Calendly alternative with a project inbox built in
Calendly gives a person a booking link. Publish a meeting type in Kontacts and the booking link belongs to the project — with the mailbox behind it, so the reply to a confirmation lands somewhere the whole team can see.
One link for the project, not one subscription per person. Mail to the addresses on your list opens a GitHub issue in your repo. Free to start.
How Kontacts compares to Calendly
| Feature | Kontacts | Calendly |
|---|---|---|
| Meeting types on the free tier | Unlimited — there is no meeting-type cap on any tier | Free plan: 1 event type, 1 connected calendar [1] |
| Cost of your second meeting type | Free plan available | Standard, $10 per seat/month billed yearly [1] |
| Booking link owned by the project | Yes — one link for the whole project | Per-seat: Standard and Teams are billed per seat [1] |
| Billed per seat | No — billed per organisation, not per seat | Yes — Standard $10, Teams $16 per seat/month billed yearly [1] |
| Entry price for enterprise controls | Not applicable — billed per organisation, not per seat | Enterprise starts at $15,000/year [1] |
| A real inbox behind the booking link | Yes — project inbox on your own domain | Not offered [1] |
| Receive email on your own domain (MX/SPF/DKIM) | Yes | Not offered [1] |
| Authenticated mail to a listed address opens a GitHub issue | Yes, when routing is on | Not offered [1] |
| Reply posted back as a comment on the issue | Yes — from the inbox, posted as a comment on the linked issue | Not offered [1] |
| GitHub App scoped to repositories you pick | Yes, including private repos | Not offered [1] |
| Mail and meetings on one surface | Yes | Scheduling only [1] |
Sources
- [1] https://calendly.com/pricing — read . Free ($0, 1 event type, connect 1 calendar); Standard $10/seat/month billed yearly; Teams $16/seat/month billed yearly; Enterprise starts at $15,000/year. No email inbox, email receiving or GitHub issue creation appears on the pricing page.
Calendly vs Kontacts: a person's link or a project's link
Calendly is built around a person. The URL has your name in it, the availability is yours, and the bill is per seat. That is exactly right for a salesperson and exactly wrong for a project, where “book a call with us” should not mean “book a call with whoever happened to set up the account”.
Kontacts' booking page belongs to the project. You describe the team's hours once and the page does the arithmetic — a buffer after each meeting, a minimum notice so nobody books you for eleven minutes from now, a horizon in days so your calendar is not open until Christmas, and daylight saving resolved instant by instant rather than by adding an hour and hoping.
Calendly pricing vs Kontacts pricing
Calendly's free plan is one event type and one connected calendar. A second meeting type — “30 min intro” and “15 min bug triage” — puts you on Standard at $10 per seat/month billed yearly. Teams is $16 per seat/month billed yearly, and Enterprise starts at $15,000/year (source [1], read 2026-08-18).
Kontacts is billed per organisation, not per seat. Prices live on the pricing page rather than here. Your second meeting type costs nothing, and so does your tenth — there is no meeting-type cap in the product.
Calendly alternative for open-source projects and small teams
If you are maintaining an open-source project or running support out of a GitHub repo, the scheduling link is the small half of the problem. The big half is the mail: the bug report, the “is this a known issue”, the invoice, the partnership ask. Those arrive as email and they need to become work items.
Kontacts does that in one move. Point your domain at it, connect the repository, flip routing on, and mail to the addresses on your list opens an issue in your repo. Publish a meeting type and the booking page is on the same project, from the same product, on the same domain.
When Calendly is the better choice
If the person booking is a customer being sold to, and the person being booked is one of a sales team, use Calendly. It is the category standard, it has the deepest integration surface of anything in this comparison, and its per-seat model is a feature rather than a bug when every seat is a quota-carrying human. Its Teams tier adds Salesforce routing and round-robin distribution that we have no equivalent for (source [1]). And if you do not have a GitHub repository, the half of Kontacts that makes it worth switching to is a half you will not use.
Questions,
answered short.
- What is the best free Calendly alternative for a small team?
- It depends on what “free” has to cover. Calendly's free plan allows one event type and one connected calendar (calendly.com/pricing, read 2026-08-18). Kontacts has a free tier that costs nothing indefinitely, not a trial: the project gets an inbox on your own domain, and a booking page once you publish a meeting type. Above it we bill per organisation rather than per seat, and the prices are on our pricing page. It is early software and it is hosted only.
- Does Kontacts charge per seat like Calendly?
- Prices are on the pricing page. Kontacts is billed per organisation, not per seat. Calendly's Standard tier is $10/seat/month billed yearly and Teams is $16/seat/month billed yearly (read 2026-08-18).
- What can Kontacts do that Calendly cannot?
- Receive email. Point your domain's MX, SPF and DKIM at Kontacts and the project gets a real inbox; with routing on, authenticated mail to the addresses on your list opens a GitHub issue in the repository you connected. Calendly's pricing page lists no email inbox, email receiving or GitHub issue creation (read 2026-08-18). You can reply from that inbox — the reply leaves from the project address, and if the thread is linked it is posted as a comment on the issue.
- Can several people share one Kontacts booking page?
- The booking link belongs to the project rather than to a person, so the availability is the project's: you describe the team's hours once and every meeting type on the project books against them — a buffer after each meeting, a minimum notice, a booking horizon in days, and daylight saving resolved instant by instant. Kontacts bills per organisation rather than per seat, and each tier covers a different number of members, so check our pricing page for what a tier covers before you plan around a headcount.
- Is Kontacts a full replacement for Calendly?
- No. Calendly has a substantially larger scheduling and integration surface, including Salesforce routing and round-robin distribution on its Teams tier (read 2026-08-18). Kontacts is the better fit when the booking page and the project's inbox should be the same product. If the person booking is a customer being sold to and the person booked is on a sales team, use Calendly.
- Is Kontacts really free?
- Billed per organisation, not per seat. Prices live on the pricing page — this page does not restate them.