Doodle 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.
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The short answer
Editorial assessmentSimplyMeet.me compared with Doodle
Doodle is the incumbent for group polls and does that job with the most name recognition. SimplyMeet.me includes poll meetings alongside a full booking-page product, so a team that needs both stops paying for two tools. Doodle remains easier to send to people outside your organisation who already know what a Doodle is; SimplyMeet.me is better value if polls are one of several things you need.
Choose Doodle if
Anyone who regularly has to find a time that works for a group of people who do not share a calendar system, plus small teams and educators who need sign-up sheets alongside ordinary booking links, and who want a link recipients recognize without needing an account.
Choose SimplyMeet.me if
Small teams and solo professionals who want round-robin from $5.99 and routing forms and poll meetings from $9.99 per user, and anyone whose calendar lives on CalDAV, Fastmail, Zoho, or another system mainstream schedulers refuse to connect to.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Doodle | SimplyMeet.me |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Scheduling | Scheduling |
| Starting price | $0 (Free), then $11 per user per month billed annually (Pro) | $0 (Free Forever), then $5.99 per user per month billed annually |
| Pricing model | Freemium per-user subscription across four tiers, with monthly and discounted annual billing and a two-seat minimum on the Team plan. The free tier is advertising-supported. | 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 | One Group Poll, one Booking Page, one 1:1, basic Sign-up Sheets, and one calendar connection, with advertising shown. | Free Forever covers 1 user, 3 meeting types, and 50 meetings per month, with booking pages and one external calendar; reminders and follow-ups start on Standard. |
| Free trial | The free plan serves as the evaluation path; paid plans are billed monthly or annually rather than gated behind a fixed trial | 14 days on the paid plans, with a free forever plan available indefinitely |
| Best for | Anyone who regularly has to find a time that works for a group of people who do not share a calendar system, plus small teams and educators who need sign-up sheets alongside ordinary booking links, and who want a link recipients recognize without needing an account. | Small teams and solo professionals who want round-robin from $5.99 and routing forms and poll meetings from $9.99 per user, and anyone whose calendar lives on CalDAV, Fastmail, Zoho, or another system mainstream schedulers refuse to connect to. |
| Setup time | Five minutes, and for a Group Poll arguably zero: you can propose times and send a link before connecting a calendar at all. Booking Pages take slightly longer because they need a calendar connection and working hours. | 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 | Essentially none for participants, who see a grid and click. Organizers should spend ten minutes learning the advanced settings on Pro, because deadlines and hidden responses are what turn a poll from a conversation into a decision. | 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 | Web app, iOS, Android, Browser extension, Shareable links requiring no participant account | Web application, iOS and Android admin app, Mobile responsive booking pages, Website embeds for WordPress, Shopify, and Wix |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, Swiss data protection, SSO (SAML and OIDC), MFA, and role-based access on Enterprise | GDPR, ISO 27001 (parent company SimplyBook.me Ltd) |
| Founded | 2007 | 2021 |
| Headquarters | Zurich, Switzerland, with offices in Berlin, Belgrade, and the United States | Operated by SimplyBook.me Ltd |
| Ownership | Wholly owned subsidiary of TX Group (formerly Tamedia), the Swiss media company, since 2014 | Owned by SimplyBook.me Ltd |
Strengths and limitations
Doodle
Strengths
- Group Polls are still the best implementation of the multi-party scheduling problem, and no booking-link competitor solves it properly because the problem is structurally different.
- Participants never need an account, which is why Doodle works across company boundaries where a shared-calendar approach fails immediately.
- The three-state yes, no, and if-need-be vote plus deadlines, hidden responses, and per-slot capacity limits are the details that make polls actually resolve.
- Sign-up Sheets cover a real workflow (office hours, volunteer shifts, parent evenings, conference stations) that essentially nothing else in this category attempts.
Limitations
- The free tier shows advertising, which makes it unusable for anything a customer will see and quietly forces the Pro upgrade for professional use.
- No lead routing, qualification, round-robin, or CRM integration of any kind, so Doodle simply cannot be a sales scheduling tool.
- Stripe payments and custom branding are Team-plan features with a two-seat minimum, putting the effective floor for paid bookings at $32 a month.
- No commerce layer at all: no packages, memberships, classes, gift certificates, or deposits, so appointment businesses need a different product.
SimplyMeet.me
Strengths
- Round-robin from $5.99 and routing forms from $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
Doodle
Freemium per-user subscription across four tiers, with monthly and discounted annual billing and a two-seat minimum on the Team plan. The free tier is advertising-supported.
- Free$0
- Pro$11
- Team$16
- EnterpriseFrom $15,000
Pro at $11 is fair if you run group polls constantly, because unlimited polls plus deadlines, reminders, and hidden responses is the whole product for a coordinator, and no competitor does polls properly. It is poor value if you were hoping for a booking link, since Cal.com gives one person unlimited event types for nothing and Zcal is free without ads. The Team plan is where the pricing gets awkward: $16 per user with a two-seat minimum to unlock Stripe payments and custom branding is expensive next to Acuity at $27 a month for a whole business, and it buys organizational plumbing rather than commercial capability. Buy Doodle for the polls. Everything else in it is a reasonable bonus at Pro and an overpriced one at Team.
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. Round-robin at $5.99 and routing forms at $9.99 per user undercut the $16 Calendly charges for that set, and poll meetings (also $9.99) 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
Doodle
Ease of UseDoodle is the only product in this category that properly solves multi-party scheduling, and that keeps it valuable even for teams who use something else for their booking links. Group Polls with deadlines, hidden responses, and per-slot capacity limits resolve the meetings that a Calendly link structurally cannot, and Sign-up Sheets cover a workflow nobody else bothers with. The trap is treating Doodle as a Calendly replacement: the free tier carries advertising, Stripe payments and branding hide behind a $16 two-seat Team plan, and there is no routing, no CRM, and no commerce layer. The right posture for most small businesses is to buy Pro at $11 if you run polls weekly, use something cheaper and cleaner for client-facing booking links, and never look at Enterprise, which starts at $15,000 a year and is not sold to you anyway.
Read the full Doodle 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. Round-robin at $5.99 and routing forms at $9.99 per user undercut Calendly's $16 Teams plan, 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 profileDoodle profile last reviewed 2026-09-27; SimplyMeet.me last reviewed 2026-09-27. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
The best in Scheduling & Booking
23 trackedScheduling tools replace the back-and-forth of finding a time by exposing real calendar availability as a bookable link, with routing, reminders, and payment collection built in.
The booking link everyone already recognizes, with the routing, teams, and integrations underneath to stay the standard.
The free tier is the product: design-led booking pages with almost nothing held back.
Open-source scheduling that doubles as booking infrastructure for other products, compounding through its developer ecosystem.
Fills the calendar with your work rather than just other people's meetings, turning scheduling into an AI planning problem.
A group poll goes out in five minutes with no calendar connection required, and participants just see a grid of times and click.
Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Doodle and SimplyMeet.me?
Doodle is the incumbent for group polls and does that job with the most name recognition. SimplyMeet.me includes poll meetings alongside a full booking-page product, so a team that needs both stops paying for two tools. Doodle remains easier to send to people outside your organisation who already know what a Doodle is; SimplyMeet.me is better value if polls are one of several things you need.
Is Doodle or SimplyMeet.me cheaper?
Doodle starts at $0 (Free), then $11 per user per month billed annually (Pro). SimplyMeet.me starts at $0 (Free Forever), then $5.99 per user per month billed annually. The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Doodle pricing model: Freemium per-user subscription across four tiers, with monthly and discounted annual billing and a two-seat minimum on the Team plan. The free tier is advertising-supported. SimplyMeet.me pricing model: 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.
Does Doodle or SimplyMeet.me have a free plan?
Doodle has a free plan. One Group Poll, one Booking Page, one 1:1, basic Sign-up Sheets, and one calendar connection, with advertising shown. Trial terms: The free plan serves as the evaluation path; paid plans are billed monthly or annually rather than gated behind a fixed trial. SimplyMeet.me has a free plan. Free Forever covers 1 user, 3 meeting types, and 50 meetings per month, with booking pages and one external calendar; reminders and follow-ups start on Standard. Trial terms: 14 days on the paid plans, with a free forever plan available indefinitely.
Who should choose Doodle?
Anyone who regularly has to find a time that works for a group of people who do not share a calendar system, plus small teams and educators who need sign-up sheets alongside ordinary booking links, and who want a link recipients recognize without needing an account.
Who should choose SimplyMeet.me?
Small teams and solo professionals who want round-robin from $5.99 and routing forms and poll meetings from $9.99 per user, and anyone whose calendar lives on CalDAV, Fastmail, Zoho, or another system mainstream schedulers refuse to connect to.
What are the best alternatives to Doodle and SimplyMeet.me?
SaaSTracker profiles 23 products in Scheduling & Booking. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Calendly (Category Leader), zcal (Best Value), Cal.com (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
