Kreneau: the Doodle and Framadate alternative

Doodle and Framadate are polls: their job is to find a date. You propose several possible slots, everyone ticks what suits them, and you keep the one that works for most people. To settle on a meeting date, that is exactly the right tool, and nothing below says otherwise.

The trouble starts when you use one for something else: getting people to sign up for slots that are already fixed. There the tool begins working against you, and it is not a matter of taste - it is a matter of the shape of the table.

A poll and a sign-up sheet are not the same thing

A date poll answers the question "when?". It compares a handful of possible dates against each other so you can keep one. The table is built for that: a few columns, one row per person, and you read the answer by counting which columns filled up.

A sign-up sheet answers an entirely different question: "who is coming to what?". The dates are no longer competing, they all coexist. You are not trying to eliminate any of them, you are trying to know who will be there on Tuesday and who will be there on Thursday.

Those two questions produce tables of opposite shapes, and that is why one tool cannot do both well.

What that looks like in practice

Take a club that drops a term of training sessions into a poll: three sessions a week over twelve weeks, so thirty-six columns. Forty members reply.

You end up with a table forty rows by thirty-six columns, close to 1,500 cells, the vast majority of them empty. The member who comes to a single session still takes up a whole row stretched across all thirty-six dates, with one ticked box somewhere in it. To find out who is coming to Thursday's session, you scroll sideways to the right column, then read down forty rows.

On a phone, that is simply unreadable. And the day somebody drops out, nobody notices: their row is still there, it just has one box fewer out of 1,500.

This is not a flaw in Doodle or Framadate. It is what happens when you ask a comparison matrix to do the work of a list.

Side by side

One row deserves underlining, because it often decides the matter on its own: none of the three makes participants create an account. That is not where the difference lies. It lies in the shape of the table and in what you are able to state on it.

When the slots are known in advance

Kreneau only ever asks the second question. The slots are known in advance - the week's sessions, the month's shifts, the hours of a course - and each person signs up for the ones that suit them. No vote, no date to settle.

Every slot carries a time, a description and, if you need it, a minimum or maximum number of participants. A full slot says so by itself: nobody can add themselves to it, and there is no counter for you to keep by hand.

You can also define roles inside a single slot, up to eight. On a food run, "driver" and "helper"; on a course, "trainer" and "trainee"; each with its own capacity. When signing up, the participant picks a role. That is the thing a date poll cannot express at all: to a poll, a ticked box is a ticked box.

The template, for when the schedule repeats

At this point one objection almost always lands: "fine, but my training sessions are the same every week - am I going to type them out twelve times?"

No. You define a template, that is, a reference week: seven days with their slots, times and roles, exactly as you want an ordinary week to look. You can build it from scratch, or pre-fill it from a week you have already entered. You give it a name and save it. The button carries that name, "Template", in edit mode.

Then you generate: you pick the starting week in a calendar, then the number of weeks, up to four at a time, on weeks that are still empty. The days arrive with all their slots in place and, of course, without the sign-ups - these are new dates, not copies of the old ones.

You can save two templates per sheet. In practice that is what it takes to separate the two rhythms most organisations have: the ordinary week and the school-holiday week, or the in-season week and the reduced one.

This is where the difference from a poll becomes structural rather than practical. Doodle and Framadate have no notion of a recurring week, and cannot have one: a poll compares dates against each other, it knows nothing of the rhythm that produced them. Every new period starts again from an empty table, to be filled column by column.

One clarification so you are not left with the wrong idea: a sheet covers 42 upcoming days, which is six weeks. The template therefore does not manufacture a whole season in one gesture. The realistic rhythm is this one: a week entered once, a month generated in a few clicks, and you start again the following month. For a club, that means preparing your sign-ups once a month instead of maintaining a spreadsheet continuously - setting it all up for a club is described here.

How to go about it

1. Create the sheet. One click from the home page. No registration, no account, not even for you.
2. Lay out your days. A sheet covers up to 42 upcoming days, which is six weeks. Past days do not count towards it: the same sheet can serve all year, with the weeks added as you go.
3. Add your slots. Up to 21 per day, with times, descriptions and capacities.
4. Duplicate instead of retyping. A slot duplicates just below itself, with its time shifted accordingly; a whole day and a whole week duplicate too. That is the useful move for a one-off adjustment - for a schedule that repeats, go through the template described above.
5. Share the link. Participants enter their name, optionally a comment, and that is it.

You can edit the sheet at any time: sign-ups already taken stay where they are.

The mistakes that cost the most

Trying to prepare everything at once. That is what produces the unreadable table described above. On a sign-up sheet you prepare the weeks ahead instead, a month at a time, in the same sheet: past days fold away on their own into a collapsed section.

Setting no maximum. With no limit, you discover the overbooking on the day. A maximum is not administrative red tape: it is what saves you from phoning somebody to tell them to stay home.

Describing slots too vaguely. "Tuesday 6pm" does not say whether it is the beginners' class or the advanced one. The description exists precisely to stop people signing up for the wrong thing.

Carrying on copying into a spreadsheet. This is the most stubborn reflex, and the most expensive: the moment a second source of truth exists, the two drift apart. And keeping a spreadsheet up to date costs more than you think: a climbing club spent at least ten minutes a week on it, formatting and date-checking included, before it switched.

If Framadate is what you use

Framadate is free, open-source software, run by an association doing valuable work. If you use it for what it was built for - finding a common date - there is no reason to switch, and Kreneau will not replace it.

The case where the question arises is narrower: you have fixed slots, you want people to sign up for them, and you are fighting a table that grows in the wrong direction. That is the only case. The same reasoning applies to Framacalc, Framasoft's spreadsheet: a charity left it for a very concrete reason, several of its volunteers could not sign up from their phones.

The thing they have in common that matters: as with Framadate, the link is shared as-is, and nobody has to create an account to sign up.

Which one to choose

The question fits in one sentence: is the date still to be decided?

• Yes, we are still working out when. Doodle or Framadate. That is their job, they do it well, and a sign-up sheet will be no use to you.
• No, the slots are already set. That is a sign-up sheet's job - and it is all Kreneau does.

If your need looks more like a full platform, with payments, dues and waivers to sign, this is not the useful comparison: see Kreneau against SignUpGenius instead.

And if you would rather see what a well-structured sheet looks like before building your own, the standard structure is described here.

Your slots are already set and you just want people to sign up? That is exactly what the sheet below does - try it, then create your own.