Not sure where to start? Apple's Calendar, which is already installed on your Mac, is clean, functional, and syncs with your iPhone and iPad without any effort. Natural language processing means you can type something like "go for a walk at noon" and expect your computer to figure out what you mean. You can also click-and-drag on the calendar itself to create an appointment.
There are four main views: day, week, month, and year. You can create as many local calendars as you want, and all of them will sync using iCloud. This is handy if you've got a work account and personal calendars to keep balanced. Apple's calendar used to offer a to-do list, but tasks now live in Reminders, a separate app. If you want to see tasks alongside your appointments, this app won't cut it.
But there are plenty of other integrations. Addresses, for example, show up in Apple Maps, and you can optionally get travel time notifications. Apple's Calendar is simple, sometimes to a fault, but if you only use Apple products, you should try it before installing anything else because it covers all the calendar basics.
Fantastical macOS, iPhone, iPad. Putting the word "Fantastic" in the name of your product is risky. Fantastical pulls it off. Put simply, this is the best-designed calendar app for macOS. Start with the left panel: most apps put a mostly useless list of calendars here.
Not Fantastical. Here, that space is used for an agenda view or your reminders. It's a small thing, but it reflects how carefully the developers thought about every design element to make the calendar intuitive to use. Another little thing: if an identical event shows up in two calendars, it will only show up once, with a pin-stripe pattern letting you know it's in two different calendars.
Use Fantastical for a while and you'll notice all kinds of little things like this. Adding appointments is quick: just hit the plus button and start typing. There's natural language processing with animated real-time feedback, making it very clear how the natural language processing works. Viewing appointments is also great: there are daily, weekly, monthly, and annual views, all well thought out.
There's also a great menu bar icon, which basically gives you access to the right-panel in the main interface at any time. Native notifications and a really great Today widget round out the integrations. The only downside I can think of is the price, which is high, but Fantastical just might be worth it for you if you spend a lot of time in your calendar. BusyCal macOS, iPhone.
BusyCal, at first glance, looks almost identical to Apple's Calendar. It isn't. Look close and you'll see a few things. A weather forecast and moon phases show up in the weekly and monthly views, for example.
And there's more. The right panel can show your to-do list—tasks are pulled in from Reminders. If you don't use Reminders, this panel can show details from the currently selected event. Or, if you want both Reminders and details, you can have one atop the other. Your Reminders can also optionally show up in the calendar itself, on the dates that they're due. Which is just to say that everything about this program is very flexible.
Dig through the preferences and you'll find ways to change the color scheme, what shows up in the info panel, and even customize the fonts. You can add a second timezone to the side panel, which is great if you happen to travel a lot or work with teammates in another area. There's an availability panel, which is useful if you want to quickly find the next available open spot in your schedule. There's also a great menu bar icon for quickly browsing appointments. Dig in, and I'm sure you'll find even more things to tweak.
And there are five main views for seeing your appointments: daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and list. It's a lot of flexibility. The only downside, as with Fantastical, is the price point, but again this just might be worth it for you if you're looking for the most customizable calendar for Mac. Mac applications tend to focus on doing one thing well, which is why Apple computers come with separate email, contact, to-do, notes, and calendar applications.
Microsoft's Outlook does not adhere to this philosophy—it's all those things, and more, all at once. If that's what you're looking for, then Outlook might be just right for you. There are five main views to see your appointments: daily, three day, work week, week, and month. The work week view, which isn't offered by any other tool outlined here, is a good example of how work-focused Outlook is.
There are some other nice features: a three-day forecast in the toolbar, for example. Collaboration is a key focus, and the integration with email and contacts helps with that. You can also create templates for appointments, which is useful if you regularly invite people to similar things.
Exchange accounts are supported, obviously—Microsoft built the Exchange protocol around Outlook. But the most recent versions of Outlook for macOS also support Google Calendar, which was missing as recently as Office This is a very welcome addition. That means that you can still do things like access the different views using the new UI and can add invitees to calendar events. It does serve as a way to try the Premium features for 14 days so you can see if Fantastical Premium is for you.
With this new pricing model, Fantastical is not going to be for everybody. If you need scheduling help, the ability to propose meeting times alone is probably worth it for you. Being able to propose multiple meeting time options can eliminate a lot of the typical email ping-pong before landing on a time that works.
The price is actually very competitive when compared to services like WhenWorks or Calendly. These are not a direct comparison because both of these services can do more than Fantastical can. One consideration a review of this type requires is how to approach Outlook. Do you compare the calendar function only? If an all-in-one approach is your preference, then Outlook is certainly a potential good fit for you. But, when considering calendar and scheduling features on their own, Fantastical is a much better overall experience than what the calendar portion of Outlook has to offer.
Another issue to weigh is the cost. Is Outlook good enough to overcome the larger price tag? Not in our opinion. If fitting in with Exchange is a must-have or if you already subscribe to Office , then Outlook merits serious consideration. For anyone else, Fantastical or BusyCal are better options. For the most casual user, it can certainly fit the bill. Where does it lack compared to Fantastical? Well, it does not have a menu bar option.
As mentioned under ease of use, this is a must have for yours truly. The oddest part of Calendar is its lack of integration with other iCloud items. Want to interact with your Reminders in your calendar app? Then Calendar is not for you. Same for the Calendar Today widget. Because Apple separates Reminders into its own app, you cannot see these tasks even if they are time-based in the view of your day.
Nothing comes close to Fantastical in terms of overall design or functionality. BusyCal comes closest in comparisons feature-wise, but it lacks the grace of a more well-designed application. How intuitive is the app? How easy is it to add a new event and invite people to it? How does the app handle tasks or todos when necessary? These are some of the questions we considered when looking at the available options for calendar apps on the Mac.
Design : Many people resist looking at their calendar because they resent the fact that their time is already spoken for. But the truth is when you learn to manage it well, you have more time for the things that are important to you. Scheduling Features : Calendar apps have remained largely the same for a long time.
Thanks to the colorful sidebar, it is very easy to take care of hundreds of to-dos or reminders you may have. Even if you are using the menu-bar version of the app, it provides proper insight to your upcoming days.
There are also a number of features to love in Fantastical. For instance, it integrates quite well with macOS system, especially when it comes to widgets. If you are a fan of the notification panel, you can bring in one widget too. Considering the Smart features, Fantastical lets you configure your events based on geo-fence as well. Another feature we loved in Fantastical is Scheduling, if you have support for a mail server. That is, you can schedule a particular event by also considering the time-slots of your colleagues, which is great.
Because the content is synced perfectly, you can keep everything under control. In the long run, Fantastical will be offering a lot of features, but the question is different: do you need them all? Or, does it have features that you need? This is where all the differences are made. In the same way, if you are not a fan of the system widgets, you lose one point there too.
One of the other features that we liked about Fantastical 3 is the option to collaborate with other individuals who are not even using the app. It lets you propose multiple dates for an event. So pick a date and pick another, send it across to you contact, and agree on a time. Fantastical will send an email to the people you have invited, gathering their inputs for a preferred event slot.
Calendars can be boring if they are just calendars. With Fantastical 3, you get the option to add Interesting Calendars to your main calendar. Interesting Calendars are calendar integrations that you can have with Fantastical. Have a favorite football team? Just look them up in Interesting Calendars and you will have their schedule integrated into your main calendar.
Well, Fantastical 3 — the newest version of this innovative calendar app — is quite cool, but there are a couple of places around product development where it could have a better say. Fantastic 3 is a major overhaul over Fantastical 2, its predecessor, which means that users might have some trouble getting used to the new features, and might even miss some of the older features that are not present in Fantastical 3.
We wished that the transition to the newest version was smooth, and that users did not have to complain about missing out on a few Fantastical 2 features such as push updates, fullscreen view, and time to leave notification, among other things.
Fantastical for macOS moved to a subscription-based model with the release of Fantastical 3. If you just want to check things out, then you can start with a day free trial. Calendar II. This is a great consideration if you need a calendar app with better views. Although not comparable to our top picks, Calendar II packs some features inside. For instance, it feels really easy to find calendar entries from Calendar II, thanks to support for Spotlight Search.
You can also make use of the Touch Bar support if you have an applicable device. Despite all these features — along with standard syncing options, Calendar II lacks some Pro features everyone wants. Informant is yet another popular calendar app you can find for macOS. It does not have the most modern UI so to speak, but there is a lot to explore. Compared to many of our primary considerations, Informant has a clean way of arranging elements.
You can not only choose between Viewing Modes but also customize how individual events appear. However, we believe Informant compromises on the Performance aspect. We, however, loved the menu-bar app that Informant comes with. You can easily add events your calendar from the menu bar itself. It should be noted that Informant offers support for all the standard calendar actions, though. Informant is available for macOS and iOS. It also has a dark mode.
SavvyCal is a calendar scheduling app that makes it easy to schedule calls and meetings for remote workers. When you want to schedule a meeting, all you have to do is generate and send out personalized links to meeting attendees. The app syncs with Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar so that your availability for meetings is always up to date.
Integrations iCloud Calendar is also in development. Google Calendar. This is the point: all your activities will be synced all the time.
And, in the course of time, Google Calendar has been adding a lot of features to the lot. Of course, Google Calendar does not have a dedicated macOS app right now. You will have to keep a window open in your favorite browser. You would not have trouble in getting used to it.
Google Calendar is free to use and you can access it from almost any device. Outlook Calendar. A lot of us are still hung to Outlook. If you like the Microsoft ecosystem, the Outlook Calendar should get things going for you. Outlook Calendar for web lets you perform all the basic calendar tasks. The interface is crisp and well laid out with balanced colors. For a small, free app, Itsycal is a another menubar calendar for macOS.
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