Vimcal Alternatives For Scheduling: Akiflow vs Vimcal

Vimcal helps solve a lot of problems that come with Calendly. But have you considered an alternative to Vimcal? Akiflow is another productivity app that provides a more intuitive and complete user experience than the average online schedule app.

Compared to Vimcal, Akiflow focuses more on your tasks rather than just scheduling meetings. Furthermore, Akiflow integrates quite well into your daily workflow.

We’ll evaluate how Vimcal and Akiflow stack up as alternatives to Calendly. Depending on your needs, we’ll help you pick the best one for you.

Vimcal VS Akiflow: Key Differences

As Calendly alternatives, Vimcal and Akiflow both try to help you with your daily scheduling to reduce the chance of errors and free up more time for productivity. However, they do these two things in different ways.

Time Zone Management

Using Vimcal, you can pull up time zones immediately when you navigate to the calendar page. This could be a little unnecessary and even overwhelming. After all, you’ll need to sort through some of this information.

On the other hand, Akiflow will indicate the time zone of your team members beside their names. This is extremely convenient when you’re trying to schedule a meeting.

Workflow

Akiflow will integrate directly into your daily workflow. One of the best examples of this is when you schedule a meeting. All you need to do is press the right command to make edits to your calendar. Moreover, you can click to get to your meetings directly from the notifications.

Whereas Akiflow eliminates the necessity of going into your productivity app to make changes, Vimcal instead tries to get you in and out of their online schedule app as fast as possible. Thus, it becomes yet another tab cluttering your browser.

Launching Calls

One specific difference in the workflow is the way you launch calls from these two platforms. While Akiflow warns you of calls ahead of time and then enables you to join a call from the notification, Vimcal requires you to go to the calendar within the app and click on the part of your calendar where the call is scheduled. It’s all a matter of convenience.

What is Vimcal?

Vimcal is a time-blocking calendar app that operates completely within your browser. Using a range of hotkeys, you can achieve just about everything in the app by clicking those commands. This makes it great for managing all your online meetings in one place.

The most integral component of Vimcal is that it allows you to share your availability alongside those of everyone else on your team. This renders collaboration seamless, making this app perfect for larger enterprises with lots of meetings and people moving around.

Vimcal’s Key Features

Sharing Availabilities

To share your availability on Vimcal, all you need to do is click on the calendar. Once you get there, you can click on any time range shown to determine which people on your team will be at a certain meeting and share it with your colleagues. Consequently, when your coworkers receive an invite to a meeting, they’ll see the names of all the other attendees.

When you schedule a meeting, or even just want to search for a date and time, you can do so intuitively. Instead of navigating through some complex calendars, Vimcal allows you to type in a date and time. For instance, “Thursday, June 9th” or “next Thursday” and then the app will immediately return that date to you and give you time slots available for scheduling purposes.

Need for Speed

Vimcal claims to be the fastest online scheduling app on the internet. While we haven’t tested every single one, it does seem as though everything in Vimcal is designed with speed in mind. From navigating the app with hotkeys to entering dates in plain English.

They also make it possible for you to initiate calls directly from your calendar. It doesn’t matter which meeting app you use, they all integrate with Vimcal.

Time Zone Features

When you use Vimcal, you can use your calendar to pull up time zones from any city in the world. This helps larger remote teams plan their meetings to include as many people as possible.

Pricing

It doesn’t appear that Vimcal makes their pricing plans very detailed. All we know is that after you finish your 14-day free trial, you must pay $15/month to use the tool. There doesn’t appear to be any discount for large teams. Nor is there a discount if you purchase a yearly plan.

After looking at these prices, and considering the few features that Vimcal offers, it might appear as though only a large enterprise could justify this expense for their team.

Pros & Cons of Vimcal

Pros

–          Each feature is optimized for speed.

–          Saves minutes every time you schedule a meeting.

–          Solves problems with Calendly links.

Cons

–          Not much other than scheduling features.

–          Makes your workflow quicker but doesn’t integrate completely.

–          Web-based only.

–          There is not a lot of info about the tool online.

–          They make it rather difficult for you to sign up.

Vimcal Alternative: Akiflow

While Vimcal advertises itself as the fastest online schedule app on the internet, it doesn’t seem to integrate as directly into your workflow. For one thing, you always need to open the app within the browser, which could be a massive inconvenience.

By contrast, Akiflow has hotkeys that will work no matter where you are on your computer. That’s because Akiflow is a desktop app. Another benefit to using Akiflow is that, unlike a browser app, it will send you notifications that are hard to miss. Furthermore, you can join meetings and perform other actions directly after clicking on a notification.

Akiflow Key Features

Jump from Notifications to Meetings

Throughout your day, you’re working on several projects. Going back to your Google Calendar or Zoom could eat up a lot of your time. As a result, Akiflow made it so that you get a notification not long before your meeting. That way, you’ll know exactly how much time you have to prepare for the meeting. Or, how much time you have left to keep working on what you’re doing.

Once the meeting starts, you’ll get another notification that you can click that takes you directly to the meeting. No need to open Zoom manually, or any other app.

Turn Conversations into Tasks

Whenever you’re discussing something with one of your colleagues, it probably relates to some sort of task that you need to complete. Therefore, wouldn’t it be helpful if you could simply transform those messages into a task with a click of a button.

Universal Inbox

Akiflow gives you some extra tools for you to manage your tasks. For instance, all those conversations that you turn into tasks are sent to a singular universal inbox. That means you won’t need to waste time checking 3 different emails and 3 more messaging apps. Everything from Outlook, Slack, or other apps gets rerouted here. And of course, you can turn these messages into tasks.

Use a Single Calendar

Like Vimcal, Akiflow simplifies your calendar so that you find all your events and meetings in one place. Juggling between different calendars as most people do normally is quite the pain.

While Vimcal lets you share availability in detail, including that of other attendees at the meeting, Akiflow’s tool is more focused. You can share your availability directly from the calendar tool as well.

Keyboard Commands

Akiflow has a set of six hotkeys to accelerate your daily workflow. One of our customers, Derek, is a founder, he describes these as “superhuman-style shortcuts”.

• Command Bar (Option + Space)
• Create Task (C)
• Plan (P)
• Mark As Done (E)
• Priority (1)
• Join Meeting (Command + J)

As you can see, this takes Akiflow beyond your average online schedule app. Instead of just giving you scheduling tools, you can manage your tasks without ever needing to open the app. This will save you loads of time.

Vimcal VS Akiflow: Feature Comparison

Vimcal and Akiflow perform similar functions, we made this comparison to help you get a view of how each online scheduling app uses its features. Find out how these two time-blocking calendars stack up against each other.

Feature	Vimcal	AkiFlow
Share time slots from the calendar	Yes	Yes
Universal Inbox	–	Yes
Turn every interaction into a keyboard shortcut	Yes	–
Schedule tasks from the command bar	–	Yes
Add tasks to your to-do list	–	Yes
Type out dates in simple English	Yes	–
Turn conversations into tasks	–	Yes
Import your conversations from other platforms	–	Yes
Import tasks from other apps	–	Yes
Join meetings with one click	–	Yes
Get a view of everyone’s time zone	Yes	Yes
Pricing	$15/month	12.50-$15/month (depending on the plan and what type of billing schedule you choose)

Improve Your Workflow with Akiflow

If you’re a startup founder, you need a scheduling app that goes beyond your typical calendar tools. Akiflow is an alternative to Vimcal because it expands on it by offering you several task management features as well.

Vimcal is great for managing your time if you spend your whole day in your browser. But if an app only works within your browser, then you always need to navigate to it, and sometimes to the tab itself. Even though Vimcal is designed to be quick, it isn’t as seamless as it appears. You could end up wasting minutes every day compared to Calendly alternatives like Akiflow.

If you’re intrigued by Akiflow, test its features out for yourself with a 14-day free trial.