How is CalBot different than other AI scheduling assistants, such as BlockIt and Howie.ai?

Many people ask us how CalBot is different than other AI scheduling assistant tools. Here, we offer an in-depth analysis of the differences between products. Given the sometimes limited information available publicly about these products, we have relied the information on their websites, interviews with their current and former users, as well as CalBot staff's own usage of them.

Howie.ai

Howie.ai's founder, Austin, is a gem. Early in CalBot's development, our founder, Sarah, became a customer of Howie. She wrote to warn Austin that she was building a competitor, but Austin had no issue with that and onboarded her to the product! She remained a customer until CalBot made Howie.ai's functionality redundant. She is grateful to Austin and the Howie.ai team for building a seriously good service.

Howie.ai is similar to CalBot in many respects. Both handle scheduling over email, allow users to connect multiple calendars, etc. We also both have enterprise solutions for teams that want to use their own domains.

The major difference between CalBot and Howie is that Howie is human-in-the-loop, and CalBot is not. With Howie, there is a real person checking your messages and making sure Howie is responding and acting currently. We are sure this makes Howie more accurate. But it also means Howie is not instantaneous; it may take two hours to get a response from Howie. CalBot, on the other hand, responds within a minute.

Howie also lacks SMS support, chatbot functionality, and Outlook support, which CalBot offers.

BlockIt

Blockit is CalBot's more expensive cousin. User reviews have been mixed. Like Howie, Blockit also lacks SMS support, chatbot functionality, and Outlook support.

Conclusion

CalBot and its competitors are similar - but CalBot exceeds in its fast response times and its plethora of (highly used) features that Howie and Blockit lack.