A great product with mutiple tools that can be overwhelming.

The multiple valuable software services offered in one solution

Graphic video tutorials on using the product

My overall experience has been one of immense delight right for the onset. It was a well answered prayer and a solution to an extreme problem. We had been using Squarespace’s calendar option, and it’s nice because it’s built in, but it did not offer the flexibility and complexity that Timely offers. Timely not only offers it, but makes it extremely simple with a gorgeous UI.

I love how flexible this software is! We have events that repeat throughout the year with random breaks and weeks/days off. This software makes event management a breeze.

The only con I see, and this is being extremely picky, is the inability to publish my calendar multiple pages throughout my site. However, this could also be a feature oversight on my end.

Looked slick at first, with an events carousel and decent UI

First of all, there’s no way to find out how much the premium version costs unless you schedule a meeting with their VP. When we emailed their assistant to confirm the meeting time, the assistant never even bothered to respond, the result of which we waited for an initial meeting that did not happen. The second time we were more fortunate, but that’s where the real issues begin. The first-tier premium version itself is overpriced at $1,300 a year, with limitations on number of events and the ability of people to pay for advertising. Now, onto the plug-in itself. The events are hosted on Time.ly’s servers, which may result in your events being held hostage, as other reviewers have pointed out. However, the core issues have to do with functionality. Specific events are rendered via pop-ups, rather than distinct pages — again because you are essentially embedding a widget in events from THEIR website, not yours. In addition to this having NO SEO value (since specific events cannot be indexed), the tendency of a user is to use hit back button to get out of an event, which results in the user being taken to the website page BEFORE the calendar, which is a frustrating UX. (The pop-ups also had issues rendering on mobile, which is a serious issue. This is probably the result of substandard coding, such as the absolute positioning used in the free version.) Finally, communication with their team was frustratingly slow, with responses often taking a day or more. If this is the level of service they offer in pre-sales, one can only imagine how slow it will be once you are paying for something you cannot even back out of.

We are currently utilizing Timely as a substitute for an event calendar that our church uses internally, unfortunately we have a separate registration system from that calendar and external integration of registrations are not possible with it either. Timely allows for that seamless appearance that we need with our calendar.

It is very easy to use, very intuitive. We had a very difficult time finding a web calendar that would seamlessly integrate into our website. Given the manual nature of our calendar input I still find this calendar system to be very efficient and easy to enter all events. The customer service is also very good as well. Any customization or requests that I've had have been resolved in a very timely manner.

At the current moment there is not an a la carte way to select options that are necessary for us to use. We have the full package as does everyone that uses the software. We currently do not have need for a full event management system complete with ticketing but we are paying for everything as they have upgraded every customer to the same package recently. This did double the cost of the product which caught us off guard a little at first, but considering what we get with that price is well worth the extra.

We use two calendars. One is open to a select group of organizations and agencies in the backend. They can submit a range of events for their own viewing. They have the option to tag events in a certain way that will sync those events with the other calendar. The other calendar is public. The public calendar contains events from the private calendar as well as submitted events. (The public calendar also back-syncs to the private calendar.) Every week, we send out a newsletter of all events coming up in the next month on the public calendar. In the past, we had three separate staff members handling these three functions - private calendar, public calendar, email. We now have one person who oversees all three, and we make clear that it is the responsibility of the organization posting that their information be clean and accurate. This is a big improvement for us.

We previously had a disjointed calendaring process that required heavy involvement from multiple staff members. This was tolerated because we function as the calendaring hub in our community, with many agencies and organizations submitting events to our online calendar and newsflash. The use of Time.ly has allowed us to automate and improve the efficiency of the calendaring process. We are still able to carry out the processes that the community depends upon us for without spending the same amount of staff time.

We have run into a few bugs here and there. The team at Time.ly has been very responsive to our needs and willing to adapt.