Timeful vs World Time Buddy

Timeful

• Groups choosing a meeting time without anyone creating an account
• Respondents who want to fill in availability from their own calendar
• Organizations that want to self-host an open-source scheduling poll

World Time Buddy

• Comparing working hours across several time zones at a glance
• Picking a call time for people in different countries
• Showing a webinar time in each website visitor's local time

Timeful

• It runs in a web browser only; the site links to no desktop or mobile apps.
• Email notifications, reminders and showing responses only to the event creator all require signing in.
• Connecting Apple Calendar means generating an app-specific password for your Apple ID and entering it in Timeful.
• Availability groups, which track members' weekly availability, read it from Google Calendar only.

World Time Buddy

• Renaming locations and grouping them in tabs on the website require signing in.
• The iOS app lists a $2.99 in-app upgrade, although the maker's mobile page gives a workaround that unlocks it free of charge.
• The App Store shows iOS version 1.28 from November 2020, and Google Play shows the Android app last updated in January 2020.
• Google Play labels the Android app as containing ads and in-app purchases.

Timeful

Availability polls

Create an event with a range of dates and times, share the link, and see where everyone's availability overlaps. The home page says no login is required, and the FAQ puts no limit on respondents.

Calendar autofill

Respondents can fill in their availability from Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar or an ICS feed URL. Other people see only the availability entered, not the calendar events.

Available and if-needed times

A respondent can mark a slot as available or as possible only if needed, and the results can show when a chosen subset of the group is free.

Time zone conversion

Times are converted to each viewer's local time zone, and a selector at the bottom of every poll lets a viewer switch zones by hand.

Email notifications and reminders

A signed-in organizer can be emailed on each response or after a set number of responses, and can send reminders on the day an event is created, one day later and three days later.

Open source and self-hosting

The code is on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license, with a deployment guide for Docker Compose and NixOS and a plugin API for reading and setting availability from a browser plugin.

World Time Buddy

Hour-tile time comparison

Add locations by searching for places or time zones such as UTC, reorder them by dragging and mark one as home. Each location gets a row of hour tiles aligned with the others.

Select and share a time range

Click and drag across the hour tiles to pick a range, then open it in Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar or Gmail, copy it to the clipboard, or create a public event page.

Google Calendar overlay

Signed-in users can overlay Google Calendar above the hour tiles to find open slots. The mobile apps can show the device's calendars in the same position.

DST warnings and weekend marking

Daylight saving warnings appear a week before a change. Weekends are highlighted, including in countries where the weekend is not Saturday and Sunday.

12-hour, 24-hour or mixed format

Hours can be shown in 12-hour or 24-hour format, or in a mixed mode that uses each location's native format.

Embeddable widgets

A world clock widget and an event widget can be placed on a website. Both detect each visitor's time zone, and the event widget shows the event in the visitor's local time.

Timeful

• Free$0

  Unlimited events and every feature, with no ads. The former Timeful Premium subscription has been withdrawn.

World Time Buddy

• Free$0

  The website with all features, plus the iOS and Android apps without the in-app upgrade.

• Upgrade$2.99

  in-app purchase on the App Store; billing basis not shown

  The iOS listing marks location groups as the pro feature. The maker's mobile page describes a temporary workaround that unlocks the upgrade at no charge.