Rallly is free forever for group date polls, which is not the Calendly job

Rallly scores 69, the top of our Usable band and just under Strong. Before comparing that with anything else in this category, note that it is not measuring the same job. Cal.com at 78 and Koalendar at 61 are 1:1 booking tools; Rallly is the open source answer to Doodle, and we score its free plan on how well it does group availability rather than penalising it for a job it never claimed.

On that basis the plan is close to complete. Propose several dates, share one link, unlimited participants vote, nobody signs up. Freedom scores high too, because the AGPL-3.0 build ships as a Docker image and poll data can live entirely on infrastructure you own.

What holds the total down is retention on the hosted free plan, which deletes your data rather than locking it, plus a sentiment pillar sitting at the middle because we hold no third-party rating for Rallly at all. That is an absence of evidence, stated as such.

Nothing about the free Hobby plan meters how much you use it. Unlimited participants, core polling features, free forever (as of July 2026). The catch is what happens afterwards.

• Polls are deleted automatically once every date option has passed and the poll has then sat inactive for 30 days. Not archived, not locked behind an upgrade prompt: removed. If you use a poll as the record of who agreed to what, export it before that window closes.
• Pro at $56 a year is what keeps polls indefinitely and unlocks the full feature set.

Then the limits of scope, which are design decisions rather than paywalls:

• No availability schedules, no round-robin, no payment links, no booking page. Rallly complements a booking tool instead of replacing one.

And the self-hosted route, which removes the retention rule entirely and adds work in its place:

• You need somewhere to run the Docker container, a database, and an SMTP provider for invitation emails. Deliverability of those invites becomes your problem, not the vendor's.
• That is a straightforward evening for a developer and an unreasonable ask for anyone else, which is the honest way to say "free if you can run Docker".

The ladder has exactly two rungs and the difference between them is time rather than capability. Pro at $56 a year keeps polls indefinitely, unlocks the full feature set and includes early access to new features. Everything else about the free Hobby plan, the unlimited participants and the core polling, is already there.

That makes this an unusually clean decision. If your polls are disposable, which most group date polls are, the free plan is the whole product and $56 a year buys you nothing you need. If your polls are records, either pay or export.

The third option is the one that makes Rallly interesting on a site about free tools. The AGPL-3.0 build ships as a Docker image with no licence cost, and a self-hosted instance has no retention rule at all, because nobody else is running the cleanup job. The bill becomes a small server plus an SMTP provider, which is likely under $56 a year in cash and more than that in attention.

Set against the category, note that Pro is priced annually rather than per seat, so it does not scale with your group size the way Calendly's free plan and its paid tiers do.

Free with limits, and the limit is retention rather than usage. On the hosted Hobby plan you can run as many polls as you like with as many participants as you like, forever, and the only thing you lose is the poll itself after every date has passed and 30 days of silence go by.

Who can live here permanently: a committee scheduling monthly meetings, a club picking a date, a team coordinating across nine calendars, a family arranging a get-together. None of them need the poll after the meeting happens, so the deletion rule costs them nothing and the free plan is complete.

Who cannot: anyone who needs the poll as an audit trail, which is $56 a year or an export habit. And anyone who arrived looking for a free Calendly, because that is a different tool and Rallly will not become one. Run it alongside a booking tool rather than instead of one.

If 1:1 booking is what you actually need, Cal.com's free plan gives one person unlimited event types at no cost. Free Rallly alternatives covers the polling options, and best free scheduling tools ranks the category.