Comparison
Leaving Cal.com
Cal.com moved its production codebase private in April 2026, relicensing the public repository with enterprise features stripped out. If you chose it partly because the arrangement was open, that is a fair thing to be annoyed about, and a fair reason to look around.
The first honest thing to say is that BusyWait cannot replace what you have lost. It is not open source, you cannot self-host it, and you cannot read the code. Anyone telling you their proprietary product is the natural home for a departing open-source user is selling you something.
What it can offer is a different kind of assurance: not "you can audit it" but "the deal does not change by plan, and the things it never holds have no switch". That is a weaker guarantee than source access. It is also written down, specifically, and it applies on the free plan.
Credit where it is due
What Cal.com does better
Written first, because a comparison that never concedes anything is not worth reading.
- Being self-hostable. If running it on your own infrastructure is the requirement, no hosted product answers it, and the open Cal.com codebase still exists.
- Auditability. You can read Cal.com and satisfy yourself about what it does. You cannot do that here, and no promise on this page substitutes for it.
- Extensibility. An API, apps and the ability to modify the thing yourself are real capabilities BusyWait does not have.
- Scheduling depth. Routing forms, teams, workflows and payment collection are all well beyond what BusyWait does.
Side by side
The differences that decide it
| Cal.com | BusyWait | |
|---|---|---|
| Source code | Open repository, production code now private | Closed. This is a genuine loss and not something to talk around |
| Self-hosting | Supported | Not possible |
| What varies by plan | Features, including some previously in the open version | Calendar count, syncs, booking links and lookahead. The privacy floor is identical on every plan |
| What is published | The code | Every field held, every field not held, and the full failure behaviour |
| Calendar providers | Google, Outlook, CalDAV and others | Google, Outlook, iCloud and any CalDAV server, including Fastmail and Proton |
Which one
How to decide
Choose Cal.com
Stay with Cal.com, or self-host it, if openness is the requirement rather than a preference. If you need to read the code, run it yourself, or extend it, nothing on this site is an answer to that and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Choose BusyWait
Consider BusyWait if what you actually wanted was a tool that would not change the deal on you, and if a published, plan-independent floor is close enough. The free plan is not a trial, busy-only is the default on every tier, and what the product refuses to hold is a list rather than a setting.
FAQ
Questions about the two
- Is BusyWait open source?
- No. BusyWait is a closed-source hosted service and cannot be self-hosted or audited. What it publishes instead is a field-by-field account of exactly what it stores and what it never stores, at busywait.ai/what-we-store, and its full failure behaviour at busywait.ai/reliability. That is a weaker guarantee than being able to read the code, and it is worth being clear that it is not a substitute.
- Does BusyWait change what it stores depending on the plan?
- No. The default is busy-only on every plan, including the free one: a mirrored event carries a start time, an end time and the status busy. Paid plans add the ability to switch extra fields on for a specific sync — titles, guests, or whether a block is a meeting or your own time — which no plan ever does automatically. The things BusyWait never holds at any setting, such as recordings, transcripts, anything from a calendar you did not connect, and anything used to train a model, are identical on every plan.
Two calendars, free, for as long as you like
Not a trial. Enough to find out whether the thing described above is the thing you wanted.