What is Meetly?

Most group scheduling tools ask a room full of people to reconstruct their own calendar from memory. Meetly asks their calendar instead. That is the whole idea, and everything below follows from it.

How does Meetly work?

1. 1

   Create a poll in about twenty seconds

   Name the event, pick the dates that are candidates, and set the daily window you would actually meet in. There is no account step and nothing to configure beyond that. Single-day polls, non-contiguous date sets and overnight windows all work.

2. 2

   Share one link

   Participants open it and do not sign up for anything. They enter a name, and optionally an email if they want the invite later.

3. 3

   They connect a calendar or drag the grid

   Connecting imports busy time from Google, Outlook, Apple iCloud or any published .ics feed, and the grid fills itself. Anyone who would rather not connect drags their availability by hand, and the two approaches mix freely inside one poll.

4. 4

   Meetly ranks the times that work

   Instead of handing you a heatmap to squint at, it scores each slot by how many people can attend and how many marked it as preferred, then names the best ones.

5. 5

   You pick one and everyone gets an invite

   Finalizing emails every participant with an email on file, attaches a proper calendar file so it lands in their calendar app, and optionally creates a Google Meet, Zoom or Microsoft Teams link.

What makes it different?

Four things, and the first is the one that matters most. Meetly imports calendars for every participant, not just the organizer. Doodle and Calendly connect the organizer's calendar, which helps exactly one person in a room of eleven. When2Meet and Xoyondo connect nothing at all.

• Four calendar sources, plus a universal fallback. Google, Outlook, Apple iCloud and any .ics link or uploaded file. That last one matters more than it sounds, because many corporate Microsoft 365 tenants block third-party calendar apps at the admin level, and a published calendar link is an ordinary export that no consent policy can block.
• Availability that stays current. Connected calendars re-sync in the background, so a poll left open across a week reflects the calendar as it is now, not as it was on Monday.
• Preferred, not just free. A 7am slot is technically open for almost everyone and welcome to almost nobody. Marking slots as preferred weighs them above merely available ones when Meetly ranks.
• It finishes the job. Track who has not responded, remind only those people, then finalize and send the invite with a meeting link attached.

Who is Meetly for?

Meetly is built for the case where many people have to converge on one time and nobody's calendar outranks anyone else's. If you are the scarce resource and others should book slots you have published, a booking tool like Calendly or Cal.com is the right shape instead.

Students, clubs and societies

The hardest scheduling case there is, because attendance is voluntary and groups run to thirty people. University Google and Microsoft accounts already hold everyone's class schedule, so importing turns the most tedious part of the poll into one tap. Free with no participant cap matters here in a way it does not elsewhere, since club treasuries do not cover subscriptions.

Teams that span organizations

Google Calendar's Find a Time and Outlook Scheduling Poll are both excellent, and both stop reading availability at your own domain or tenant boundary. The moment a meeting includes a contractor, a client or a partner company, those tools show the people you most need to accommodate as unknown. Meetly has each person contribute their own availability, whatever provider they are on.

Distributed teams across time zones

Each poll is anchored to the organizer's time zone and rendered in every participant's local time, so the intended working window stays fixed instead of drifting. Setting the daily window once means slots nobody would accept are never generated, which is more reliable than hoping nobody votes for a 6am.

Friends, families and anything social

Whole-day polls answer which weekend works without forcing the question through an hourly grid. There is no account for anyone, nothing to install, and no ads in front of the people you invited, which is the difference between sending a link to your family and apologising for sending a link to your family.

What does Meetly not do?

Worth being direct about, because picking the wrong shape of tool is the expensive mistake. Meetly has no booking pages, so there is no published-availability link others claim slots from. It has no sign-up sheets for volunteer shifts. It is not open source and cannot be self-hosted. It has no payment collection, no routing rules and no embed API. And the interface is English only.

Each of those has a better home elsewhere, and the full comparison of every tool in this category says which.

What happens to my calendar data?

Connecting a calendar imports busy time windows, which is what the grid needs. Event titles are handled separately and deliberately: they are readable only by the participant whose calendar it is, and never appear in the shared results view or to anyone else in the poll. A therapy appointment at 3pm shows up to the group as busy from 3 to 4, and nothing more.

Poll pages are excluded from search engines, because a poll URL is itself the key to the poll. Manual corrections you make on top of imported availability are stored separately, so a background re-sync never wipes an override you set by hand.