A reliable calendar is a must-have companion for busy professionals. Although Google Calendar is undeniably a widely used tool for scheduling meetings, appointments, and events, its shortcomings become evident as your workflow expands. Thankfully, there is no shortage of feature-rich calendar apps to streamline your life. Here are the top five Google Calendar alternatives to take control of your time like never before.
5 LeaderTask
LeaderTask isn’t just a Google Calendar alternative. With a calendar, task, team management, collaboration, focus mode, Pomodoro timer, and more, it can be an ultimate productivity booster for your workflow. Unlike some of the Google Calendar alternatives, LeaderTask has native apps on all the popular platforms, offering a consistent experience across your preferred devices.
The list of features includes notices and reminders, the ability to create tasks from emails, shared projects, recurring tasks, labels for better organization, daily planner, team statistics, different project views like Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and more. Focus is an interesting add-on where the app hides other tasks and assignments from the main view and lets you focus on the main tasks only.
The only thing about LeaderTask that I’m dissatisfied with is its UI. The interface looks outdated and could use a neat makeover to take on established rivals.
4 Notion Calendar
Are you surprised to see a calendar offering from the popular productivity app, Notion? Back in June 2022, Notion acquired a well-known cross-platform calendar app, Cron, and integrated its offerings right into the main Notion workspace. Whether you use Notion on the desktop or the web, your weekly or monthly schedule is just a click away.
As you would expect from a Notion product, their calendar offering follows a minimalist approach without skipping important features. It offers month, week, and timeline views, several customization options, two-way sync with Google Calendar, drag-and-drop support, recurring events and tasks, and more.
One of the best features of Notion Calendar is its integration with your current Notion pages. You can easily connect your calendar with an existing database and glance over the upcoming meetings from a single place. It doesn’t support Outlook and iCloud Calendar, though.
3 Fantastical Calendar
Next on the list is an Apple-exclusive Fantastical Calendar. It has native apps on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch only. It supports all the popular calendar services like Google, iCloud, and Microsoft 365. Unlike other apps, Fantastical uses natural language to create events and tasks. For example, you can simply type ‘Meeting with Harvey on Friday 1 PM’ and it will create the same calendar entry in no time, saving you several clicks.
Fantastical shines with its beautiful UI. It’s simply the best-looking Google Calendar alternative on the list. Its features include weather forecasts, integration with video conferencing apps, event and task templates (a must for busy folks), custom event colors, a large number of macOS widgets, Handoff support, and more.
If you are heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem, you can’t go wrong with it. Fantastical used to follow a one-time pricing model, but the company has switched to subscriptions, with prices starting at $7 per month or $57 per year.
2 Thunderbird
While Thunderbird is known for its sleek email management, Mozilla’s offering packs a capable calendar integration, too. Thunderbird used to look quite outdated, but the company has completely turned the tables with the Thunderbird 128 Nebula. It looks modern, fast, stable, and can replace your Google Calendar setup in style.
With emails, tasks, calendars, and contact management, Thunderbird can be your go-to productivity hub to get through a busy day. It supports Google Calendar and lets you create an email with all the relevant information like categories, status, reminders, descriptions, and event attachments.
Thunderbird also supports multiple tabs to enable users to switch between different add-ons seamlessly. As always, Thunderbird is completely free to download and use, and it has native apps on all the major platforms.
1 Microsoft Outlook
Speaking of the top Google Calendar alternatives, how could we leave its prime rival out of the list? Yes, I’m talking about Microsoft Outlook. Back in 2015, Microsoft acquired a popular service called Sunrise Calendar and integrated it with the Outlook inbox for Microsoft 365 users.
Having gained an early advantage, Microsoft has enhanced its calendar service through numerous updates, making it one of the top calendar apps available. It supports both Outlook and Gmail calendars, and lets you subscribe to one from the web or via a file.
Being a Microsoft 365 product, it has tight integration with Microsoft Teams. You can also add Google Meet or Zoom as an add-on and schedule your video meetings in no time. Outlook also beats Google Calendar with its sports and TV schedule. For example, you can follow your favorite NFL team or Formula One and check their upcoming schedule right from the calendar view. I have subscribed to Liverpool and F1.
Outlook has native apps on all the major platforms, and it is free to download and use.
Escape Google’s grasp
Although Google Calendar is popular, it’s definitely not the perfect fit for everyone. Mac users will love Fantastical, while Notion enthusiasts will appreciate its integrated calendar. Thunderbird is perfect for those prioritizing privacy, and Outlook is great if you’re in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Either way, you can’t go wrong and won’t miss Google Calendar when you switch your workflow to any of these alternatives.
Apart from a calendar app, you can also invest in productivity apps to create a smooth workflow. Check out our separate guide to find the top productivity apps for Windows.