Office-hours scheduling built for faculty
Booking pages, meeting types, and group availability polls that understand an academic week — office hours, advising, thesis committees, prospective students, senior-design presentations. Students book in seconds and never need an account.
Why faculty end up here
Most scheduling tools are priced and shaped for sales teams. Calendly’s paid plans run about $120 per user per year, and its free tier stops at one event type — one duration for office hours, advising, and everything else. When2meet is free, but it’s an availability grid, not a booking system — no confirmations, no calendar invites, and no privacy policy that we could find. Doodle’s free tier shows your students ads.
Facultory’s scheduling desk is the tool in between: real booking pages and group polls, priced for one professor — $6 a month, or $60 a year — with a written privacy policy and a FERPA-conscious posture toward student data.
What’s on the scheduling desk
A booking page at your university’s address
Your page lives under your institution — /your‑university/your‑department/you/schedule — or behind a short /meet/you link. It reads like a faculty page, not a sales link.
Meeting types, not one-size slots
Office hours, advising, prospective-student chats, committee meetings — each with its own duration, color, and location: your office, a phone call, any custom spot, or Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Google Meet.
Availability that respects your calendar
Weekly windows plus a busy overlay from your connected Outlook calendar, a booking horizon up to 90 days out, and minimum-notice rules so nobody books tomorrow’s 8 a.m. at midnight.
Topics collected up front
The booking form asks what the meeting is about, so you walk in prepared — and advising bookings can log into the advisee progress tracker automatically (opt-in).
Calendar invites on every booking
Confirmations arrive as standard .ics invites — Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple Calendar all read them — and a reschedule or cancellation updates the same entry instead of littering new ones.
Email that comes from you
Confirmations send from your own address — the platform’s mailer or your connected Resend, SendGrid, Mailgun, or Postmark account — with editable templates and an outbox that keeps the record.
Group polls, When2meet-style
Pick a date range and slot size, share one link, and let everyone paint availability — voting needs no account. Finalizing sends the whole group a single calendar invite.
Department poll boards
A department can opt into a public polls page, so a seminar or committee poll is findable at /your‑university/your‑department/poll instead of buried in an email thread.
The Datebook also carries the Senior Design manager — team intake, slot caps, and final-presentation booking inside the windows you declare — and recurring time blocks that hold writing or lab hours across everything above.
Students never pay, and never sign up
- Booking pages and poll links are public — a student picks a slot, confirms their email, and is done. No account, no app, no fee, ever.
- No ads. Your students are not the product on the way to your office hours.
- FERPA-conscious by design: bookings, advisees, and letters stay scoped to you — there is no admin, department, or platform read path into them.
- A written Privacy & Data Collection Policy and Terms of Service — the documents a campus privacy review asks for first.
Pricing that isn’t per-seat
or $60 a year — two months free. The whole scheduling desk: booking pages, unlimited meeting types, locations, group polls, and the Senior Design manager. No per-seat math, no student charges — and every larger Facultory plan includes the desk too.
Claim your page →Compared honestly
Questions faculty actually ask
Do students need an account to book office hours?
No. Booking pages and poll links are public — a student picks a slot, confirms their email address, and gets a calendar invite. Nothing to install, nothing to pay, no account, ever.
How much does Facultory scheduling cost?
The Datebook is $6/month or $60/year, flat — booking pages, unlimited meeting types, locations, group availability polls, and the Senior Design manager. Every larger Facultory plan includes the scheduling desk too.
Is Facultory a Calendly alternative for professors?
For faculty work, yes: booking pages, meeting types with their own durations and locations, and group polls — at a flat $60/year instead of roughly $120 per user — plus the academic pieces Calendly has no concept of: advising bookings that can log into your advisee tracker, senior-design presentation booking, prospective-student intake, and department poll boards. See the full comparison.
Can it replace When2meet for group scheduling?
Yes. Polls use the same paint-your-availability grid, and voting needs no account. Unlike When2meet, a finalized poll becomes a real meeting: every participant gets one standard calendar invite, and the poll can live on your department’s public poll board. See the full comparison.
Does it work with Outlook and Google Calendar?
Every booking and finalized poll sends a standard .ics calendar invite, which Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple Calendar all read — and a reschedule or cancellation updates the same entry. You can also connect your Outlook calendar as a busy overlay so offered slots respect the meetings you already have.
What about FERPA and student privacy?
Facultory is FERPA-conscious by design: student-facing records stay scoped to the faculty member who owns them — there is no admin, department, or platform read path into them — and the public pages never read student data back. The platform publishes its Privacy & Data Collection Policy and Terms, and the entry scheduling plan includes no AI features at all.
Competitor pricing and feature notes reflect the vendors’ public pages as of July 2026 and can change at any time — verify current details on their own sites. Calendly is a trademark of Calendly LLC; Doodle of Doodle AG; When2meet of its operator. Facultory is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them, and the comparisons here are our good-faith reading, offered so you can make your own call. Facultory pricing shown is the live plan catalog at render time.