Rallly review

Rallly answers Doodle's question, not Calendly's

Calendly and Cal.com answer "when can I book time with you"; Rallly answers "which of these six dates works for all nine of us". You create a poll with candidate times, share one link, and participants tick what suits them. No accounts required for voters.

It is open source under AGPLv3 and ships as a Docker image, so a self-hosted instance costs nothing beyond a small server. That combination, group polls plus self-hosting, is rare, and it is why Rallly turns up on lists of Doodle replacements far more often than Calendly ones.

The groups that end up sharing a poll link

• Teams and committees scheduling meetings across many calendars
• Community groups, clubs, and families picking a date without a group chat thread
• Privacy-minded organisations that want poll data on their own infrastructure

Hobby is free forever; Pro prices retention at $56 a year

On the hosted side, Hobby covers the core polling features with unlimited participants and costs nothing. Its single meaningful limit is retention: once every date option in a poll has passed and the poll has been inactive for 30 days, it is deleted automatically. Pro, at $56 a year, keeps polls indefinitely and unlocks the full feature set.

Self-hosting removes the hosted-plan question entirely. There is no licence fee under AGPLv3, and you keep everything.

No booking links, and a 30-day deletion limit

It is not a booking tool. There are no availability schedules, no round-robin, no payment collection, and no "book a 30-minute call with me" link. If you came here from Calendly expecting a swap, you will be disappointed, and anyone telling you otherwise has not used it.

The hosted free plan's auto-deletion catches people out. If you use a poll as a record of who agreed to what, export it before the 30-day window closes.

Self-hosting is free but not effortless. You need the Docker container, a database, and an SMTP provider for invite emails. That is a normal developer task and an unreasonable ask for anyone else.

Pair it with a booking tool, do not swap one for it

Use Rallly when the problem is a group and a set of candidate dates. It is the best free and open source option for that job, and self-hosting makes it genuinely yours. Pair it with Cal.com if you also need one-to-one booking links, because Rallly will never be that tool and does not pretend to be.