If you are still holding on to your old school PDAs, perhaps it is time to make the leap towards the new age tablet computer–tablets are morphing into something much more functional and much easier to carry around. The iPad seems to be the top choice especially since it doesn’t come with Windows or Mac Operating System.
These days everyone is busy and people seem to be always on the go. Whether it’s work, school, church, clubs, or social life, we lead very busy lives and we need fast and efficient ways to organize our time and share events with others.
Keeping a calendar can change your life. A calendar will keep you from missing meetings and appointments, as well as make your life a lot less hectic. Plus, having all of your appointments on your calendar frees up your brain to work on more important tasks.It doesn’t matter what your business does—time is your most valuable resource. You need to make sure you’re spending that time wisely, and the calendar is your budget. That’s why it’s so important you find the best calendar app for the job. We considered and tested several dozen calendar apps, to uncover the best options. Here’s what we found. Click on any app to learn more about why we chose it, or keep reading for more context on what makes a great calendar app. The iOS App Store is home to a very large collection of apps. Owing to the popularity of the platform, developers from around the globe make their apps available on the App Store in an effort to get a piece of the pie. It’s often difficult to find a good app for yourself, especially for something as essential as a calendar or planner app for iOS. In this article, we’re bringing you a roundup of 7 of the best calendar apps for iPhone & iPad, so you can pick the one that best suits your needs and requirements.
We’ve highlighted the apps’ pricing and their Pros & Cons upfront, so it’ll be easier for you to find the best calendar app for iOS. Let’s dive right in.
Google Calendar (Android, iOS, Web)
Much of Google Calendar‘s popularity comes from the fact that you can create multiple calendars in one place using a Google account, and then port those entries to almost any other online calendar. Google Calendar also works with nearly everything else on the market. You can connect your Google Calendar not only to other calendar apps, but also to 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. You can also show or hide calendars, so you can focus on specific types of events. As you would expect from the company that started as a search tool, Google Calendar offers excellent search capabilities. It also integrates with Google Workplace (formerly 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 coworkers’ schedules alongside your own. Inviting others to your calendar is a cinch too. You can choose between sharing an entire calendar or just using 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 robust features, you can always connect Google Calendar to virtually any other app on this list.
Want more out of your calendar? Connect Google Calendar to your favorite apps through Zapier. You can create automated workflows that send calendar appointments to other apps, like Trello or Todoist. You can even create calendar appointments from spreadsheets.
Google Calendar Pricing: Free with a Google account; Business Starter for Google Workspace, which includes all Google Apps, starts at $6/user per month.
You can do even more with Google Calendar. Here’s how to turn it into the ultimate productivity hub with Zapier.
Apple Calendar (iOS, macOS, Web)
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, you can keep your calendar up to date across your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, thanks to iCloud. 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 info from other calendars, too, such as Google Calendar, Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo, and any calendar that uses CalDAV. Setting this up is as easy as connecting an email client app to another email account.
Apple’s clean and simple calendar lets you focus on your events rather than the app itself. It’s intuitive to use if you’re familiar with other Apple apps, with support for drag and drop and Siri integration. Click or tap the plus sign (+) to create a new event, which can include a title, location, reminder, note, and invitees. You can also 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 via iCloud with an Apple ID
Woven (Android, iOS, macOS, Web, Windows)
Woven, at first glance, doesn’t look that different from other calendar apps. The main difference is in the left sidebar, alongside your calendar. Click an appointment, and you’ll see all details there, instead of in a pop-up. It’s a subtle thing, but it makes browsing your appointments a lot easier.
And this sidebar contains all sorts of other information, most notably an Analytics tab. It breaks down all of your appointments and shows you how you’re spending your time—how many hours you have free for focused work, how many hours you’re spending in meetings, and even who you’re spending the most time in meetings with. There’s even a note about how many hours you’re spending in video calls.
Time is money. Woven does a good job of turning your calendar into a budget.
Woven pricing: Free; Premium starts at $10 per month
Calendar.com (Android, iOS, Web)
It’s hard to think of a simpler name for a calendar than Calendar.com, but fortunately, that’s not all this app has to offer. Everything you need to manage your appointments is here, on a site with modern design and full support for collaboration. This is a well-thought-out app.
But it’s not just a calendar app: it also works as an appointment scheduler. Sign up for Calendar.com, and you’ll get a public profile—for example, calendar.com/michaelscott. You can set up times that you’re available, then allow anyone with the link to schedule an appointment with you.
There are plenty of appointment scheduling apps that do this, but so far as we know, Calendar.com is the only full-fledged calendar app to also offer a feature-complete scheduling feature like this. That alone makes it worth trying out.
You can also connect Calendar.com to your other favorite apps through Zapier. You can, for example, get a Slack notification every time someone signs up for a meeting with you.
CalenMob Calendar- sync with Google Calendar
If you are looking for a modern, cool, and clean design for your calendar the CalenMob Calendar app can offer just that. This one is able to support both the iOS calendar and Google calendar, making it versatile. What makes this app useful is that it allows you to move around and move items around on your calendar in a simplified and fast way. This one supports drag and drop functionality and smart techniques to ensure it’s easy to use. Additional features include real-time syncing, a variety of view modes to choose from, the app will send push notifications of reminders, the app works online and offline, and it is universal across all your devices.
CalenMob Calendar – sync with Google Calendar app review
- The app syncs with your iOS and Google calendars
- Works online and offline
- Uses drag and drop functionality
- Offers a reminder system
- Works on all your devices
Countdown‼ (Event Reminders, Timer and Calendar Event Countdowns)
Do you have a big event, an appointment, or something else you’ve been counting down to? The Countdown‼ app gives you a fun way to do so with a timer, event reminder, and a calendar countdown. You can have the widget appear in the Notification Center so you can instantly see the countdown. Features of this app include being able to pick a background photo for your countdown, add music to it, set up a reminder, and even pick the font that will be used in the countdown display. If you want you can also count up from an event.
Countdown‼ (with Facebook Event Countdowns) app review
- The app is very user-friendly
- Customize the experience and look of the countdown
- Add a background photo and music to a countdown
- Works in portrait and landscape mode
- Count up from an event if you like
Calendars by Readdle
Pricing: Free, with an optional upgrade of $6.99. A Full pack of PRO unlocks is just $12.99 (one-time).
Devices: iPhone, iPad & Apple Watch
Pros: Incredible set of features, natural language event creation, Conference Call integrations, 200+ Interesting Calendars, one-time purchase.
Cons: Lacks a Mac app.
Calendars is the most elegant and easy to use calendar app available for iOS. Part of Readdle’s incredible lineup of productivity apps, Calendars is by far the best calendar app for iPhone and iPad.
What makes Calendars so good for your iOS device is its ease of use and intuitiveness. Creating and managing your events in Calendars is super simple. You can Drag & Drop events to reschedule them and quickly jump between dates. Calendars works with multiple calendar accounts on your devices, so you can plan and schedule your week just the way you want. The app UI really shines on the iPad, but also adapts graciously on the smaller screen of the iPhone — you’ll love using the app on either device. You can subscribe to over 200 Interesting Calendars from around the world with a few quick taps.
Another notable feature in Calendars is its ability to work offline. If you’re in an area with spotty or no internet, Calendars will still let you create or reschedule events and plan your day. All these changes are automatically synced the next time you have a stable internet connection. Calendars also has a gorgeous Apple Watch app to help you stay on schedule when you’re on the go.
Calendars is also a fantastic To-Do app for all your tasks. It helps you get more done with an intelligent task-manager and organizer. You can organize all your tasks, assign due dates and calendars will remind you about them.
The latest release of Calendars integrates conference call services like Zoom, Google Hangouts & GoToMeeting. When you create an event in Calendars, you can automatically create & add a link to the conference call on one of these services with a few simple taps. No more scrambling to find the call joining link 5 minutes before the meeting. The integration also saves you a lot of time you’d otherwise waste in manually creating & scheduling the call.
Timepage
Timepage is a beautiful calendar app from the house of Moleskine, the global brand known for its notebooks & planners. Timepage takes an interesting approach to calendaring with its design and UI. You see the whole week at a glance and scroll to see what’s next into the future. The design is gorgeous, and the calendars can be customized with authentic Moleskine themed colors.
Timepage combines events, contacts, maps, and weather, attempting to be a single app to boost your productivity. It has basic Natural Language Parsing for event creation, saving you precious time and clicks. Overall, Timepage is a beautiful and functional calendar app, and whether you end up using it really just boils down to two things (i) whether you like the design aesthetic of the app and (ii) whether you think the $12/year recurring subscription is worth it.
Overview: A beautiful calendar app with handy weather and travel information.
If you love the design of Moleskine notebooks and planners, then Timepage is the calendar app you’ve been waiting for. This iOS-only app is truly beautiful, featuring an elegant, uncluttered interface that you’d expect from Moleskine.
Beneath the aesthetics, however, Timepage is a powerful calendar app. It includes natural language processing to let you easily type in events, as well as a “heat-map” view that shows how busy your month is at a glance.
Best of all, Timepage integrates with a variety of other apps to show you weather alerts and travel times to events. This way, you’ll not only remember that you have to be somewhere, but you’ll also get there on time.
Price: $1.99/month or $11.99/year (after a 7-day free trial)
Platforms: iOS
Planner Pro – Daily Calendar
Planner Pro Daily Calendar app is designed for those people who’re looking for a full-featured app to manage daily life better. Planner Pro, a calendar app for iPad which costs years for designing and coding is now coming out for everybody. It combines events, tasks and notes in one place so that you do not need to spend extra money for other apps. Planner Pro provides different kinds of settings for different requirements depending on your specific needs.
- Sync with iOS calendars and events
- Show or hide calendars as you want
- Add, edit or delete events easily
- Supports full recurring period
- Manually time slot
Planner Free for iPad app review
Fantastical
Pricing: Free with a Recurring Subscription of $4.99/mo or $39.99/yr
Devices: iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch & Mac
Pros: Packed with features, multi-platform, feels very polished.
Cons: Expensive in the long run, the new version has a few annoying bugs.
As the name suggests, Fantastical is a fantastic Calendar and To-Do app from the house of Flexibits. It has won several accolades for itself since its debut on the Mac almost a decade ago. The app is immensely popular among power users and packs in a long list of nifty features. Fantastical is known for its gorgeous user interface, a delightful user experience, and its Natural Language Parsing capabilities.
Earlier this year, Fantastical moved to a subscription model that was met with backlash from its users. The developers introduced a single recurring subscription of $4.99 per month or $40 per year that enables access to some nifty Premium features across all the platforms. While you can still download Fantastic for Free from the App Store, it does end up being expensive in the long run.
Our Criteria for the Best iPad Calendar App
Calendaring is one of those interesting areas where each person uses each of their devices differently. For those working on a Mac each day, the calendar app may perform dual-purposes, like entering events and referencing events. Then, perhaps, most referencing is done on the iPhone while on-the-go.
The iPad falls under the same blanket — how you work each day will define your calendaring needs. I, for instance, do almost no calendaring on the Mac or on the iPhone, but instead use the iPad for scheduling events, referencing events, and finding open times in my schedule.
As a result, the criteria for the best calendar app for the iPad is the same as the criteria for the Mac:
- Ease of use: The number one priority of a calendar app must be the UI. 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 iPad.
- Design: Many people resist looking at their calendar because they resent the fact that their time is already spoken for. When you learn to manage your time well, you have more time for the things that are important to you. Since it’s critical you spend time managing this part of your life, an attractive user interface can make time management more approachable and enjoyable.
- Scheduling Features: Calendar apps have remained largely the same for a long time. If you’re going to invest in something beyond the stock Calendar app, the app you decide to use should give you additional features to help you take your time management game to the next level.
- Price: Because Apple gives you a decent calendar app on the iPad for free, price is certainly a factor we consider. The iPad calendar app you decide to use should give you the features you need at a price that you’re comfortable with.
- Integrations: Because iPad users do not all use the same calendar service (iCloud, Google Calendar, Exchange, etc.), the calendar app you use must work with all the available options. Additionally, it should integrate with other apps (where appropriate) to make managing your events and time-sensitive tasks easier.
- Cross-Platform Sync: Lastly, because most of us live in a multi-device environment, your calendar app should have a macOS and iPhone version that syncs seamlessly with the iPad version.
Conclusion:
Apple’s calendar app on the iPad is quite limited, but there are some awesome 3rd party calendar apps available to make your iPad even more awesome.