Cronofy vs SimplyMeet.me
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedCronofy compared with SimplyMeet.me
SimplyMeet.me offers a developer API on paid plans from $5.99 a user, which sounds superficially like the same category. It is not: that API reads and writes against SimplyMeet.me's own booking product, while Cronofy is a calendar synchronisation platform your product builds on top of, covering Exchange and enterprise connectivity SimplyMeet.me never touches. Take SimplyMeet.me to automate around your own bookings; take Cronofy to put scheduling inside software you ship to customers.
SimplyMeet.me compared with Cronofy
Different buyers. Cronofy sells calendar and scheduling infrastructure to developers embedding availability inside their own software, with a developer API from $139 a month, and a Scheduler product around £12 per seat. SimplyMeet.me sells a finished booking page for $5.99 a user. If you are shipping scheduling inside a product, SimplyMeet.me is not a candidate; if you need people to book time with you, Cronofy is the wrong shape and the wrong price.
Choose Cronofy if
Software companies embedding scheduling inside their own product (recruiting platforms, field service software, telehealth, marketplaces, sales tools) who need reliable multi-provider calendar sync and real-time availability without building and maintaining it themselves.
Choose SimplyMeet.me if
Small teams and solo professionals who want routing forms, round-robin, and poll meetings at the cheapest published price in the category, and anyone whose calendar lives on CalDAV, Fastmail, Zoho, or another system mainstream schedulers refuse to connect to.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Cronofy | SimplyMeet.me |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Scheduling | Scheduling |
| Starting price | Free developer account, then around $139 per month for the entry API plan (free plan available) | $0 (Free Forever), then $5.99 per user per month billed annually (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Two separate products. The developer API is priced in tiers by synced accounts, Smart Invites, and Embedded Scheduler seats, with published per-unit overages and unlimited API calls. The Scheduler team product is priced per dynamically assigned seat, with Scheduler API access only from a much higher tier. | Freemium per-user subscription with tiers defined by user count and meetings booked per user per month rather than by meeting-type count. Annual billing discounts the monthly rate. |
| Free plan | A free developer account for building and testing, rather than a free production tier. Live usage requires a paid plan. | Free Forever covers 1 user, 3 meeting types, and 50 meetings per month, with scheduling basics, booking pages, reminders, and calendar integrations. |
| Free trial | A free developer account allows building and testing against the APIs before any payment | 14 days on the paid plans, with a free forever plan available indefinitely |
| Best for | Software companies embedding scheduling inside their own product (recruiting platforms, field service software, telehealth, marketplaces, sales tools) who need reliable multi-provider calendar sync and real-time availability without building and maintaining it themselves. | Small teams and solo professionals who want routing forms, round-robin, and poll meetings at the cheapest published price in the category, and anyone whose calendar lives on CalDAV, Fastmail, Zoho, or another system mainstream schedulers refuse to connect to. |
| Setup time | Hours to first API call with a free developer account, days to weeks for a production integration. The variable is how much scheduling logic your own product needs to express, not how hard Cronofy is to call. | Fifteen minutes for a solo user: connect a calendar, define meeting types, share the link. A team with routing forms should budget an hour or two to design the qualifying questions and the routing logic properly. |
| Learning curve | Moderate for a developer, impossible for a non-developer. The API concepts (synced accounts, availability rules, participants, Smart Invites, application calendars) are clean once understood, but they are calendar-domain concepts and there is real domain complexity underneath. | Low for basic booking. Routing forms and poll meetings take a little thought because they involve designing a flow rather than filling in a form, but neither is complicated. |
| Platforms | REST API, Official SDKs and client libraries, Embedded Scheduler UI component, Cronofy Scheduler web product | Web application, iOS and Android admin app, Mobile responsive booking pages, Website embeds for WordPress, Shopify, and Wix |
| Compliance | GDPR, Enterprise-oriented security documentation, since Cronofy's customers must survive their own customers' procurement reviews | GDPR |
| Founded | 2014 | 2021 |
| Headquarters | Nottingham, United Kingdom | Operated by SimplyBook.me Ltd |
| Ownership | Venture and growth-capital backed | Owned by SimplyBook.me Ltd |
Strengths and limitations
Cronofy
Strengths
- Solves a genuinely hard engineering problem: multi-provider calendar sync and real-time availability across Google, Microsoft 365, Exchange, Apple, and CalDAV behind one API.
- A free developer account with full API access for building and testing before paying, which is the correct evaluation path for infrastructure and not universal.
- Unlimited API calls on every tier, so the cost model tracks customers rather than traffic and chatty implementations are not punished.
- Published per-unit overage pricing rather than negotiated terms, so growth beyond an allowance can be forecast rather than discovered.
Limitations
- It is developer infrastructure, so nothing works until someone writes code. There is no path from signup to a working booking page in an afternoon.
- Entry pricing at around $139 a month makes it categorically unsuitable for anyone who just wants a scheduling link, where sub-$10 products do the same visible job.
- The tier jumps are steep: $139 to $819 to $2,399 on the API, and £12 per seat to £589 a month for Scheduler API access, with the higher tiers billed annually.
- The Scheduler product is a separate purchase from the API, which makes the overall pricing story more confusing than it needs to be.
SimplyMeet.me
Strengths
- Routing forms and round-robin at $5.99 to $9.99 per user, capabilities Calendly reserves for its $16 Teams plan.
- Poll meetings for finding a time across a group, a Doodle-style workflow most booking-link tools omit entirely.
- CalDAV support inherited from Harmonizely, which is the only realistic option for Fastmail, Zoho, and Nextcloud users in this category.
- Payments brokered through SBpay.me connect your existing Stripe, PayPal, or Square account rather than forcing a new merchant relationship, with no vendor percentage.
Limitations
- Meetings are metered per user per month (50 free, 100 on Standard, 500 on Professional), which is the only volume cap in this batch and a genuine constraint for heavy schedulers.
- User counts are capped per tier at 5 and 30, so growth forces tier jumps rather than incremental seat additions.
- No deep first-party CRM connectors with field mapping; HubSpot and Salesforce logging runs through Zapier.
- The brand is unfamiliar to recipients, and the vendor domain on free and lower tiers means a stranger clicking your link sees a name they do not recognise.
Pricing compared
Cronofy
Two separate products. The developer API is priced in tiers by synced accounts, Smart Invites, and Embedded Scheduler seats, with published per-unit overages and unlimited API calls. The Scheduler team product is priced per dynamically assigned seat, with Scheduler API access only from a much higher tier.
- Developer account$0
- Starter (API)About $139
- Emerging (API)About $819
- Growth (API)About $2,399
- Scheduler (team product)About £12
Judged against building it yourself, Cronofy is straightforwardly cheap. A competent engineer will spend months getting Exchange, Google, and Microsoft 365 availability correct, and will then spend years maintaining it as providers change behaviour. Starter at around $139 a month is less than a week of that engineer's time per year. Judged against other products in this category, it is expensive by a factor of twenty, because it is not competing with them: nobody chooses between Cronofy and Koalendar. The honest caution is the shape of the curve. The jump from $139 to $819 is steep, the Scheduler API jump from £12 per seat to £589 a month is steeper, and a startup should model synced-account growth carefully before committing annually. Get the free developer account, build the integration, and let real usage tell you which tier you belong on.
SimplyMeet.me
Freemium per-user subscription with tiers defined by user count and meetings booked per user per month rather than by meeting-type count. Annual billing discounts the monthly rate.
- Free Forever$0
- Standard$5.99
- Professional$9.99
- EnterpriseCustom
Feature for dollar, SimplyMeet.me is the strongest value in this batch for teams. Routing forms and round-robin at $5.99 per user is a capability set Calendly charges $16 for, and poll meetings are a Doodle-shaped workflow most competitors do not offer at any price. CalDAV support genuinely has no substitute for anyone outside the Google and Microsoft ecosystems. The two honest caveats are the meeting meter, which is the only per-usage cap of its kind in this batch and which punishes high-volume schedulers, and the absence of deep first-party CRM connectors, which means Zapier is doing work that Calendly does natively. For a small team that books a moderate number of meetings and wants routing, nothing here is cheaper.
Editorial verdict on each
Cronofy
Cronofy is the only product in this category that is not competing with the others, and buying it by mistake would be an expensive error. It is calendar and scheduling infrastructure for software companies: one API across Google, Microsoft 365, on-premise Exchange, Apple, and CalDAV, with real-time availability, multi-participant and sequenced scheduling, and Smart Invites, backed by a free developer account and published per-unit overages. If you ship a product where two parties need to find a time, that is a genuinely hard problem you should not solve yourself, and around $139 a month for the entry tier is less than a week of engineering. The cautions are the steep tier jumps ($139 to $819 to $2,399, all annual above Starter), the confusing separation between the API and the Scheduler product, and the fact that a Google-only product does not need any of it yet. Build against the free developer account first. And if what you actually wanted was a link people could click to book a call, close this page and read the Koalendar or SimplyMeet.me profile instead.
Read the full Cronofy profileSimplyMeet.me
SimplyMeet.me is the price-to-capability winner among booking links for small teams, and the only sane option for anyone on a CalDAV calendar. Routing forms and round-robin at $5.99 per user undercut Calendly's $16 Teams plan by a factor of nearly three, poll meetings remove the need for a separate Doodle subscription, and payments run through your own Stripe or PayPal account with no vendor cut. The catch is the meeting meter, which is the only usage cap in this batch: 50 a month free and 100 per user on Standard will not survive a busy recruiter. Buy it if you are a small team that needs routing and books a moderate volume. Choose Koalendar instead if you book heavily and want no meter, Calendly if a native Salesforce connector is non-negotiable, and SimplyBook.me from the same vendor if it turns out you actually have staff, rooms, and a service menu.
Read the full SimplyMeet.me profileCronofy profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; SimplyMeet.me last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.