If you're an independent tutor, there's a good chance Calendly was your first scheduling tool. It was probably recommended by a fellow freelancer, showed up in a productivity round-up you Googled at midnight, or you just grabbed it because it has a free tier and a name you can actually spell.
And honestly? It's fine. It works. But here's the thing — "works" and "works for tutors specifically" are two very different standards. A Swiss Army knife works. That doesn't mean it's the right tool for a professional chef.
This post is an honest, side-by-side look at Calendly and Tuton's built-in scheduling. Not a hit piece on Calendly — it genuinely does a lot of things well. But fit matters, and what fits a freelance consultant doesn't necessarily fit someone teaching Spanish, French, or Mandarin to a roster of ongoing students.
What Calendly Does Well
Let's give credit where it's due. Calendly is one of the most polished scheduling tools on the market, and it got there for good reason.
The UX is genuinely excellent. Setting up your first booking page takes about ten minutes. The interface is clean, the booking flow is frictionless for your clients, and it doesn't feel like enterprise software from 2009.
Calendar integrations are solid. It syncs with Google Calendar, Outlook, and Apple Calendar. It connects with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet to auto-generate video links on booking. For general freelance use, this is everything you need.
Availability controls are robust. You can set custom availability windows, add buffer times before and after meetings, cap the number of bookings per day, and set minimum notice periods so students can't book a lesson for tomorrow morning at 11:58pm (we've all been there).
Automated reminders work. Email confirmations go out on booking. Reminder emails fire before the event. Rescheduling and cancellation links are included. It's a proper automated workflow without you lifting a finger.
Multiple event types. On paid plans, you can create separate booking pages for different session types — a 30-minute trial lesson, a 60-minute regular session, a 90-minute intensive. Useful if you offer varied formats.
None of this is faint praise. Calendly is genuinely good at what it does. The question is whether what it does is what you actually need.
Calendly Pricing
Calendly has four tiers, though for most independent tutors the relevant ones are the first two.
Free — One active event type, unlimited bookings, Google/Outlook calendar sync, basic email notifications. It's workable if you have a single session type and very simple needs.
Standard — $10/month — Unlimited event types, email reminders, Zoom/Teams/Meet integrations, custom availability, basic workflows. This is the tier where Calendly becomes genuinely useful. Most solo tutors who use it seriously end up here.
Teams — $16/month per seat — Adds round-robin scheduling, collective events, team reporting. Almost certainly overkill for a solo tutor.
Enterprise — For large organisations. Not relevant here.
So realistically, you're looking at $10/month for a functional Calendly setup. That's not expensive. But it's also worth knowing what you're getting for that $10 — and more importantly, what you're not.
Where Calendly Falls Short for Tutors
Here's where the honest conversation starts.
Calendly is built for generic appointment booking. It doesn't know you're a tutor. It doesn't know your bookings are lessons. It has no concept of students, subjects, learning progress, or anything that makes tutoring different from booking a haircut or a sales call.
No student profiles. When Maria books a French lesson with you, Calendly logs a booking. It doesn't store Maria as a student with a profile. It doesn't know she's been learning French for eight months, that she struggles with subjunctive, or that you've been through two textbooks together. Every booking is just a booking — a calendar event with a name and an email address attached.
No lesson history. After the lesson ends, nothing changes. Calendly has no record of what happened. Whether it was her first lesson or her fiftieth, whether she cancelled twice last month, whether you gave homework — none of that exists in Calendly's world. You have to track it somewhere else. A spreadsheet, a notebook, a separate CRM, a second browser tab you keep forgetting to update.
No teaching context. You can add a custom form to your booking page — Calendly does support that — but it's a generic form builder. You're bolting teaching context onto a tool that wasn't designed for it.
Booking happens in a vacuum. Every booking arrives as a fresh event with no connection to anything that came before. This means manual reconciliation. You get a booking notification, you go check your CRM (if you have one), you cross-reference your notes, you try to remember where you left off. It works, but it's friction. Every. Single. Time.
For someone with three students, this is annoying. For someone with fifteen to twenty-five students, it's a genuine drain on your time and headspace.
What Tuton Scheduling Offers
Tuton is built specifically for independent language tutors, and its scheduling reflects that from the ground up.
Students book from your availability. Your booking page works like Calendly's — you set your available hours, students pick a slot, they get a confirmation and reminders. The fundamentals are the same.
But the booking is connected to everything. When a student books a lesson, it's attached to their student profile. Their lesson history, your notes from previous sessions, their learning goals, any outstanding invoices — it's all there before the lesson starts. No reconciliation. No spreadsheet archaeology.
Automated reminders are built in. Students get booking confirmations and reminders without any extra setup or third-party integrations.
Lessons are logged automatically. After each lesson, the session is recorded in the student's history. Over time, you build a complete picture of each student's journey — not scattered across your calendar and a notebook you left somewhere.
The built-in video classroom is integrated too. Your lesson link is generated and tied to the booking. You're not juggling Zoom, Google Meet, and Calendly and hoping they all talk to each other.
Invoicing is connected. When a lesson completes, Tuton knows it happened. Generating an invoice isn't a separate task you do later — it flows from the lesson record.
All of this is included in Tuton's Solo plan at $29/month. That covers scheduling, the student CRM, the video classroom, invoicing, and lesson history — the full stack for running a tutoring practice. You're not assembling these pieces from five different tools; they're built to work together.
Compare that to Calendly at $10/month — just for scheduling — plus whatever you're using for notes, invoicing, video calls, and student tracking. The maths tends to get uncomfortable fairly quickly.
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | Calendly (Standard) | Tuton (Solo) |
|---|---|---|
| Booking page for students | ✅ | ✅ |
| Custom availability / buffer times | ✅ | ✅ |
| Automated reminders | ✅ | ✅ |
| Calendar sync (Google/Outlook) | ✅ | ✅ |
| Zoom / Meet integration | ✅ | Built-in video classroom |
| Multiple event types | ✅ | ✅ |
| Third-party integrations (Zapier etc.) | ✅ | Limited |
| Standalone use (without CRM) | ✅ | ✅ |
| Student profiles / CRM | ❌ | ✅ |
| Lesson history per student | ❌ | ✅ |
| Notes tied to bookings | ❌ | ✅ |
| Invoicing | ❌ | ✅ |
| Built-in video classroom | ❌ | ✅ |
| Built for tutors | ❌ | ✅ |
| Price | $10/mo | $29/mo |
Where Calendly wins: More third-party integrations, better for standalone scheduling use, works for any type of appointment (not just tutoring), and cheaper if you genuinely only need a booking link.
Where Tuton wins: Everything is connected. Scheduling isn't a separate tool you bolt on — it's part of running your tutoring practice.
The Real Question — What Are You Optimising For?
This is the crux of it.
If you need a booking link and nothing else — if you're doing five sessions a week, you're not trying to grow, you have simple admin needs, and you have other tools you already love for everything else — Calendly at $10/month is a completely reasonable choice. No argument here.
But if you're trying to run a proper tutoring practice — tracking student progress, knowing where each student is in their learning journey, keeping lessons organised, sending invoices, not spending Sunday evening reconciling five different tools — then a booking link in isolation is the wrong optimisation.
The goal isn't "efficient booking." The goal is "efficient tutoring practice." Scheduling is one piece of that. When it's integrated with the rest of your workflow, you get compounding benefits: less admin, better context before every lesson, a cleaner picture of your business.
Calendly gives you a great booking link. Tuton gives you a booking link that knows it's a lesson, attached to a student, part of an ongoing practice.
Same surface area. Very different depth.
Who Should Use Calendly
You're just starting out. You have one or two students, you're testing the waters, and $0/month on Calendly's free tier is the right answer while you figure things out. Sensible. Pragmatic. Go for it.
You have very simple scheduling needs. One session type, a handful of students, no desire to build a proper practice right now. Calendly does the job without any overhead.
You're a part-time tutor. Teaching a few hours a week on the side, not looking to scale, already have tools you like for everything else. Calendly slots in cleanly.
You need integrations with specific tools. Calendly's third-party integration library is substantially larger than Tuton's. If your workflow is built around specific apps and you need Calendly to connect to them, that's a real advantage.
Who Should Use Tuton
You're running a proper tutoring practice. Eight students or more, repeat bookings, ongoing relationships, lesson tracking that actually matters. You need your scheduling to be part of your practice, not separate from it.
You want less admin, not more tools. You're tired of updating a CRM, a calendar, a notes app, a spreadsheet, and an invoicing tool every time a lesson happens. You want one thing that handles all of it.
Context matters before every lesson. You want to open a lesson and see who this student is, where they are in their learning, what happened last time — not spend five minutes digging through emails and notebooks before you can say hello.
You're a language tutor specifically. Tuton is built for this niche. The features, the terminology, the workflow — it's all shaped around how language tutors actually work, not adapted from generic freelancer tools.
You want to grow. If you're thinking about adding more students, building a sustainable practice, and treating tutoring like the business it is, you need tools that grow with you. An integrated platform scales more gracefully than a patchwork of disconnected apps.
The Bottom Line
Calendly is a genuinely excellent scheduling tool. This comparison isn't about finding fault — it's about fit.
For most independent language tutors who are serious about their practice, scheduling in isolation is the wrong frame. You don't just need bookings managed. You need bookings managed in the context of your students, your lessons, and your business.
That's what Tuton was built for.
If you're spending more time on admin than you'd like, reconciling tools that don't talk to each other, or losing context between lessons — it might be worth seeing what an integrated approach actually looks like in practice.
Try Tuton free at tuton.io/register — no credit card required, no spreadsheets necessary.