this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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21
cal.com compatible ics calendar or alternative booking suite? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 week ago by VanillaWasp@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I need to add booking to my website. I stumbled upon cal.com which seemed great. However I've run into 2 issues.

My current options for calendars are Protonmail and cpanel/webmail/roundcube.

cal.com doesn't really work with either of these. For proton its mostly on proton's side, their calendars are read-only externally + a bit buggy: https://github.com/calcom/cal.com/issues/5756

Roundcube uses caldav, and cal.com's support is still in beta with most caldev's being unsupported: https://github.com/calcom/cal.com/issues/3457

Roundcube got me the farthest but the booking emails just don't get sent and the calendar event pops up maybe an hour later + there's 75% the booking just doesn't work. I was told this was the calendars fault πŸ˜‚.

SO

Are there any selfhosted calendar implementations that support ics feed, external viewing ,etc etc that I can throw on a standard webserver?

Or are there any better foss booking systems?

I just need to book clients and connect it back to a working calendar that's not locked to a desktop. I thought this would be a solved problem in 2026...

I'm not trying to pay for yet ANOTHER software on top of business mail, and a webserver.

Thanks.

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[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So you are asking about something that seems simple, but is actually many different components working together. Apple and google have really made this integrated for a long time.

What you want is:

  • caldav/cardav server (radicale is good)
  • integration into your email client (Thunderbird can do this)
  • share-able webDAV service
  • some auth in front of this

I've left out all the plumbing needed to either support your access to this, or provide secure integration with a 3rd party email service.

This is a hard problem to solve for self-hosting. I have a self-hosted radicale instance and I get around the inter-connectivity by simply exporting ICS files and sending them to folks. Updating meeting times, setting calendar sharing is all very difficult because of above.

[–] VanillaWasp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you're saying shared/sync'd and updateable calendars outside of big tech like google is still an unsolved problem?

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Sorry, I didn't mean to doom that answer.

It is possible, but it is complex and onerous. How much appetite you have for that is of course up to you.

The basic functionality of hosting my own caldav/cardav fully privately with synchronising across devices is enough for me.

[–] neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I’ve been looking into this a bit already. I’m actually on a road trip and will start driving soon, but if your respond to this comment I can fill you in on what I’ve learning in the next day or two.

[–] VanillaWasp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

never hurts to learn.

[–] neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 days ago

Took me a while to get back to this. I got a bit sick over the weekend. Anyway, the opensource scheduling software is not too great. I am a little surprised by it as there are a few commercial options or opensource options that lock certain features behind a paywall even when selfhosting, like cal.com.

Cal.com is the only software that provides the feature set I need, but they charge about as much per user as Zoom does and it pisses me off that it's so expensive to have a shared calendar so my clients will simply book a time and date and have round robin logic applied to who the client gets assigned to.

Because of this, I am slowly working on building my own scheduling system that I will selfhost. I am mostly vibecoding it as I am too busy running a small company to dedicate time to coding it properly, but that is some tech I can easily test for functionality and fix down the line when there is more time or money.

simplybook.me is another service I came across, but they charge you based on how many features you enable, and you basically can't use their system for scheduling without adding on a bunch of features. Once your trial ends, you can't turn off the features and go back to the free version without signing up for a pro account or whatever they call it.

[–] sorghum@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nextcloud does almost everything you want. Be aware though that is is pretty dang fragile. You can export calendars and have both public and private web access for calendars.

[–] VanillaWasp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

pretty dang fragile So tired of fragile software BUT its usually free and responsibility falls on me to contribute or stfu.

Now shitty paid software? I could rant for days.

I'm saving nextcloud for when I need to scale and have more hardware.

[–] sorghum@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

I bought an old Lenovo hotel front desk computer I was going to turn into a router, but it didn't have a pcie slot. So after I got the right computer and turning that into my router, I used that wrong computer as my nextcloud host (Debian, docker, AIO Nextcloud). It works well enough for people seeing my availability, family calendar, file server front end, and CardDAV. I don't think it of be able to handle video/audio calls because of the hardware though.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For proton its mostly on proton's side, their calendars are read-only externally

You can have encrypted or unencrypted, can't have it both ways.

Cal.com is a for-profit company, so it should be any surprise that they want to make it difficult to self-host.

[–] VanillaWasp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago

Cal.com is open-source and selfhostable without too much issue. The issues just stem from proton's encryption and cal.com still being in development.

[–] MrQuallzin@pie.eyeofthestorm.place 1 points 1 week ago

I just got Easy!Appointments setup after being disappointed by cal.com. I don't see any options for ics, but it does have CalDAV integrations (along with Google sync as well). I haven't personally used the CalDAV integration so can't speak to how mature it is. I've got my SMTP settings setup and emails go right out

[–] undu@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You might want to take a look at https://github.com/olivierlambert/calrs

it was made as a reaction to cal.com not meeting the needs of the creator, like being selfhood table and being caldav compatible.

Note that I cannot vouch for it since I have not used it.

[–] VanillaWasp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago

Thanks this might be the solution. Fingers crossed it supports round-cube without issues.

[–] tvcvt@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I’ve been using Odoo CE for some projects and I know that it has apps for scheduling and booking, but if you want to add this to an existing website, that may be overkill.

What platform does your site use? That may help target some suitable options.

Also, check out this list and you may get some ideas: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#booking-and-scheduling

[–] VanillaWasp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Odoo seems super heavy for my use-case but thanks for sharing. Never hurts to have backups. easyappointments doesn't seem too bad.

The site is basic wordpress atm and I've got a separate server for hosting webapps.

[–] tvcvt@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah, I sort of figured it’d be too much. It looks like there are a bunch of booking plugins for Wordpress. That’s definitely where I’d start my search in your shoes.