Harmonizely Review (2021) – Is it a better alternative to Calendly & Acuity for appointment scheduling?

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With the increase in remote work, video calls for official communication, online meetings have become an integral part of getting things done. 

One of the critical aspects of getting the most out of online meetings and for maximum productivity is to get the scheduling and syncing with your calendar faultless. 

Sure, it can be done with the back and forth emails, but it makes the whole process extremely unproductive and ineffective consuming loads of time in scheduling every meeting manually. 

That's where calendar scheduling apps come in to automate the whole process of making it easy for a client or a customer to view a scheduling page, select a time, fix a meeting, and get the link for the video call. 

Scheduling apps make all this happen with a few clicks and a few minutes.

Schedule your meetings for free 

Calendly and Acuity scheduling are some of the well known and widely used scheduling apps being around for a long time. Harmonizely is a new tool that aims to add a few more useful features. Let's see how good it is and how the features stack up in this review. 

Getting started

Te sign-up and onboarding process are extremely simple with just the time-zone and default language asked for apart from the email.

Once the initial sign-up is completed, the next important step is to connect with your calendar to sync all the scheduling you plan within Harmonizely. 

It is impressive that Harmonizely lets you connect with many calendar options including Google calendar, iCloud, Outlook/Office365 calendar, etc. 

It is also possible to connect multiple calendars by setting up calendar sharing within Google and Outlook calendar accounts. 

Overall, the initial set-up is simple and quite easy to follow through.

Meeting types

This is where you build the content for your scheduling page and all the settings for it. 

The meeting can be named for your reference and a brief description can be provided on what exactly the meeting is about and what the client or customer gets out of it. 

The URL slug of the meeting can be personalized along with the desired duration of the meeting. 

The next step is to define the location of the meeting. It can be set up with various video call integrations with Harmonizely including Zoom, Google Meet, Whereby, and Vectera. 

When someone books a meeting on the scheduling page, Harmonizely automatically detects the local time zone. This can be disabled and fixed to a certain time zone of your choice as well. 

It is also possible to activate the phone number field to collect the phone numbers of meeting participants.

Also, the meeting type can be made a secret, so that it is visible and available to book only for the invitees you personally share the scheduling link with. This is a very useful feature for planning private meetings. 

The next setting is to define the availability of date and time for the meeting to be scheduled. Many automatic settings can be applied including conditions like weekdays and availability on specific dates. 

If the meeting schedule requires any custom questions prior to booking, it can be added as well. This is particularly useful to get a prior idea about the prospect or a client which makes it way easier to prepare. 

The questions can be made optional or mandatory to continue with the booking.

Additionally, the questions can be either of one line or multiple lines.

Email notifications

Harmonizely lets you set custom email notifications to be sent at specific time intervals before the meeting.

These email notifications can be set as custom templates for,

• Meeting scheduled,
• Meeting rescheduled, 
• Meeting canceled. 

Various merge tags can be added to the email body to completely automate the email notification and reminders. It is also possible to add custom timings before the meeting to send a reminder.

Meeting duration

The maximum and minimum time within which the meeting can be scheduled can be set as a timeframe. It is also possible to set buffer times between each meeting so that continuous meetings without any interval in-between will be avoided.  

Harmonizely also lets you redirect to an external URL after a meeting is scheduled. This is useful to give any additional information before attending the meeting or to download any resources, etc. 

Integrations

Harmonizely has all the important integrations covered to book and conduct the meetings. Apart from supporting all the major calendars, the following video call tools are natively integrated as well,

• Zoom,
• Google Meet,
• Vectera,
• Whereby. 

If you are using any other tool, there is Zapier integration as well to connect with a lot more apps. 

Pricing

Harmonizely has a pretty simple pricing structure with two plans in total, a free and a pro plan. The pro plan costs $12 per month per user or $10 per month when paid annually. 

Although the free plan is quite good, the pro adds some very important features like connecting a custom domain with custom email sender, buffer times, integration with video calling apps & Zapier, redirecting to custom URL, etc. 

It is impressive that multiple language support for the scheduling page is available in the free plan. Harmonizely currently supports English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, and Swedish.

Support

Live chat support is available both on the website and within the dashboard. 

There is a public roadmap as well that is updated constantly to keep a track of all the features that re being built or planned. 

Harmonizely Public Roadmap

The support documentation is quite good as well with instructions on how to set up all the features within Harmonizely. 

Negatives?

Well, as much as liked the tool, there are quite a few. 

There is no API which is really important for certain use cases. Another important missing feature is the absence of native integration with any payment gateway to charge for meetings.

I believe it is on the roadmap to be built, but as of now, it is not possible to collect payments natively without any workarounds. 

Conclusion

To conclude, do I like it? Yes, for sure. 

The UI is very easy to use and intuitive, customer support is fantastic and all the essential features are covered to make Harmonizely a really good scheduling tool. 

Yes, the absence of API may be a deal-breaker for some use cases, but overall, Harmonizely has the basic structure and framework for an excellent product to which features can be added on.

Try Harmonizely Pro free for 14 days

If you are using any other scheduling tool, Harmonizely is definitely worth a try for some of its unique features like custom domain, multi-language support, etc.