; the table above is the actual comparison.
What happens if we want to switch later?
Easy!Appointments keeps its data local or in open formats, so leaving is an export rather than a negotiation. Cal.diy is still self-hostable, so the files stay on your server either way — but it is not local-first by design, so check what its export produces before you rely on it.
Can I self-host Easy!Appointments or Cal.diy?
Both can be self-hosted. The difference is what it costs you in time rather than whether it is possible — see the setup and maintenance rows above.
Are Easy!Appointments and Cal.diy both alternatives to Calendly?
Yes — both appear in our Calendly comparison, which is why they are worth putting side by side. People usually arrive here already having decided to move off Calendly and now choosing between the two replacements, which is a narrower and much easier question.
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-07-09. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.