By Mike Wuerthele
Sunday, March 26, 2017, 01:00 am PT (04:00 am ET)
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The winner of the best calendar app for every user of macOS and iOS is...not included in this showdown. It's not that we're on a peculiar quest to determine which is the second best, though. Instead, it's because the best app for most people is Apple's own Calendar.
If you're an AppleInsider reader, you're just not most people.The calendar that comes free with your Mac, iPhone or iPad is robust, easy to use and you know that any event you enter on one device is immediately on the others.
Plus, of all the calendars we tested, Apple's own has the best travel time alerts —the feature that pops up a notification saying you'd better leave for your next appointment now because traffic is heavy. We've swapped entirely to an alternative app but we still rely on Apple's travel time alerts.
Whether you just use your calendar every few weeks to check who's birthday is coming up or you're in it a few times a week, try Apple Calendar and you may very well end up happily sticking with it. If you use your calendar every day and especially if you use it many times a day, though, then there are alternatives that have each have great strengths.
Calendar apps by other companies all aim to do better than Apple's in broadly two ways. The most useful is how they each attempt to make it quick to enter a new event or look up an existing one. Not all succeed but those that do are startlingly fast.
The other broad description you assign to calendar alternatives is that they want to be better designed than Apple's. They want to look clearer, to show you different views of your calendar in more attractive and useful ways.
They also want you to pay.
Each of the recommended apps here range from around five to fifty bucks and we've just about completely ignored the price in every case. You're more likely to drop five dollars to try something out than you are fifty. However, if the $50 one is perfect for you and the $5 isn't, it's not any savings going for the cheaper option, it's just wasting your money.
Plus, the more expensive calendar apps all have trial versions, at least for the Mac, so you can have a good look at what you'd be getting.
All of the apps here, Mac and iOS, actually use Apple's own behind-the-scenes calendar engine. That means you can download, say, Fantastical and immediately be using it with all of your existing events. Try it out and if you don't like it, you could go to BusyCal and immediately be using that — with all your events including any new ones you added in Fantastical.
The fact that they use the same Apple engine meant we could try them all separately, together, in combinations and most of all in anger. We put these apps through real-world testing, living our working and home lives by each of these calendars except the terrible ones we'll tell you about in a minute.
None are so perfect that we recommend you and everyone you know ditches Apple Calendar for them. However, there is one that comes close and there are several that could be the best for you.
If there's no one real winner, though, there are losers. Two of them.
Worst in class
Google Calendar for iOS. The Google Calendar service is powerful, if fiddly, but the free app for iPhone and iPad is a mess.
That's not because we're thinking of security and how Google automatically reads everything to see how it can advertise to you best. In fact, that actually gives Google Calendar at least one feature the others can't match: it can automatically schedule a certain type of event it calls Goals into your week.
It's not because we agree with Tim Cook's opinion that if the service is free then 'you're not the customer... you're the product' — although we do.
Rather, we just out and out recommend that you skip Google Calendar for iOS because the app is bad. The kindest thing you can say about it is that at least it's better than the official Google Calendar app for Mac - because there isn't one.
If you use and like the Google Calendar service, your best bet is still to stay with Apple's own Calendar app. That plugs into Google Calendar on both Mac and iOS. It's not ideal — it doesn't support all of Google Calendar's power features — but it works.
The second-place worst app is the calendar in Microsoft Outlook for iOS. Again, just tell Apple Calendar that you have a Microsoft Exchange account and never look at Outlook for iOS again. We examined it so you don't have to.
Envelope not provided by PriceWaterhouse Coopers...
With those out of the way, this is what we've got. The best calendar apps on the Mac and iOS are Fantastical, BusyCal, Calendars 5 and Timepage. Special mention to Informant 5: it's an app for handling a busy schedule and so includes a calendar. The calendar isn't its sole or primary purpose though, and we're looking at apps that concentrate on this.
Most of the apps we've ended up with also include a basic To Do or Reminders kind of feature. If your work or life needs more than Apple Calendar, then it also needs a fully implemented To Do manager. Go look at OmniFocus or Todoist.
Timepage by Moleskine
Timepage by Moleskine belongs in contention here solely because of how great it looks. Don't ever knock the importance of attractive design when it's for an app that you're going to spend a lot of time using.
As well as simply looking great, the attractive design means that Timepage is maybe the best for quickly showing you one thing. With a single glance at Timepage, you immediately get how busy your schedule is. You immediately see when you've got a day that can take a new event and you can immediately see when you haven't.
It's a heat map of your month and though we've chosen a soft blue color, Timepage lets you pick your palette the first time you start it. The colors are all the same as Moleskine uses on its paper notebooks and they're all shown off rather tastefully throughout the app.
Timepage, however, works best when you have only one calendar. If you separate your events and appointments into, for example, a Work and a Home calendar, Timepage will show you both — but not at the same time.
It's fast for you to look at this heat map, everything else on Timepage is a little slow. Only a little, but if you're using the app a lot, you notice. The way you add new events is different to Apple's but doesn't save you any time. Starting the app feels slow enough that you don't turn to it to check where you're going next.
Still, that heat map is gorgeous and Timepage is on Mac, iOS and Apple Watch. Timepage 2.0.1 for iPhone requires iOS 9.2 or higher and costs $4.99 on the App Store. The separate Timepage 1.1.1 for iPad requires iOS 9.2 or higher and costs $6.99 on the App Store.
Calendars 5
Calendars 5 from Readdle is not on Mac or Apple Watch, it is exclusive to iPhone and iPad. If you work entirely or mainly from those devices, you'll never even notice. If you're split between iOS and Mac, it's not exactly a burden, however.
It's better to have the same calendar app on all the devices you use but it isn't essential. It's not even that big of a pain because anything you enter or change on Calendars 5 on your iPhone is immediately entered or changed on whatever Mac calendar you use.
Calendars 5 has some clear advantages over Apple's Calendar on iOS. Chief among them is the week view on iPhone which is particularly well designed.
If you look at it in landscape then you get a regular week view with a column for each day and each event gets a box that blocks out that part of your day. Turn it to portrait, though, and you get a unique take on the same information.
Now each day is a row. Instead of a day being a long blank section divided into hours and with these event boxes at the appropriate times, you get this:
Each event gets its own box and has the title and time in it but they aren't spaced out to represent when they are in the day, they are next to each other. It's specifically so that you can see with a glance both what your next event is today — and how visually spot how busy any given day is.
Every calendar app —except Apple's on iPhone — has a week view but none presents it to you in this way.
Every calendar app also offers you a list view that simply lists every event you've got coming up, in order. Calendars 5 does it clearly and also gives you a quick way to leap on to list just events from tomorrow, next week and so on.
Entering new appointments is done very well too and it's also fast. It's not the fastest or the best, but it is very good because it uses natural language. Rather than having to schlep through a series of questions such as when the event starts, when it finishes, where it is, you just type. Simply type into Calendars 5 the same way you would tell a friend where you're going: 'Lunch with Bert next Tuesday at noon at Starbucks' is enough.
Apple Calendar now uses this natural language too, though, so while it's great to have it, the feature isn't strong enough in Calendars 5 to make the difference on its own. What sells Calendars 5 is this natural language entry plus how quickly you can find what's on your schedule.
Calendars 5 5.10.3 requires iOS 8.0 or higher and costs $6.99 on the App Store.
BusyCal
BusyCal also has you enter new events using this natural language where you just type what you want. It edges out Calendars 5, though, in that it understands words like 'lunch' so rather than your having to say 'lunch at noon' it gets it on the first word.
That's still not the best version of natural language that you can get and it's not why BusyCal shines.
Instead, BusyCal is up there as one of only two best-in-class calendar apps because it is replete with powerful features on both Macs and iOS. It does lack an Apple Watch app, though.
Uniquely, it has its own alarm notifications across Mac and iOS instead of relying on Apple's. That's actually a slight snag as it means cancelling an alarm that pops up on your iPhone won't cancel it on your Mac. Otherwise, though, it's a boon because BusyCal gives you choices right in the notification about how long to snooze the alarm.
Behind the scenes, BusyCal is particularly strong on working with Microsoft Exchange and in front of the scenes, right in your face, it gives you the weather. If you choose, BusyCal will put a weather forecast in every day of the month view. It will put phases of the moon in there too, if you like.
If you do like that, if it helps you, then BusyCal is your only choice and it is a fine one.
It just feels a little old and that's partly because it is — the people who make it have been doing calendar software for decades, although not this version — and partly because of design. The weather and moon information is displayed more elegantly than we seem to remember from previous versions, but BusyCal can look, well, busy.
You just can't knock how fast it is to enter appointments, you can't knock how well thought out the whole calendar app is.
It also has a version of a feature that after testing so many apps over a couple of months, we've come to find indispensable. From now on, if a calendar app doesn't have this feature, we're not interested. It just won't sound that special: it's simply an extra menubar app in the Mac version.
We keep saying that natural language entry is great because you just type the way you'd tell a friend. Imagine, though, that this friend or colleague is on the phone to you right now and needs to know if you're free for a meeting next Monday at 9 a.m. With almost every other calendar app on the Mac, you have to launch the application, find the day and look.
That's quite quick if the day you're looking at is in the current month so it's right in front of you. It's very quick if the calendar app is already open.
Yet compare that to what BusyCal can give you. Whatever you're doing on your Mac, whatever you're working in, when you get a call like this, you tap a key and BusyCal's menubar app pops down. From that app, you can see what you've already got on your plate with a view of your month marking out busy days. You can see the detail of what's coming up with a scrollable list of your events underneath that.
So you can add that colleague's meeting right there — using natural language again — without switching to BusyCal itself.
Use that for a couple of days and you're never going back. However, you might go forward: as great as this is, the same feature is done better in Fantastical.
BusyCal 3.1.5 requires OS X 10.11 or higher costs $49.99 if you buy it on its own. You can get it from the Mac App Store But you're better off buying it direct from the developer as that will get you update deals in the future and a discount deal on BusyContacts right now. BusyCal and BusyContacts for Mac are each $49.99 but you can buy them together in a bundle, just like the old Now Up-To-Date and Contact, for $79.98.
There's no bundle on iOS because unfortunately there is no iPhone or iPad version of BusyContacts as yet. Instead there is solely BusyCal 3.1.2 which requires iOS 9.0 or higher and costs $4.99 on the App Store.
Apple Pro 2018
FantasticalIf there were one winner here, if there were one app that is the closest to perfect for users who need more than what Apple's Calendar offers, then this would be it: Fantastical for Mac, iOS and Apple Watch.
Take that menubar app, for instance. As good as BusyCal's version is, Fantastical's is better because it's not an addition, not an adjunct to the main app. Fantastical in the menubar is a full application — because that's originally all that Fantastical was.
Now that it has a fuller Mac version, it's still got all its features in the menubar and that means you can do everything there. As well as seeing what's on your plate for the next few days or month, you can easily search across every event you've got. BusyCal doesn't let you search at all.
You can also choose to show or hide your Work and Home calendars so you can see everything or concentrate on one.
Then when you do want to add a new event, you've got Fantastical's natural language feature right in the menubar — and it is the best implementation of this.
Other apps are catching up, including Apple's own, but what makes Fantastical stand out is both that it understands what you're typing and how it shows you it does.
As you type in Apple Calendar, for instance, that app shows you what it thinks you mean by writing underneath where you're entering your text. So if you type Lunch in the Quick Entry box, immediately underneath it you'll see the word Lunch repeated and the words 'Today 12:00 to 13:00'. Type 'Lunch Tuesday' instead and Apple Calendar writes next Tuesday's date instead of 'Today'.
BusyCal, on the other hand, does the same thing more in a way that is more like filling out a form for you. Where all calendar apps used to have this thing of asking for the date, the start time, the end time and all that, BusyCal lets you type a sentence and it figures out which bits is the date or start time or venue and pops that information into the right boxes.
What Fantastical does that is so much better is that it visually shows your event. On Mac and iOS, the moment you start writing a new appointment, Fantastical pops a box into your month view right in front of you. When you type 'Lunch Tuesday', it moves that box over to Tuesday. When you say 'Lunch Tuesday at 1pm' it shunts the box from noon to 13:00.
The fact that you can see it doing this as you type means it's so much more clear when something's wrong, when the event's not on the day you meant. The fact that there is this fact means that you know you'll catch any problem so you end up trusting your calendar more.
It's not perfect, though. Swapping between the month, week and other views on iOS is a matter of swiping in the right direction and it makes absolute sense once you're used to it. We just seem to spend most of our time in one view so when do want to swap, there's a moment's confusion over how.
Also on the iOS version, you have to know to pull down on the calendar to get to a search box. That's not some poor Fantastical exclusive, it's more an iOS 10 feature that you can see in other apps such as OmniFocus. The fact that it's reasonably common doesn't make it any better, though.
On all versions we'd like to see the list of events somehow mark out what days are empty as well as those that are full. That's the one thing where we find Fantastical's design unhelpful: rather than leaping out at us as clearly as we'd want, we have to remember to look closely to get the information we want.
Fantastical 2.8.3 requires iOS 10.0 or higher or macOS 10.11.5 or higher. It costs $4.99 on the iPhone and $9.99 on the iPad.
The Mac version of Fantastical 2.3.3 costs $49.99 on the Mac App Store.
A choice that is no choice
We said that there's no one winner and then we went on about Fantastical as if there were. It's just that we think it has the edge because of its superb design, and in particular, how much you can do with that menubar app on the Mac. We've worn out that keyboard shortcut since we first tried it.
It is still the case that even if you are a power user of calendars then you should stick with Apple Calendar until you find it lacking. Even with all the words we've written about calendars, the choice is still an intensely personal one, and this series has been written with our particular needs and ecosystem choices in mind.
When you hit the wall with Apple's Calendar, you should look at all of these apps, but get the trial versions of BusyCal and Fantastical for Mac.
These are the two heavyweight calendar apps for Apple users. Get the free trials for their Mac versions first, then splash out five or six bucks on their iOS versions.
We're being pretty fast and loose with your cash here, but it's worth it. We thought we were heavy users of our Apple Calendar, yet over the last eight or nine weeks of studying these, we've found our scheduling precision has gone up.
Somehow, because alternatives are so fast to add new appointments and to look up existing ones, we found we were adding more. We slotted in more meetings which might be a good or a bad thing, but we also made more time for healthy pursuits as a result.
Once we had taken this time to see what alternative calendars could do, we found they did a lot and it ultimately changed how we work.
The best calendar apps keep your day flowing smoothly. Ideally, you should be able to review it at the top of the week for an overview and every morning to get a grasp on your day, relying on notifications for the rest of the time. The right calendar app helps you stay on top of appointments, holidays, and celebrations, not to mention deadlines.
The calendar app that's right for you depends on your needs and lifestyle. Do you rely on notifications and reminders or do you find them a nuisance? Do you need to manage a calendar collectively with a household or other coworkers? Do you prefer a streamlined and subtle interface or an app that's jammed full of features, such as in-app notes and to-dos, design be damned?
We considered and tested several dozen calendar apps to find the 10 best that meet a variety of needs.
What Makes a Great Calendar App?
Calendar apps have two core functions: They show your upcoming schedule and remind you of important events. The best calendars, however, aren't just functional. The give you clarity about how you spend your time, and a few rare finds are even a joy to use.
In looking for the best calendar apps, we considered apps that have five characteristics.
Easy to use. Calendar apps are easy to use when they require minimal clicking and menu exploration. They should be intuitive to learn to use and not require a lot of tending.
Designed with intention. Aesthetics aside, a good app should be designed with intention. An app with a multitude of colors and icons may look busy to one person's eye but come across as highly functional to another. If you can tell different kinds of events apart easily and get a bird's eye view of your schedule, that's what matters. For those who appreciate minimalism, however, there's certainly an allure to an uncluttered user interface because it makes checking your calendar a pleasant and stress-free experience.
Packed with features and customizable. If you're a serious scheduler, power features, such as customizable views and integrations with task management apps, will help you get the most out of your calendar. For those apps that aren't heavy on features, we looked for customization options that make the app adjust to your style.
Simple to share. Sharing features, such as the ability to give other people access to your schedule, can be a huge help. Some calendar apps are more collaborative than others, and some are more suited for home use than office. In the descriptions of the best calendar apps below, we call attention to sharing options when they are front and center in an app.
Available for multiple devices. When considering apps for this list, we gave preferences to apps that are accessible on more than one platform, as you should be able to see your calendar no matter where you are and what device you have on hand.
There's no need reason to limit yourself to one calendar app. It's quite common, for example, to use Google Calendar, Outlook calendar, or Apple Calendar (formerly referred to as iCal) as the holding tank for your calendar entries, and then port them into a different calendar app that better meets your needs in terms of form and function.
With these criteria in mind, here are the 10 best calendar apps, listed alphabetically.
10 Best Calendar Apps
- Any.do (Android, iOS, Web)
Best calendar app for staying organized - Apple Calendar (iOS, macOS, Web)
Best calendar app for storing data on Apple devices - Cozi (Android, iOS, Web, Windows)
Best calendar app for managing large families - Fantastical 2 (iOS, macOS)
Best non-native calendar app for Mac - Google Calendar (Android, iOS, Web)
Best free calendar app for all-purpose use - Microsoft Outlook Calendar (Android, iOS, macOS, Windows)
Best business calendar app - My Study Life (Android, iOS, Web)
Best calendar app for students and educators - Thunderbird Lightning Calendar (Linux, macOS, Windows)
Best personal calendar app for combining with email and tasks - TimePage by Moleskine (iOS)
Best paid calendar app for iOS - TimeTree (Android, iOS, Web)
Best free collaborative calendar app
Any.do (Android, iOS, Web)
Best calendar app for staying organized
The excellent to-do app Any.do formerly had a separate calendar app called Cal, which it has more recently rolled into the namesake app to create one unified place for your tasks, goals, reminders, and schedule. A rich variety of reminders help you stay on top of your agenda, to-do, and goals.
The calendar shines on mobile devices, where it makes use of the small screen with grace and poise. You can connect Any.do to your stock calendar app to import existing events. In the month view, all events appear as colored dots, with the color mapping up to whatever colors you use to manage the original calendar (for example, you might keep a birthday calendar in yellow and personal appointments in blue). At the bottom of the screen, you see a snapshot for the selected day, and you can open any event to see more information about it.
Any.do's calendar is appealing to people who need tools to help them stay organized, such as location-based reminders, a notification that reminds you to preview what's on your agenda at the beginning of each day, and the ability to add in travel time to any notification before an event. It's the app to choose if you need a lot of help staying organized with your day.
Any.do Pricing: Free; paid plans from $32.88/year
Apple Calendar (iOS, macOS, Web)
Best calendar app for storing data on Apple devices
Because it's built into macOS and iOS, Apple Calendar is the default place to store calendar entries on Apple devices. Without any real effort on your part, aside for enabling iCloud, you can keep your calendar up to date across all your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. In a pinch, you can also view and update your calendar entries from a web app on icloud.com.
Apple Calendar allows you to pull in data from other calendars, too, such as Google Calendar, Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo, and any calendar that uses CalDAV. Setting it up is about as easy as connecting an email client app to another email account.
Apple Calendar's clean and simple lets you focus on your events rather than the app itself. It's intuitive to use if you're familiar with other Apple apps. Click or tap the plus sign (+) to create a new event, which can include a title, location, reminder, note, and invitees. You can add a travel time estimate that will be factored into event alerts. As you might expect, this no-frills calendar integrates with Apple devices, so that you see notifications from it in the iOS and macOS notification bars.
Apple Calendar Pricing: Included with macOS and iOS devices, or free via iCloud
Cozi (Android, iOS, Web, Windows)
Best calendar app for managing large families
Family schedules are hectic. Band rehearsal some mornings, soccer games after school, not to mention constantly conflicting appointments… and when is the dog walker going on vacation again? Cozi is designed with busy families in mind, consolidating multiple calendars, to-do lists, and shopping lists in one app. Think of it like the old-school bulletin board and wall calendar hanging in the kitchen, only smarter and pocket-sized.
With Cozi, you create one centralized calendar and give appropriate people access to it, such as family members, nannies and au pairs, pet sitters, and so forth. Members have a color assigned to them so that when you create an event and indicate who needs to know, their colors appear on the calendar entry. The app is accessible on a variety of mobile apps, and via the web.
The calendar is merely one feature in Cozi, which also has shopping lists, to-do lists, a journal, and messaging features. It's a complete family organizer.
Cozi Pricing: Free; $29.99/year for Cozi Gold, which adds calendar search, multiple reminders, a birthday tracker, and removes advertisements.
Fantastical 2 (iOS, macOS)
Best non-native calendar app for Mac
Is it cheesy to call Fantastical 2 fantastic? Probably, but at least in this case, it's not hyperbole. Fantastical 2 has just about everything one could want in a calendar app for iOS and macOS, in addition to being available on Apple Watch. While it's key to have the mobile app, Fantastical 2 really shines on desktop.
The app is colorful without being gaudy or overwhelming, and it's easy to use without sacrificing control over your event details. On a Mac, the menu bar app lets you quickly add an event or see what's on your agenda in the coming days. Adding details to your events, such as notes, URLs, invitees, and locations, feels quick and smooth on the desktop app. Fantastical 2 also integrates with the rest of your system to give you a Today view widget, Handoff support, and a share extension that lets you create events from other apps, such as from addresses in Maps and URLs in Safari.
Fantastical 2 is most renowned, though, for its natural-language event creation. Start typing 'Lunch with Casey at noon at Park Place' and watch as the app parses your words into calendar fields and pulls in relevant information, such as addresses and team members' availability. The natural language parsing means you can interact with the calendar app as infrequently as you want and still create events without having to think like a computer. While $50 is a hefty price to pay for a calendar app, it's worth it if you live in your calendar and want something other than the Apple default. While the app isn't free, you can download the app free from the developer's website to try it for 21 days.
Fantastical 2 Pricing: $49.99 for macOS, $9.99 for iPad, $4.99 for iPhone
Google Calendar (Android, iOS, Web)
Best free calendar app for all-purpose use
Google Calendar might be the most popular calendar app around (according to one survey, anyway). Much of its popularity comes from the fact that you can create multiple calendars in one place using a Google account, and then port those calendar entries to nearly any other online calendar you might use, as Google works with nearly everything else on the market. You can connect your Google Calendar to not only other calendar apps, but also business apps and services that have calendars as part of their features, such as Trello and Asana.
Color coding for individual calendars makes it easy to see which area of your life an event applies to at-a-glance, or to show or hide calendars so that you can focus on specific types of events. Plus, as you would expect from the company that started as a search tool, Google Calendar offers excellent search capabilities. It also integrates with G Suite apps, letting you create a calendar event from Gmail, for example. When used across an entire organization, Google Calendar gives you the ability to check your co-workers' schedules alongside your own. Inviting others to your calendar is a cinch too, whether you're sharing an entire calendar or use the invite option to add people to an event.
Although there's no desktop app, Google Calendar's web app and mobile apps for Android and iOS are enough to keep schedules straight. If you want a more enticing user interface or more powerful features, you can always connect Google Calendar to virtually any other app on this list.
Google Calendar Pricing: Free with a Google account
Microsoft Outlook Calendar (Android, iOS, macOS, Windows)
Best business calendar app
The most stalwart of calendar apps, Microsoft Outlook is more of a personal information manager than a place to see your next appointment. The desktop app unifies your calendar, email, notes, tasks, and contacts into one view. Outlook's mobile apps aren't quite so ambitious, but they do at least combine your calendar and email.
Outlook, which is part of Microsoft Office, lets you share calendars with teammates, and that's its real strength. With Exchange Server accounts and the appropriate permissions, team members can view and manage each others' schedules and subscribe to one others' calendars. Outlook offers options for how you can view multiple calendars at once: side-by-side or with calendars combined in an overlay view.
If you don't use Outlook within an organization, you might still appreciate the calendar's many features. You can drag and drop an email onto the calendar icon in the navigation menu to turn it into an appointment (available in the Windows app only), or quickly send a meeting request from either email or the calendar. Outlook supports multiple time zone views, too. There's a lot to dig into.
You can get a free online version of Outlook, called Outlook.com, which is more streamlined and has fewer features. Outlook.com has family sharing so you can add other household members to your account to make your calendar accessible to others.
The Mac version of Outlook isn't as robust as the Windows version, but if you like having everything in one place, this is an all-in-one productivity tool to consider.
Microsoft Outlook Pricing: Office 365 subscriptions, which include the Microsoft Outlook desktop app, start at $5.99/month or $59.99/year. Apps free for Android and iOS.
My Study Life (Android, iOS, Web)
Best calendar app for students and educators
My Study Life is a free calendar app designed to meet the unique needs of students and educators. In the educational world, schedules are drastically different from those in the private sector. Students typically follow a semester or term system rather than a quarterly one. They meet for classes on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, or maybe on Tuesday and Thursdays only, or perhaps their courses alternate on an A/B day setup. If a national holiday falls on a Monday, students sometimes find themselves going to Monday's courses on Tuesday. In short, educational calendars are full of exceptions and unusual circumstances, and My Study Life was created to accommodate them.
The app is available on the web or as a mobile app for Android and iOS. It's not a bad idea to use the web app when first getting started, at least until you've logged all your classes and their timings. Once you get the hang of the app, it does double duty by letting you log assignments and other tasks you need to do, whether it's homework or preparing a lesson plan as an educator. You can keep track of your progress on assignments, too, noting how close they are to completion as a percentage. Yet another section of the app lets you keep track of scheduled exams.
My Study Life is free to use, and it's a great choice for students who are tired of calendars that don't deliver what they need.
My Study Life Pricing: Free
Thunderbird Calendar (Linux, macOS, Windows)
Best personal calendar app for combining with email and tasks
Not only is Thunderbird one of the best email apps you can find, it also is a superb calendar. In previous versions of this app, you had to install the Thunderbird Lightning Calendar add-on to have an integrated calendar, but now it's included with the app from the get go.
Thunderbird gives you a tab for your email, calendar, and tasks. The setup lets you easily hop between communicating, scheduling, and managing what you need to get done. On the calendar tab, you can see a summary of everything on your schedule for today, even if you've paged forward through the months to plan events in the future.
The calendar offers four different views: day, week, multi-week, and month. It also has a convenient search function with time filters and built-in categories for events, such as 'birthday' and 'calls.' Although there's nothing particularly striking about Thunderbird's calendar, having the whole kit and kaboodle—personal email client, calendar, and task-management app—in one app makes it easy to plan your time and keep your life organized.
Thunderbird Pricing: Free
Timepage by Moleskine (iOS)
Best paid calendar app for iOS
Timepage is one of the most beautiful calendar apps for iPhone and iPad. This paid app comes from the same company that sells Moleskine notebooks, the ones you see on display at bookstores around the world. The app shares the same minimalist design ethos as the paper books. You can choose a color scheme for your calendar, and no matter which option you pick, it still looks sleek and clean. Swiping left and right takes you to a month view and the app settings, while going up and down scrolls you through a day by day view of your agenda. Timepage has page-turning and scrolling sound effects for your vertical and horizontal swipes, too.
A few special features, such as alerts before it rains and a daily briefing, add value and make paying for Timepage worthwhile. The app also comes with the ability to create Siri Shortcuts and widgets. Compatibility with Apple Watch isn't available as of this writing but is purportedly in development.
You can try Moleskine and all its features for seven days, but after that, you'll need a paid subscription to get anything more than a read-only calendar. Once you do have a subscription, you can sign into the app on both iPhone and iPad. The iPad version of Timepage has a few unique features. For example, you can use split screen mode to view your calendar while also looking at another app, such as email. Or you can use a special double view option that lets you see two different views of Timepage side-by-side, in case you need to look closely at today's details alongside a timeline overview of event on the horizon.
If you're an iOS devotee looking for a calendar app with a minimalist design, and you don't mind paying a few dollars per year, Timepage by Moleskine is the calendar app to choose.
Timepage by Moleskine Pricing: $1.99/month or $11.99/year
TimeTree (Android, iOS, Web)
Best free collaborative calendar app
TimeTree is a collaborative calendar app for Android, iOS, and the web that guides you to creating useful calendars by trying to understand your intention for its use first. For example, when you create a new calendar in TimeTree, the app asks you whether it's for personal, family, friends, work, relationship, or group use.
Each option has a descriptor so you can better understand the purpose. For example, the relationship calendar is best when you need to know someone else's schedule, as it's a calendar made for two people to share. The friends calendar, however, comes with features for commenting and discussing plans, such as finding a suitable date for multiple people to meet. You don't have to have only one calendar, however. You create multiple calendars with this app, and as you do, it can display your events in an overlay, giving you a full picture of what's on your schedule. Color coding for each calendar helps you know what's what.
TimeTree is one of the better choices of free apps for managing multiple calendars, including collaborative ones, when you don't want to use one of the big three companies in calendar data storage (namely, Apple, Google, and Microsoft). It also lets you import other calendars, such as those with a list of different national holidays and so forth.
TimeTree Pricing: Free
Connect Your Calendar to Other Apps You Use
As much as you might love your calendar app, no one wants to spend too much time entering details into events and copying them to other places where you need them, like into a to-do app, or creating reminders for every appointment. A better strategy is to get these types of actions to happen automatically, and you can create automations for your calendar using Zapier.
With a Zapier account, you can connect your calendar to other apps and services you use, whether it's email, a to-do app, or even text messages on your phone. Then, you create rules to automate what you want. For example, you can receive a text message however many minutes you like before any Google Calendar event starts.
Another example: When you add a new event in Google Calendar, automatically get a reminder in Slack. Or when you create a new task in Todoist, then also create a corresponding new event on Google Calendar.
This article originally published in May 2017 by Melanie Pinola and was updated in December 2018.
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Title photo remixed from originals by Zlatko Najdenovski via Noun Project.