Doodle alternative

Doodle's free tier is one group poll, with ads, and then an upgrade screen. When2meet and Framadate are free and unlimited but ask you to answer a grid or use a busy French instance. LettuceMeet is the prettiest grid and still a grid. What this does differently is narrow: as many polls as you like, three tick-boxes instead of a drag, eight languages, and the whole thing deleted on a date you choose. If your question is which hour inside a working week, a grid genuinely answers it better and this does not.

Doodle does a great deal this does not, and some of it matters. It syncs with your calendar, so it knows when you are busy without being told. It has booking pages and 1:1 links for the freelancer case, reminders, deadlines, and Zoom and Teams integration. If scheduling is a large part of your working week, that is a real product and this is a single page. Pay them.

When2meet's grid says more than three buttons can. Painting your availability across a whole week records that you are free 9-11 and 2-4 on Tuesday, and for finding a common hour inside five people's working days that detail is the entire point. It is also free, ad-free and account-free, and has been for fifteen years — which is the standard everything here is measured against.

Framadate is free software you can run yourself, and that is an advantage this cannot match: open source, self-hostable, answerable to a non-profit rather than a company. If where your data lives matters more than anything else on this page, host Framadate on your own machine and you have a poll nobody can take away — including us.

LettuceMeet's overlap view shows the shape of everybody's week at once, so a slot nobody proposed can still emerge from it. If you do not already know which times to offer — and finding that out is the actual question — paint their grid instead. This tool needs you to propose first, and can only ever answer about what you proposed.

Doodle's free plan includes one group poll. That is enough to try it and not enough to use it: the second time you need to find a date — a month later, a different group — you are at the upgrade screen. Most people meet that wall at exactly the moment they had decided the tool was useful, which is the point it was designed for. The other three here are genuinely unlimited and free, and so is this: making a poll costs one of twenty daily runs signed out, a hundred with a free account, and two thousand on Pro.

When2meet and LettuceMeet both ask you to drag across a grid of time blocks. That is precise on a laptop and miserable on a phone, and the phone is where most people open a link somebody sent them. Every organiser who has used one knows the pattern: send it to eight people, get five replies, chase the other three. A poll only works if everybody answers, so the interface everybody can answer is the one that gets the meeting booked — which is why this asks for three buttons per option instead.

All four offer a third answer between yes and no, and this one does arithmetic with it. Most polls have no time everybody can make, so the real question is which near-miss to take — and counting only yeses cannot tell four-yes-one-no from four-yes-one-at-a-push. Those are different things to tell a group. An "at a push" counts half, which is the only weight where one is worth less than a yes and two are worth more.

These are two different questions and they want two different tools. If five people need a common hour inside a working week, a grid you paint is the only thing that can answer it — every free stretch, from everybody, overlapped — and When2meet and LettuceMeet do that well. If the question is whether it is Thursday or Saturday, a grid asks each person to draw a rectangle to say one word. Most of the polls people actually send are the second kind.

Type what it is for, pick two or more dates — or set a from and a to and add a whole span in one press, with the weekend left out if you like — and press Make the link. Send that link to whoever needs to be there. They tick yes, at a push, or no, and the option most people can make rises to the top. If two are level it says so rather than picking one for you, because a tie is a real result and choosing between them is your decision.