5 Calendar Apps For Mac 2017

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. Outlook for mac request read receipt. 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. Icloud control panel. 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.

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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. Worst in class Google Calendar for iOS.

The Google Calendar service, 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.