Switching from Calendly to Calio: a practical guide

What comes with you, and what stays behind

There is no import button, and it would not buy you much. A scheduling tool holds hardly any data worth moving: what is in there is a handful of event types, your working hours, and a list of appointments that is mostly in the past. That is not a migration, that is filling in a form again.

What you move across, by hand:

• Your event types: name, duration, description, buffers, location.
• Your working hours, plus the exceptions you already know about (holidays, a fixed day off).
• The questions you ask guests when they book.

What stays behind:

• Your past bookings. If you need them for your records, export them from Calendly before you cancel. Afterwards you lose access.
• Your Calendly URL. We will come back to that, because it is the one part of the switch that genuinely needs attention.

Start with your name, not your settings

One thing is worth thinking about before you create your account: the organisation name you enter at sign-up determines your booking link. Your link becomes calio.nl/your-organisation/your-event-type, where the first part is derived from your organisation name.

You cannot change that name afterwards. So enter what your clients recognise: your company name, not your own name if you trade under a brand, and nothing temporary. It is the only step in this whole guide you cannot undo later.

Recreating your event types

Most Calendly settings have a direct counterpart. This table is the translation:

Budget half an hour for three or four event types. Start with the one you share most; the rest can follow later without breaking anything.

Connecting your calendar

Connect Google Calendar or Microsoft 365 before you share your link. Without it Calio does not know when you are already busy, and a double booking becomes a matter of time.

The connection works both ways: Calio reads when you are busy and writes confirmed appointments back into your calendar. What it does not do is read your calendar entries. Of your existing appointments only the start and end times are kept, no titles, descriptions or attendees. Pick Google Meet or Teams as the location and the link appears in the invitation automatically.

If you have several calendars (work, personal, a shared team calendar), connect them all for the availability check, and choose per event type which calendar the booking lands in.

The real work: your old link

This is where it goes wrong for almost everyone, and it is the one part that is not done in five minutes. You cannot redirect calendly.com to Calio. That domain is not yours, so there is no technical trick that lands your old links on your new page. The only fix is to replace them yourself, everywhere.

Work through this list. These are the spots people forget most:

• Your email signature, and everyone else's on the team.
• Your website: contact page, footer, every “book a call” button.
• Proposal and quote templates, and your invoice footer.
• LinkedIn (your profile and your company page), Instagram bio, X.
• Your Google Business Profile, which often carries a booking link.
• Auto-replies and out-of-office messages.
• QR codes on anything printed, which you cannot update. Those deserve attention.

Do not cancel Calendly straight away. Keep the subscription for a month or two after you have moved everything. While it is active your old links keep working, which gives you time to discover the place you missed. Once your Calendly dashboard has been empty for a month, cancel.

Appointments already on the calendar

Leave them where they are. The temptation to get everything neatly into one system is strong, but moving an appointment means cancelling in Calendly and rebooking in Calio. Your guest then gets two emails they did not ask for, and the odds of one falling over in somebody else's calendar are real.

Two systems side by side for a few weeks is awkward but harmless. Both write into the same calendar, so no double bookings arise. Put new bookings in Calio from day one and let the old ones run out.

What works differently

Honest about the differences, in both directions. What Calendly has and Calio does not, yet:

• SMS reminders. Calio reminds by email, 24 hours and 1 hour ahead. SMS is on the roadmap.
• SSO. Signing in with your company account is still to come; two-factor authentication with an authenticator app does work, and you can enforce it across your organisation.
• Calendar providers beyond Google and Microsoft. Calendly supports more.

What you gain:

• iDEAL. Let guests pay or leave a deposit when booking, through Mollie. The money goes straight to you, not to us first.
• A no-show fee per event type. Visible up front, charged afterwards as a payment request, and never taken automatically.
• Booking in plain language. A guest who types “Thursday afternoon next week” gets the matching times.
• A guest flow in Dutch, English and German.
• Your data in the EU, with every subprocessor named by company and country in the data processing agreement. Why that is more than a flag is in our piece on the CLOUD Act.
• A free plan with no cap on event types. Calendly's free plan stops at one.

Checklist

1. Create an account with the organisation name your clients recognise.
2. Connect your Google or Microsoft calendar.
3. Set your working hours, plus the exceptions you know about.
4. Set up the event type you share most and make a test booking yourself.
5. Check the appointment landed in your calendar and the confirmation arrived.
6. Add the rest of your event types.
7. Replace your link in every place on the list above.
8. Leave Calendly running for another one to two months.
9. Export your historic bookings, and only then cancel.

The three mistakes people make most

Cancelling Calendly immediately. You will find another place your old link lives about two weeks later, guaranteed. While the account is alive that is an inconvenience rather than a missed appointment.

Sharing the link before connecting the calendar. Without the connection Calio cannot see your existing appointments, and someone books straight over your dentist.

Trying to move everything at once. Start with one event type, make a test booking on yourself, and build from there. Anyone who perfects six types before testing discovers their mistake six times.