Doodle

Doodle is a group scheduling tool that helps find meeting times that work for everyone. But its free plan now shows ads and limits poll features, while the Pro plan ($14.95/month) seems excessive for a tool that serves a single purpose — finding available time slots among participants.

Rallly is a lightweight, open source scheduling poll tool that does exactly what Doodle does — create a poll with proposed times, share a link, and let participants vote on their availability. It has a clean, modern interface with no ads, no account required for participants, and unlimited polls. Cal.com provides a broader scheduling platform — while it's primarily a Calendly alternative with booking pages, it also supports group scheduling and round-robin assignment.

For organizations that use scheduling polls regularly (recruiters, sales teams, executive assistants), self-hosted Rallly eliminates the recurring cost entirely. It runs as a simple Docker container and requires minimal maintenance.

The simplicity argument is strong here. Doodle has expanded into a broader meeting management platform with integrations, admin dashboards, and team features that most users don't need. Rallly stays focused on the core use case — group scheduling polls — and does it well. When a tool's primary value is finding a meeting time, the open source version that does exactly that, without feature bloat or subscription fees, is hard to argue against.