A calendar can make or break an business and there is no better appointment scheduling software than the one we offer at Free Online Appointments. Our software allows you to set your own appointment schedule and change it anytime. It is easy to use, and perfect for small businesses if they don’t have a lot of employees.
Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a free tool offered by Google.
While it’s free, it offers the basic needs for a content calendar.
As expected, outside the content calendar, Google Calendar doesn’t offer any other features related to content processes.
Google calendar allows you to set reminders.
Although it’s free, I haven’t used it before for no reason.
However, what Google Calendar does is to allow you to pick a date and add the content coming up next.
And from there, your team could see what’s coming up next.
There isn’t any automation here. As said, it’s free, your ticket to use it is a Gmail account.
You can check it out here.
Content-Cal
ContentCal is one of the content calendar tools that are built specifically for planning and scheduling content.
The content calendar offers a more defined service for social media. It enables you to plan, schedule, approve and automatically publish content to your various social media and blogging channels.
And this is done without leaving the ContentCal interface.
To be realistic, ContentCal is one of the best solutions you can choose.
It’s my best and absolute pick for content marketers who need more automation.
Speaking of its unique feature, ContentCal allows you to collaborate with your team.
You can add content ideas and have another member to approve it. And if all is done, you can schedule it to automatically publish on specific content platforms.
As at the time of writing this post, ContentCal offers integration with popular social media platforms and blogging platforms like WordPress and Medium.com.
As expected, right from your ContentCal dashboard, you can publish and schedule posts to your WordPress blog.
This is a rare solution in the industry. With Zapier, you can activate many more apps.
Key Features
- All-in-one collaboration tool
- Automatic scheduling and publishing to social media and other content platforms.
- Integrates well with other platforms
- Grammarly
- Draft posts, notebook, and tagging
Pricing package
ContentCal offers four pricing plans.
The four plans are Pro, Company, Premium Custom, and Enterprise Custom.
The Pro costs $17 per month. The Company costs $47 per month, the other two premium plans are custom pricing.
Unlike other tools, ContentCal has a better solution for content planning and scheduling with automation and this explains the reason for its pricing.
So far, I recommend starting with the company plan if ContentCal is your tool of choice. Grab it
Notion.so
Notion.so is the not-so-popular content calendar that does excellently well. It’s one of the best content calendars in the industry.
A proof that Notion is an awesome tool to add to your army of tools is the awesome votes and love it has been receiving from marketers on twitter.
Similar to Airtable, Notion.so isn’t just a content calendar tool, it’s a collaboration tool for projects and teams.
As a content marketer and creator, Notion is a perfect fit for your business.
Nearly all features on Airtable are present on Notion.so at the cheapest amount possible.
There are templates (over 50+ templates) to ease your journey and make it easier to build a content calendar. As expected of a collaboration tool, Notion allows you to add guests to edit your calendar.
The ability to call the attention of your co-collaborators (writers, editors, etc) is priceless.
What I love about Notion is it easy to understand interface. You don’t have to read a guide to understand how to use Notion.
Not just for marketers alone, Notion is built for students and other personal use to improve productivity.
Key Features of Notion
- All-in-one collaboration tool
- Ridiculously affordable (starting from $4 per month)
- Offers a forever free plan
- Built for the team and personal use
- Has a large library of templates to choose
- Offers integration with EverNote
- Offers notes and docs to create content (instead of using other content writing platforms)
Pricing Package
As said earlier, Notion offers the best pricing you could think of for a premium tool.
Offering four different plans, the first plan is a forever free plan for personal use. The least paid plan costs $4 per month and is for personal use.
The team plan costs $8 per month. And finally, the last plan (enterprise plan) offers a custom pricing that requires you to contact their sales team for a quote.
Read More: Multichannel marketing statistics 2021 (Trends)
Monday
Monday is an all-in-one project management tool that enables you to plan and manage projects.
It is one of the project management tools I have used before. It’s great and offers a simple to use interface.
It’s visual and lovely. Best for teams, Monday allows you to assign tasks to your team members and also track their progress.
Interestingly, it gives you insight on who can take on more tasks. And this is a rare feature on most other tools.
With their analytics, you can make better and data-backed decisions for your team and business at large.
From the analytics, you know how your team is faring with the project. And if it needs more hands to get the job done before the deadline, you can easily make an informed decision.
Absolutely, your budget planning isn’t left out too.
Speaking of the content calendar, it’s’ one of the building blocks in the tool. Other building blocks include Kanban view, timeline view, automations, integrations, forms, workload, file sharing, guest submissions, etc.
Key Features
- Offers a simple and user-friendly interface
- All-in-one project management tool
- Allows you to manage the workload
- Integrates well with a couple of tools
- Affordable but not cheap
- Integrates with Shopify and WooCommerce
Pricing Package
Monday.com offers four different pricing plans, Basic, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise.
The Basic plan costs $8 per user per month. The Standard plan costs $10 per user per month. The Pro plan costs $16 per user per month. And the enterprise plan offers custom pricing. Grab it
GatherContent
GatherContent is a specialized tool for simplifying your content process.
Beyond the content calendar, GatherContent offers more services which include content hub, content planning, content project management, content templates, content workflow, content management, and collaboration.
With the content calendar, you can view team content schedules, filter by content workflow status, and show personal content assignments.
It also integrates with other third-party calendars like iCal, Google Cal, or Outlook.
To create optimized and well-organized content, GatherContent offers a bundle of content templates.
Within the templates, you can create content rules to assist and guide your content creators.
Generally, when it comes to content creation, collaborating, and scheduling, GatherContent is at the forefront.
However, the major disadvantage I notice here is the expensive pricing offered.
With the pricing and the structure of GatherContent, it’s best for agencies and businesses with a lot of content needs.
For a blogger or a small business with small content needs, GatherContent would be a bit expensive.
And since you can get your tasks done on cheaper platforms, I don’t recommend GatherContent for small businesses.
Key Features
- Content Hub
- Content Calendar
- Content planning and project management
- Built-in content templates
- Content style guides
- Content workflow
- Content Creation and collaboration
Pricing Package
GatherContent offers three plans; Start, Scale, and Transform.
The Start plan costs $99 per month. The Scale plan costs $299 per month, and the Transform plan costs $799 per month.
GatherContent offers a 30-day free trial with no credit card required.
So, if you’ve great needs for content (especially agencies), you can consider getting started with their free trial.
Post Planner
Post planner isn’t your regular content calendar, it’s a social media tool basically for just social media platforms.
With Post Planner you can plan, schedule, and directly publish your post on social media platforms.
And they boast of amazing engagement using their platform. The most interesting feature I find on Post Planner is its discovery engine.
With the discovery engine, Post Planner curates content ideas for your social media accounts. The engine scans and analyzes posts across different feeds for content that are performing well.
You get to plan your content calendar alongside scheduling your content to go live on your various social media accounts automatically.
Key Features
- All-in-one social media planner
- Allows you to plan and schedule posts
- Integrates well with social media platforms
- The discovery engine generate content ideas
- Collaborate with other team members
Pricing Package
Post Planner offers three pricing plans; Starter, Love, and Guru.
The Starter plan is the basic plan and costs $3 per month
The Love plan costs $9 per month. And the Guru plan costs $19 per month.
22. Loomly
Loomly is a content management and collaboration software that is built to manage your marketing team effectively.
Built to serve as a better replacement to the spreadsheet, Loomly allows you to handle your content marketing and also track your tasks and progress.
Best for marketing teams running remote, Loomly provides a marketing calendar to track your project.
You get to choose between the list view and calendar view. Offering integration with other apps you already use (Slack, Push, Microsoft Teams, Email, etc), Loomly sends notifications to you from these apps.
And in that case, you don’t have to leave the interface to handle your processes.
Key Features
- Built-in marketing calendar
- Integrates with social media platforms
- Generates post ideas from RSS feeds, twitter feeds, etc.
- Allows you to manage all your assets from one platform
- Offers optimization tips
- Post and Ad mockups
- Approval workflow and comment
Pricing Package
Loomly offers five pricing plans; Base, Standard, Advanced, Premium, and Enterprise plan.
The Base plan costs $25 per month. The Standard plan costs $57 per month. The Advanced plan costs $119 per month. And the Premium plan costs $249 per month.
Conclusion
The best calendar apps don’t simply make it easy with set up and manage reminders, but will also integrate with office software platforms.
For personal users a calendar app can simply be useful, but for business users a calendar app is essential.
When for personal use, you can set it up to remind of annual events such as birthdays, as well as one-time events such as medical appointments, day trips and family visits.
For business purposes, it can be a great way to cover all that, as well as more important business-focused issues such as deadlines, meetings, and events.