Cal.com vs Calendly (2026): Price per Seat, HIPAA, AI and Teams

The short answer

Cal.com and Calendly book the same kind of meeting, but they are built for different buyers. Cal.com gives away more on its free plan, charges less per seat for team scheduling, and sells a signed HIPAA agreement that Calendly does not offer at all. Calendly is the more polished product, with AI meeting notes and an email assistant on its Plus plans, and Cal.com's own guidance for AI assistants concedes that Calendly is generally the easier pick for small, non-technical teams. Pick on price and compliance, or on simplicity and AI. The sections below walk through each point, with every figure taken from the two vendors' own pages as of October 2026.

Price per seat, monthly and yearly

Both tools charge per seat, and both reward yearly billing. Cal.com Teams costs $16 per user a month, or $12 billed yearly; Organizations costs $37, or $28 billed yearly ^[1]. Calendly has four self-serve tiers. Standard costs $12 a seat a month or $10 billed annually, Teams $20 or $16, and the Plus versions of each add AI features: Standard Plus at $24 or $18, Teams Plus at $32 or $24 ^[2]. The closest match is Cal.com Teams against Calendly Teams, since both bring round robin, routing forms and managed event types. Here they are side by side, per seat.

What a ten-person team pays

For ten people on yearly billing, Cal.com Teams costs $1,440 a year and Calendly Teams $1,920, a gap of $480, by our arithmetic. On monthly billing the gap is also $480: $1,920 a year for Cal.com Teams against $2,400 for Calendly Teams. Cal.com's yearly discount is 25% on Teams, and Calendly's is 20% on Teams. Seat counting differs too. Calendly charges for users who connect calendars and host meetings, while Cal.com bills the highest number of members during the billing cycle, or active users on plans with a minimum commitment. A team that adds and removes people often should check that rule. Turnover costs money.

Where the gap closes

The comparison flips once you need single sign-on. Calendly sells SAML SSO as a $3 per user monthly add-on on annual Teams, while Cal.com puts SAML SSO and SCIM on Organizations. With SSO, Calendly Teams comes to $228 per user a year against $336 on Cal.com Organizations, by our arithmetic. Calendly keeps SCIM and the audit log for Enterprise, though, while Cal.com includes both in Organizations. At fifty seats, Calendly Enterprise costs $15,000 a year and Cal.com Organizations $16,800 on yearly billing. Large regulated teams should ask both for a quote. Neither list price tells the whole story at that size.

Contracts, refunds and switching

The billing terms are close, with one difference worth noting. Both vendors treat fees as non-refundable under their terms, and Cal.com bills in advance, renews automatically and ends a cancelled subscription at the close of the paid period. Calendly's customer terms add that renewal prices can rise by CPI plus 3%. Budget for that. Switching is easy in one direction: Cal.com's free plan includes a one-click import of Calendly event types, and Cal.com's switching pages say it will cover the remaining Calendly contract for teams that move. Ask for that offer in writing. It changes the first-year math.

Free plans: Cal.com gives far more away

The free plans are not close. Not even nearly. Cal.com Free covers one user with unlimited event types, calendars and bookings, Stripe and PayPal payments, two-way Salesforce and HubSpot sync, Cal Video, the Companion mobile app and browser extension, and a one-click Calendly import. Calendly Free allows one event type and one calendar connection, with unlimited one-on-one meetings, a booking page, the mobile app and the browser extension. It has no payments, no CRM or Zapier connections, no automations and no group or round-robin events. Every new Calendly account starts with a 14-day trial of paid features and drops to Free when it ends.

Cal.com Free has its own gaps, and they matter more than the headline suggests. It sends only the default reminder email, because custom workflows were pulled from the free plan after spam and phishing abuse. It includes no messaging credits, so text reminders cost money from the first message. Round robin, collective and managed events, branding removal and Cal Video recording all need a paid plan. Still, a solo consultant who wants several meeting types, payments and CRM sync without paying anything has one real option here, and it is Cal.com.

Team scheduling, routing and CRM

On paper the team features look alike. Cal.com Teams adds shared availability, round robin, collective and managed event types, routing forms and booking analytics through Insights, which can show a routing trace explaining why a host was picked. Calendly Teams adds round robin through its Distribution Engine, routing forms that work with Calendly, HubSpot, Pardot and Marketo forms, centrally managed event types, groups and admins, and team analytics. Routing is where they part. Cal.com saves attribute-based routing, where hosts are weighted by attributes such as location or specialty, for Organizations. Calendly saves routing by Salesforce lookup for Enterprise.

The CRM story favors Cal.com on reach and Calendly on breadth of form tools. Cal.com includes two-way Salesforce and HubSpot sync on every plan, Free included. Its Salesforce app creates event records under a lead or contact, can hand the record to the booking organizer, and can book a round-robin event straight with the account owner. Calendly connects HubSpot from Standard and Salesforce and Marketo from Teams, and adds Microsoft Dynamics 365 on Enterprise. A sales team that lives in HubSpot or Salesforce can test Cal.com's sync before paying. On Calendly, the same test needs a paid seat.

Workflows, texts and credits

Both tools automate reminders and follow-ups, but they count the cost differently. Cal.com workflows send email, SMS and WhatsApp messages, and can trigger a Cal.ai phone call, on confirmations, cancellations, reschedules and timed triggers before or after a meeting. Texts and calls draw on credits worth $0.01 each: Teams includes 750 per member a month, Organizations 1,000, and Free none ^[3]. Every message is charged at the Twilio rate plus an 80% processing fee, and when credits run out, reminders fall back to email.

Calendly bundles automations and reminders into Standard and above, allows up to 50 automations per user or team, and includes 250 SMS credits per seat a month below Enterprise. Cal.com's Enterprise plan removes the meter entirely with unlimited credits, while Calendly's SMS allowance is the one stated for every tier below Enterprise. The practical difference is predictability. A team that sends a text before every call should estimate its monthly volume on Cal.com, because the price per message depends on the destination country. Calendly's allowance is simpler to read. Text-heavy teams should run the numbers.

AI: meeting notes versus a phone agent

The AI layers point in different directions. Calendly leads on notes. Its Standard Plus and Teams Plus plans add Notetaker, which joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls to record them and share transcripts and recaps, and Callie, an assistant that schedules over email and in-app chat. Both launched on August 19, 2026, and both work in English only. Calendly also opened an official MCP server on March 11, 2026, so assistants like ChatGPT and Claude can work with your scheduling data. If AI meeting notes are the reason you are shopping, Calendly has the more complete package today.

Cal.com's main AI product is Cal.ai, a phone agent that runs inside workflows and can confirm, book, reschedule, cancel and follow up by phone. It is available on all plans and costs 29 credits a minute, or $0.29, and Cal.com sells US phone numbers for it at $5 a month. Cal.com also runs a hosted MCP server at mcp.cal.com, agents that manage your agenda from Slack, Telegram, email or a command-line tool, and Cal Video recording and transcription on Teams and above. It suits outbound calling more than note-taking. Teams fighting no-shows will find that useful.

Compliance: the BAA decides it for clinics

For healthcare buyers this section ends the comparison. Calendly says it does not currently comply with HIPAA or GLBA, and its customer terms forbid protected health information. That rules it out. Cal.com sells a signed business associate agreement on every paid plan. The BAA is free on Enterprise and on Organizations with 15 or more users, and costs $300 a month on Teams and on Organizations with fewer than 15 users ^[4]. Older Cal.com pages that tie HIPAA to Enterprise only are outdated. Cal.com also reminds customers that any third-party integration they connect has to be HIPAA compliant too.

The threshold creates a pricing quirk worth checking. Fifteen users on Organizations billed yearly cost $5,040 a year with the BAA included, while fifteen users on Teams cost $2,160 plus $3,600 for the BAA, or $5,760 a year, by our arithmetic. Below fifteen users, Teams plus the BAA is the cheaper route. Beyond HIPAA, Cal.com lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR and CCPA, with US and EU hosting for data residency. Calendly offers SAML SSO, SCIM, domain control and an audit log, mostly on Enterprise. None of those controls opens Calendly to protected health information, so a clinic should not read them as a substitute for a signed BAA.

API, developer platform and apps

Developers will find more surface on Cal.com. There are caveats. Its REST API v2 allows 120 requests a minute by default with an API key, and OAuth clients need approval from a Cal.com admin, with access tokens that last 30 minutes. API v1 shut down on April 8, 2026. Webhooks cover more than 20 triggers and are signed with HMAC SHA256. The legacy Platform for managed users has taken no new sign-ups since December 15, 2025, and the Atoms React components get fixes only. Teams building a white-label booking product should read those two notes twice.

Calendly's API v2 offers webhooks, OAuth and personal access tokens. The free plan gets the API at 50 requests per user per minute, and the Scheduling API that creates invitees needs a paid plan. Both vendors list more than 100 integrations, including Google, Microsoft, Zoom, HubSpot and Zapier. On apps, Cal.com's Companion runs on iOS and Android, as browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge, and as desktop apps for macOS, Windows and Linux, free on every plan. Calendly offers its mobile app and browser extension on Free as well. Neither leaves you stuck at a desk.

Self-hosting and the license

This used to be Cal.com's clearest edge, and it has narrowed. Since April 2026 the commercial Cal.com is closed source. What remains open is Cal.diy, an MIT-licensed community edition with the scheduling engine, API v2, webhooks and CRM apps, but without teams, round robin, routing forms, workflows, Insights or SSO. Cal.com says Cal.diy is strictly for personal, non-production use, with no security guarantee. A company that wants Cal.com on its own servers buys an enterprise on-premises deployment through sales. Cal.com's comparison page notes that Calendly has no self-hosting option at all. For most buyers, that settles it. Both are cloud services now.

Who wins for which buyer

Cal.com's ratings on G2, Trustpilot and Product Hunt are positive, and it has no Capterra listing to compare. Neither card settles the choice, because the products differ less in quality than in shape. Our scores reflect that: Calendly scores higher than Cal.com in our scheduling category, and Cal.com scores above Setmore, Acuity Scheduling, YouCanBookMe and TidyCal. Our Calendly review and Cal.com review explain each score in full. Use the list below to match the tool to the team in front of you.

• Clinics and anyone handling health data: Cal.com, because Calendly offers no BAA.
• Solo users who want payments and CRM sync for free: Cal.com Free.
• Sales teams that want routing and the lowest seat price: Cal.com Teams.
• Teams that want AI meeting notes and an email assistant: Calendly Standard Plus or Teams Plus.
• Small, non-technical teams that value a simple setup: Calendly.
• Large teams that need SCIM and audit logs: quotes from both, since Cal.com Organizations includes them and Calendly keeps them for Enterprise.

The bottom line

Cal.com wins on price, on its free plan and on compliance: team seats cost less on either billing cycle, the free plan includes payments and CRM sync, and only Cal.com will sign a BAA. Calendly wins on polish and AI, with meeting notes and an email assistant that Cal.com does not match, and it is the simpler tool for a small team that just wants meetings booked. Watch the credits if you text a lot on Cal.com, and the SSO add-on and Enterprise floor on Calendly. If health data is involved, the decision is already made.