It’s 2024, and we now have way more calendar apps than ever before. Their marketing campaigns make it sound like they’re all essential to your productivity. But which ones will actually help you get more done each day, and what are they better at than your existing calendar setup?
For most folks, default system calendars such as Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, and Apple Calendar will get the job done. But a new set of calendar apps on the market promises to help you with things ranging from scheduling to coordinating and task management. Let’s guide you through this vast universe of tools and see what your uber-organized schedule can look like.
More calendar apps than you can count
We are going to look at the vast landscape of calendar tools by organizing them into four distinct categories:
- Reminder-focused calendars: For folks who frequently have a lot of meetings on their schedule, as well as for those who juggle multiple calendars. Examples include TimeOS and Beams.
- Scheduling tools: For users who organize a lot of meetings or coordinate with multiple people across the world. Examples include Calendly, Cal.com, and SavvyCal.
- Task management calendars: For people who work from home or work hybrid jobs. The apps in this category are designed for managing both your personal and work life. Examples include Notion Calendar, Amie, Rise, Routine, Sunsama, Vimcal, and Daybridge.
- AI-powered features and extras: For people who want quicker access to info about their upcoming calendar events, or need help structuring their day with time to wind down. Examples include Reclaim, Clara, and Trevor.
While your team at work might use internal tools and calendars for meetings, some of these third-party apps can help you personally if you can integrate them with work tools.
Native calendar apps such as Outlook Calendar and Google Calendar have also caught up with features like availability sharing, location sharing, and the ability to book paid appointments. However, these apps have so many features that it might be hard to find them – and that’s when dedicated third-party tools make sense.
It’s important to remember that these third-party apps are integrated with your Google, Outlook, or Apple Calendar. So even if you use multiple apps for different purposes, you can still see your schedule from your default calendar app of choice.
Tip: here is how to get your Google Calendar to show lunar/moon phases.
PSA – the free versions of calendar apps are good enough
Most folks will find all the scheduling functionality they need in the free tiers of these new calendar apps, meaning you don’t need to pony up for a subscription right away.
So if you end up deciding to pay for a calendar tool, look for extra features that truly justify the cost, such as transcribing your meetings and summarizing notes from them.
Supercharged reminders
Most calendar apps notify you about upcoming meetings by default – but it’s easy enough to miss these alerts if you are not careful. A lot of us still forget a particular meeting either because our phone is not around or we have muted notifications altogether.
One of the most handy tools to use in that situation is a browser extension called TimeOS. It displays info about your next meeting when you open a new tab on your browser, so it’s like a constant reminder for your brain.
TimeOS also has an auto-join feature that you can enable to ensure that the video conference link opens up without human interference.
If you are a Mac user, you can also use a tool called Beams, which sits in your menu bar to alert you about upcoming meetings. You can also see your schedule for the current day and the next with just a click.
If reminders are the only way you show up for appointments on time, the task manager app Any.do is worth a look. It offers WhatsApp and location-based reminders for $5 a month.
Tip: here are the ways to fix the Calendar app not showing in Windows.
Scheduling and availability
Virtually every calendar app out there lets you add an event, but scheduling tools provide you options to share timeslots with others. They can save you time emailing back and forth with your contacts to negotiate a suitable slot.
If you need to communicate possible times for a meeting, Calendly is one of the most popular tools for doing that easily, and you don’t need to spend a dime on it.
With the free tier, you can specify your daily work hours and set one event type, such as a 15-, 30-, or 60-minute meeting slot. You can share a link with anyone and they can book a time slot without asking you. They will see free times in your schedule and book a slot without any back and forth. There is an option to customize work hours on a particular day as well.
For more event types – such as specifying custom timing for meetings, connecting multiple calendars, and configuring notifications, you’ll have to pick a paid plan starting from $10 a month.
Vimcal, which is available on iOS for free, lets you stack up timezones on the sidebar, which is very useful in case you have colleagues or collaborators across the timezone. This saves you the mental math of looking at a world clock and trying to figure out the best time for you and your contact elsewhere on the planet.
The newly launched Notion Calendar, which is the revamped version of Cron Calednar, also allows you to look at multiple timezones on one screen.
Plus, it handles conflicts between your personal and work calendars, and auto-blocks the slots that you have marked busy.
Additionally, Vimcal, Notion Calendar, and TimeOS let you share your availability by dragging time slots across dates. This is like selecting multiple column cells on a spreadsheet. You can see how that works in a quick video.
This is helpful when your work hours are not fixed, and you want to share specific timeslots with people for a particular meeting. It’s the equivalent of saying, “I’m free for a call on Thursday between 3-6 PM, and on Friday from 10-11 AM.”
Voting on the best times to meet
There are situations where you and your collaborators have agreed on a three-hour block each week for a recurring 30-minute meeting but want to keep the exact timing flexible. Voting is the best way to go about it.
Doodle is a neat tool for people to vote on proposed timings for a meeting so you can avoid going back and forth between multiple people to get them to agree on a suitable time slot. It also allows you to create a Calendly-like link for one-on-one meetings with the free tier, and you can create unlimited group polls.
Separately, TimeOS also allows users to create group polls for voting on a timeslot for a meeting.
For a more personal touch, Daybrige, which aims to be a social calendar, easily lets you create and share an event link with your friends for them to RSVP.
Task management
Your schedule likely isn’t just about meetings. You probably need a reminder for a specific time to buy groceries, sort out your meal prep, or do your laundry. Thankfully, there are apps for that.
A lot of hybrid apps allow you to look at your meeting schedule and also jot down your daily tasks, and even longer-term plans.
These task management-focused apps also help you with blocking a fixed amount of time for each task, so you don’t get overwhelmed when you look at your to-do list and meetings.
Routine is one such app – available on the web, iOS, and macOS, with plans to launch on Android – which combines all of the above.
Unlike other apps that are built around events that have specific time slots, Routine treats tasks like a primary citizen. The interface lets you jot down tasks easily first, before having you slot them into a particular date and time.
It works great for recurring tasks too. Plus, it has a simple ‘Agenda’ view that shows you today’s meetings and tasks.
But Routine has a lot of competition in this category. There’s the aforementioned Any.do, which combines to-dos and your calendar. There’s also Amie, which recently did away with its waitlist, and offers better scheduling tools including a personalized link for your contacts to book time with you.
Sunsama, which only offers paid plans, helps you with conscious planning by asking you to define how much time you want to spend on a task. The app also shows you how much time you spent on doing different tasks on a day when you mark them done, and even nudges you to write a daily wrap-up/shut-down brief.
Daybridge offers multiple views such as Focus, Plan, and Relax, to help you look at your schedule through personal and work lenses. Additionally, the tool easily helps you categorize tasks – by assigning them tags like Entertainment, Social, Fitness, and Personal Care when you are writing them down. The idea is to let you find the best times for different kinds of tasks by providing you with views and toggles without involving AI.
Tip: if you are looking to self-host your own calendar app, check out Baikal.
Can AI run your schedule?
Modern calendar apps apply AI chops primarily to optimize time for you: suggesting time slots, or automatically creating a schedule in a way that allows you to get enough downtime each day.
For instance, Vimcal’s AI bot will help you find the right time automatically. You can post the other person’s Calendly link (or any other availability), and Vimcal will automatically highlight mutual slots when both parties are available for a meeting. Plus, you can also paste sentences from emails like “I am free between 3-5 PM ET tomorrow” to let AI find a slot.
Keep in mind that AI can’t agree on a time slot on your behalf. It can find the best timing for you and save you the hassle of manually looking at the slot by parsing text or links.
Vimcal also has a neat feature that briefs you about the company your meeting attendee is from, based on their email domain.
What’s more, many apps let you define your preferences for downtime or your fitness routine, and their AI will move your schedule around to accommodate your personal activities.
Reclaim AI has a feature called Habits, which are adapting recurring tasks or habits that you want to build into your daily routine. Just like New Year’s resolutions, people often tend to forget to do habit-building tasks after a while. So Reclaim puts those habits into your calendar, and even smartly moves your schedule around them so you don’t miss it.
You can define three habits on the free tier; there are several templates such as writing, customer research, and afternoon catch up to get you started quickly. These templates are based on the role you select during onboarding.
While Trevor AI doesn’t handle automatic scheduling for you, it suggests the best possible slots for your tasks, and even estimates the duration for each one as you type them in.
Remember TimeOS, which we mentioned earlier? It lets you take notes during a meeting and pull them up later for reference. So that means you can prepare for a meeting directly from the calendar view by asking the AI assistant to give you summarized information about previous meetings – and you won’t have to glean those details through email threads and other sources manually.
Tip: If you want to streamline your daily workflow, try these handy automations across your email and productivity apps.
Should you pay for calendar apps?
There is no direct answer to what is a “best calendar app,” but there is a way to figure out if you should pay for one. A lot of calendar apps might have features that are similar to each other, but you might like one app’s interface, ease of use and toggles a lot more than the other.
The good way to go about thinking about a paid tier is that after you try out a calendar tool, ask yourself if that saved you time or helped you organize your life better.
Apps like Akiflow and Sunsama charge a premium because they offer a wide range of features ranging from scheduling to task management to habit building. So if you want to bring different parts of your life under one umbrella rather than using multiple apps, that’s a great way to go about it – and it may be worth paying for.
When it comes to paid features, some things are easier to evaluate. For example, if you have recurring tasks or multiple calendars in your workflow, it makes sense for you to pay for an app that supports them.
What’s harder to evaluate at the moment is AI-powered features and smart scheduling. That’s because you have to try these out for a while to understand if the AI algorithm works for you and suits the way you have your schedule laid out.
A few tools, such as TimeOS, Amie, Notion Calendar and Hey Calendar, offer more things outside of the calendar universe such as meeting recording, transcription, and better integration with your email or database system. These tools offer premium tiers that are geared towards collaborating with colleagues across teams – so while they’re powerful, you’ll likely want to consider paying for them only if you’re using them in tandem with others.
Wrapping up
As someone who’s constantly trying out productivity apps, I frequently migrate between products. Vimcal is currently my favorite tool for sharing my availability because it makes light work of finding times that work for meetings with people across time zones.
Meanwhile, Routine has been my weapon of choice for merging to-dos and my calendar. Its daily agenda view helps me easily slot in tasks such as sending important emails or researching specific topics.
However, given that Amie is now publicly available without a place on its waitlist and has built-in email integration, you can drag emails on to schedule them as tasks in your calendar, I plan to give that a go too.
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