The Best Alternative to Blockit: Carly
Carly is an AI-powered scheduling assistant that works over email and SMS. Unlike traditional booking links or calendar tools, Carly reads messy email threads she is cc'd on, understands context, and sends real invites that keep the conversation natural. You can forward Carly an email, send her a text, or send screenshots and images for her to process and add to your calendar. It's built for busy professionals who want a human-like assistant that just works, handling coordination and calendaring so you don't have to. ChatGPT could never be this useful.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Carly | Blockit |
|---|---|---|
| AI-Powered Scheduling | ✅ | ✅ |
| Human-like Assistant | ✅ | ✅ |
| SMS Integration | ✅ | ❌ |
| Email Integration | ✅ | ✅ (CC-based) |
| Slack Integration | ❌ | ✅ |
| Agent-to-Agent Negotiation | ❌ | ✅ (when both sides use Blockit) |
| Acts Beyond Scheduling (email, CRM, 200+ apps) | ✅ | ❌ |
| Multiple Calendar Support | ✅ | ✅ (Google + Outlook) |
| Smart Time Zone Detection | ✅ | ✅ |
| Pricing | From $35/month | $1,000/yr individual; $5,000/yr team |
| Natural Language Understanding | ✅ | ✅ |
| Email Thread Awareness | ✅ | ✅ |
| Setup Time | 2 mins | Minutes (30-day free trial) |
| Response Time | 1 min | Instant |
| Available 24/7 | ✅ | ✅ |
Why Carly is the Better Choice
Blockit has serious momentum: a $5M seed led by Sequoia (announced January 2026), a founder who spent six years as a Sequoia partner, and 200+ companies using it — including a16z, Brex, and Together.ai. Its signature trick is agent-to-agent negotiation: when both parties run Blockit, their agents settle on a time directly with zero email back-and-forth. That’s genuinely impressive — when the other side is also a Blockit user. When they’re not (which for most people is most of the time), Blockit works like other CC-based schedulers, negotiating with humans over email or Slack.
The price gap is the headline. Blockit costs $1,000/year for an individual and $5,000/year for a team license after the 30-day trial. Carly starts at $35/month — roughly a third of the cost — and includes SMS from day one, so you can text “find 30 minutes with the Ramp account team this week” instead of composing an email. Blockit only operates through email CC and Slack.
The scope gap matters just as much. Blockit is a scheduling specialist: it books the meeting and stops. Carly is an executive assistant that schedules and acts across 200+ integrations — after the invite lands it can send the follow-up email from your Gmail or Outlook, log the meeting in HubSpot, or fire any workflow on real triggers, 24/7 in the cloud.
Who Should Pick Which
Pick Blockit if you’re at a company where colleagues and counterparties already run it — the agent-to-agent network genuinely compounds at agent-dense firms like the VC funds on its customer list, and the $1,000/year is defensible for someone living back-to-back. Pick Carly if you want the same CC-to-schedule motion at a fraction of the price, over email and text, from an assistant that keeps working after the meeting is booked. Weighing more options? See our full roundup of Blockit alternatives.
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See what people say
"Before Carly, I relied on a Calendly link, but the whole process felt impersonal and not very professional. Carly changed that by handling all the back-and-forth, so I'm no longer stuck in endless email threads trying to line up schedules.
Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."
