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
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
| Easy!Appointments | Cal.diy | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 91 | 85 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | 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. |
Easy!Appointments is Macrostack's recommended Calendly alternative, so it's our pick here.
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
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Facts verified 2026-07-09. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.