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Chobble Tickets vs Cal.com

Cal.com is a scheduling platform that built its reputation as the open source alternative to Calendly. On 14 April 2026, the company announced its production codebase is moving closed source. Here is how it compares to Chobble Tickets.

Different tools for different jobs

Cal.com is a scheduling platform. People use it to share a booking link, let others pick a time slot from their calendar, and confirm appointments. It supports paid bookings through Stripe and PayPal, so it is sometimes used for consultations, coaching sessions, classes, and one-to-one events that need a fee.

Chobble Tickets is an event ticketing platform. It is designed for events with a fixed date and capacity - workshops, gigs, club nights, charity dinners, kids' parties - where attendees buy a ticket, get a QR code, and scan in at the door.

The two platforms overlap when you need to charge people to book a time. If your "event" is a 30-minute slot in your calendar, Cal.com fits well. If your event is a workshop with 40 places on a Saturday afternoon, a ticketing platform fits better.

This page is for organisers who have been using Cal.com to take payments for events and are now reconsidering after the closed source announcement, or who are choosing between a scheduling tool and a ticketing tool for the first time.

The closed source announcement

On 14 April 2026, Cal.com published a blog post explaining that its production codebase is moving closed source. The reason given was security: the company argues that AI tools can now scan open source code for vulnerabilities at a scale that was not previously possible.

This is one view. The more common response among open source projects to AI-assisted vulnerability scanning has been to invite more scrutiny rather than less - publish more tests, accept more reports, fix issues faster. Closing the code does not make vulnerabilities go away; it makes them harder for defenders to find and fix.

A few facts from the announcement:

  • The production application that runs cal.com is no longer publicly available
  • A new project called Cal.diy has been released under the MIT licence as a community version
  • The company states the production code has "significantly diverged" from the open source version, with major rewrites of authentication and data handling
  • Self-hosting is still possible using the community version, but it is not the same code that runs cal.com

For most users, this is a change in marketing rather than a change in day-to-day use. Cal.com worked the same on the day after the announcement as it did on the day before. The change matters if any of these were reasons you chose Cal.com:

  • You wanted to read the code that handles your customers' data
  • You wanted to self-host the same software the vendor runs
  • You wanted to fork or audit the platform if it ever went away
  • You picked Cal.com over Calendly because it was open source

Chobble Tickets is licensed under AGPLv3. Every line of code that runs at tix.chobble.com is in the public GitHub repository. You can read it, fork it, and run the same software on your own server.

Pricing comparison

Cal.com charges per user, per month:

  • Free - $0/month, one user. Includes paid bookings through Stripe and PayPal, unlimited event types, calendar integrations, and the mobile app.
  • Teams - $12 per user per month (about £115/user/year at annual billing rates). Adds team scheduling, round-robin, custom APIs, branded booking pages, and routing forms.
  • Organizations - $28 per user per month (about £270/user/year at annual billing). Adds SSO, sub-teams, SCIM provisioning, and compliance certifications (SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001).
  • Enterprise - custom pricing, contact sales.

There are no per-booking platform fees. Stripe payment processing is charged separately at the standard rate (1.5% + 20p in the UK).

Chobble Tickets is a flat £50 per year for the whole site, with no per-ticket fees and no per-user charge. Community groups, charities, and schools pay £25/year. Stripe processing is charged separately at the standard 1.5% + 20p. Self-hosting is free.

Which one is cheaper depends on what you're doing

For a single freelancer running a Free Cal.com account, taking payment for one-to-one sessions, Cal.com costs nothing in platform fees. Stripe takes its 1.5% + 20p. Chobble Tickets would cost £50 a year in addition to the same Stripe fees.

For a team of five people running paid sessions on Cal.com Teams ($12/user/month), the platform cost is around $720/year (about £575/year). Chobble Tickets stays at £50/year regardless of team size.

For a community group running events with a fixed date and capacity, Cal.com is not really designed for the job. You would end up creating one event type per event date, which gets messy quickly.

Cal.ai is a separate paid add-on

Cal.com sells an AI phone agent called Cal.ai. It calls attendees on the phone, books meetings, and handles reminders using a synthetic voice.

Cal.ai is charged per minute on top of any subscription:

  • $0.29 per minute of call time (29 credits per minute)
  • Free plan: no included credits, all minutes purchased separately
  • Teams plan: 750 credits (about 25 minutes) per member, per month
  • Organizations plan: 1,000 credits (about 34 minutes) per member, per month

Cal.ai is sold as an add-on to all plans rather than included in any of them. Free plan users who want to use it must buy credits separately.

Chobble Tickets does not have an AI phone agent and does not charge AI usage fees. Confirmation emails are sent through your chosen email provider with customisable templates.

Feature comparison

Cal.com is a scheduling platform with payment support. Chobble Tickets is a ticketing platform. They share some basics but the core jobs are different, so a feature-by-feature comparison only goes so far. Here is an honest breakdown:

Both platforms share some features:

  • Online payment collection through Stripe
  • Email confirmations after booking
  • Embeddable on your own website
  • Custom questions on the booking form
  • Calendar feed exports (ICS)
  • Mobile-friendly booking pages
  • Webhooks for integrations
  • REST API for automation
  • Free tier or self-hosting option

Cal.com has features Chobble Tickets does not:

  • Calendar availability sync - Cal.com reads your Google, Outlook, iCloud, or other calendar to show only the times you are free. This is the core feature of a scheduling tool.
  • Round-robin routing - distribute incoming bookings across a team based on availability or load (Teams plan and above)
  • Routing forms - branching questions that route the booker to a specific person, team, or event type based on their answers
  • Time zone detection - automatic time zone handling for international one-to-one calls
  • Buffer time and minimum notice - block out time before and after each meeting, set how far in advance bookings can be made
  • Conflict detection across calendars - prevent double-booking across multiple calendars
  • Video conferencing integrations - automatic Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Daily, and Jitsi links generated for each booking
  • CRM integrations - native Salesforce and HubSpot sync, plus 100+ other integrations
  • AI phone agent (Cal.ai) - charged per minute, see above
  • Native mobile app - iOS and Android apps for managing bookings on the go
  • Calendly import - migrate event types from Calendly
  • Round-robin reassignment - reassign bookings between team members
  • Workflows - automated email and SMS reminders triggered by booking events
  • SCIM provisioning and SAML SSO - enterprise identity management (Organizations plan)
  • HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001 compliance certifications (Organizations plan)

Chobble Tickets has features Cal.com does not:

  • Capacity management for fixed-date events - sell a fixed number of tickets for an event with automatic sold-out handling and 5-minute payment holds to prevent double-booking
  • QR code tickets and check-in - every attendee gets a unique scannable QR code, with a check-in interface for the door
  • Apple and Google Wallet tickets - attendees can add tickets to the Wallet app on their phone
  • Password-derived encryption - attendee data is encrypted with a key derived from your admin password using hybrid RSA-OAEP and AES-256-GCM. A database dump and the server's encryption key together are still not enough to decrypt attendee data - an attacker would also need your password. If you forget your password, the data is permanently unrecoverable.
  • Open source production code - the same code that runs tix.chobble.com is public under AGPLv3
  • Flat annual pricing - £50/year regardless of how many tickets you sell or how many staff you have
  • Tiered ticket types via groups - VIP, early bird, general admission, and other tiers sharing one venue capacity cap
  • Pay-what-you-want pricing - let attendees pick their own price within a range
  • Daily and recurring events - per-date capacity with a calendar picker and holiday blackouts
  • Refund processing - issue individual or bulk refunds from the admin panel
  • Custom email providers - send confirmations through Resend, Postmark, SendGrid, or Mailgun so emails come from your own domain
  • Liquid email templates with full HTML control - edit the subject, HTML body, and text body of confirmation emails. Combined with a custom email provider, the email is fully white-label - it does not mention Chobble at all.
  • Full custom domain - run the ticketing site on your own domain (Cal.com offers yourcompany.cal.com subdomains on the Organizations plan but does not support a custom apex or subdomain on your own domain)
  • Activity logs - full audit trail of all admin actions
  • CSV export of attendee lists with filtering
  • No per-user pricing - add as many manager accounts (for door staff, volunteers, or co-organisers) as you need without changing the bill

Data ownership

Cal.com stores booking data, calendar data, and any custom questions you collect on its servers. With the production codebase now closed, you can no longer read the code that handles that data. The Cal.diy community version exists, but the company has stated the two codebases have diverged.

Cal.com's privacy policy and terms govern what the company does with the data. Like most hosted SaaS platforms, Cal.com staff can access booking data on the server.

Chobble Tickets encrypts attendee data with a key derived from your admin password. The data is decrypted only when you log in and view it. A database dump on its own is not enough to read attendee data, and a database dump combined with the server's environment encryption key is still not enough - an attacker would also need your password. Chobble staff cannot read your attendee data, even on managed hosting. The full code is public, so you can verify how the encryption works.

The trade-off is that there is no password reset and no backdoor. If you lose your password, the attendee data tied to that account becomes permanently unreadable.

Chobble Tickets can also be self-hosted under AGPLv3. The same software that runs tix.chobble.com runs on a self-hosted server. There is no separate "community version" with rewritten core systems.

When Cal.com is the better choice

  • You need a scheduling tool that reads your calendar and offers free time slots to bookers
  • Your "event" is a one-to-one meeting, consultation, or appointment, not a fixed-date event with capacity
  • You need round-robin distribution across a team
  • You need automatic Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams links per booking
  • You need native CRM integrations with Salesforce or HubSpot
  • You need an AI phone agent and are happy to pay per minute
  • You need enterprise features like SCIM, SAML SSO, or HIPAA compliance and have the budget for the Organizations plan

When Chobble Tickets is the better choice

  • You are selling tickets to events with a fixed date and capacity
  • You need QR code check-in at the door
  • You want flat annual pricing that does not scale with team size or ticket volume
  • You want the production code itself to be open source, not a separate diverged community version
  • Privacy and encryption matter to you and you want to be able to verify how data is handled
  • You want Apple and Google Wallet tickets
  • You are a community group, charity, or school (£25/year)
  • You want to send emails from your own domain with your own email provider
  • You want to add door staff, volunteers, or co-organisers as manager accounts without paying per-user fees

About Cal.com

Cal.com is a US-based company that built its product as the open source alternative to Calendly. Until 14 April 2026, the production codebase was open source under the AGPLv3 licence, with a small enterprise component under a commercial licence. The closed source announcement changes that going forward.

Cal.com has raised $32.4 million in venture capital across two rounds: a $7.4 million seed and a $25 million Series A in April 2022, led by Seven Seven Six. Investors who provide that capital expect a financial return on it.

Chobble Tickets is run by one person as a UK Community Interest Company (CIC) - a legal structure that locks the company's assets for community benefit. There is no per-user pricing and no AI add-on. Income comes from the £50 annual fee paid by managed-hosting customers.

Why this cannot happen to Chobble Tickets

Cal.com closed its production codebase after eight years of operating as an open source company. Three structural decisions make the same change impossible for Chobble Tickets, regardless of who is running it.

Community Interest Company asset lock. Chobble is a UK Community Interest Company. The software is owned by the company, not by any individual. A CIC has an "asset lock" - the company's assets, including the source code, cannot be transferred to a private owner. They can only be transferred to another asset-locked body, such as another CIC or a registered charity.

AGPLv3 with no premium tiers. Every line of code that runs at tix.chobble.com is licensed under AGPLv3. There is no "open core" model where features are held back behind a commercial licence. Anyone can fork the code, modify it, and run it themselves, provided they release their changes under the same licence.

Reinvested profits. A CIC must reinvest its profits in its stated mission - building software for small organisations and independent groups - after paying its workers a reasonable wage. There are no shareholders to pay dividends to, because the structure does not allow them.

The combined effect is that there is no version of "Chobble Tickets goes closed source" that produces a buyout or a payout for anyone. The exit does not exist.

Sources

The information on this page was verified in April 2026. Pricing and licensing may change - check the links below for the latest figures.