People keep asking us "so it's like Doodle?" and the honest answer is: sort of, for about a third of what Doodle does, and hopefully much better for that third. Rather than dodge the question, this post is a straight comparison of the tools people actually use to pick a date with friends, written by someone who has used all of them and who obviously has a horse in the race. I'll try to be fair; where a competitor is the better choice, I'll say so.
What friend groups actually need
Scheduling tools were mostly built for meetings. Friend plans have different constraints:
- Guests won't sign up for anything. Your colleagues will create an account to attend your workshop. Your university friends will not create an account to come to dinner.
- Day-level is enough. Meetings need 2:30pm vs 3:00pm. Dinners need "Saturday or Sunday?". Time-slot grids are overkill and make responding slower.
- The organiser is a volunteer. Nobody is paid to chase responses. The tool has to make chasing unnecessary or automatic.
- It happens on phones. Most responses come from a link tapped in WhatsApp on a phone screen, not from a laptop.
With that lens, here's how the options stack up.
Doodle
The default answer for twenty years, and still the most polished meeting scheduler around. Doodle shines for professional coordination: finding a slot for a committee, scheduling interviews, one-on-one booking pages. It integrates with work calendars and handles time zones well.
For friend groups it has drifted in the wrong direction. The free tier shows ads to your guests, the interface pushes time slots rather than days, and the product increasingly assumes you're a professional whose time is money. It works, but your friends will feel like they're booking a dentist appointment.
Use it when: you're scheduling something work-shaped, need time-of-day precision, or need calendar integrations.
When2meet
The beloved veteran. Free, no ads, no accounts, and the paint-your-availability grid is genuinely fast once you understand it. For students organising society events across a week of hourly slots, it remains hard to beat.
The costs: it looks like a website from 2009 because it mostly is one, it's painful on phones (painting cells on a 5-inch screen is an exercise in frustration), there are no notifications at all, and results are a heatmap you have to interpret yourself. Nobody closes the loop - you still have to announce the final time in the group chat and hope people saw it.
Use it when: everyone's on a laptop and you need hour-level granularity for free.
Rallly
An open-source Doodle in the original spirit: clean group polls, no ads, self-hostable if you're technical. I have a lot of respect for Rallly, and if you want a straightforward date poll with time slots it's probably the nicest free option today.
Its model is still poll-per-event with the organiser doing the arithmetic, and it's web-first - there's no native app, no push notifications, and guests who lose the link are gone. Fine for one-off polls; less good as the standing tool a friend group reaches for every time.
Use it when: you want an ad-free Doodle-style poll and don't need apps or notifications.
LettuceMeet
When2meet with a modern coat of paint. Nicer on mobile, same paint-the-grid model, popular with student groups. Similar limitations: no real notification story, heatmap output you interpret yourself, and accounts are needed for some features which reintroduces exactly the friction friend groups won't tolerate.
Use it when: you'd use When2meet but everyone's on phones.
Group chat + Google Calendar
Worth naming because it's what most people actually do. The group chat collects opinions, someone makes a calendar invite, half the group never interacts with it. We wrote a whole post on why this takes 73 messages. The short version: conversation threads are the wrong data structure for "who's free when".
Happening
Here's our pitch, with the caveats attached. Happening only does day-level social scheduling. A host creates an event with a date range, shares one link, friends tap the days they can make - no account, no install, about ten seconds on a phone - and the app ranks dates by confirmed availability. The host taps the winner and everyone gets told. Hosts get real iPhone/Android apps with push notifications; guests never need anything but the link.
What Happening deliberately doesn't do: time slots (day-level only), meeting-room booking, work calendar integration (an on-device, opt-in conflict check is on the roadmap), video-call links, agendas. If your use case needs those, use Doodle or Rallly - genuinely.
Use it when: a friend group needs one date that works for everyone, and you want the asking, counting and announcing handled for you.
The comparison in one table
| Tool | Guests need account? | Phone-first? | Notifications? | Picks the date for you? | Free tier ads? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Doodle | No | Okay | No - heatmap | Yes | |
| When2meet | No | Poor | None | No - heatmap | No |
| Rallly | No | Okay | No - counts | No | |
| LettuceMeet | Sometimes | Good | Minimal | No - heatmap | No |
| Happening | No | Native apps | Push + email | Yes - ranked dates | No ads ever |
Every row of that table is checkable in five minutes, and if any of it goes stale, email us and we'll fix it. The honest summary: for meetings, Doodle; for hour-grids on laptops, When2meet or Rallly; for getting six friends to dinner without a 73-message thread, we'd obviously love you to try Happening.