Gone are the days when we could rely on our memory to remember what we need to do at any given moment. Today, there’s no way we could recall for when exactly did we schedule that meeting four weeks ago, or whether our dentist appointment is coming up soon. That’s why we use calendar apps, which keep a perfect record of everything scheduled in our lives.
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BusyCal, Calendar, and Fantastical 2 are probably your best bets out of the 14 options considered. 'Smart Filters' is the primary reason people pick BusyCal over the competition. This page is powered by a knowledgeable community that helps you make an informed decision.
There’s no shortage of Mac calendar apps out there, from the default option that comes pre-installed with the machine to other free alternatives to paid but full-featured third-party apps. Some are web-based, some are cross-platform, and some are also available on mobile.
The problem is you really need just one best free calendar app for Mac. Not sure which one you should choose? Then this guide is for you.
How To Choose A Mac Calendar App
As our work lives could vary greatly from one another, our ideas of the best calendar app could be different as well. Generally, there are five broad criteria you should evaluate calendar apps against:
- Usability. Since you’ll be using your Mac calendar app multiple times a day, how it looks and how it behaves is critical. Notice how many clicks does it take for you to create a new event or whether all the information you need is clearly displayed and could be understood at a glance.
- Features. When it comes to calendars, more is not always better. Some of the best calendar apps out there could be pretty bare in terms of functionality. And some of the most feature-packed ones are cumbersome to use. It’s all about what do you personally need to get out of the best calendar app for Mac.
- Speed. No one likes to wait around, looking at the spinning circle. The best calendar apps allow you to add events quickly and ideally never freeze up on you.
- Synchronization. We work in the multi-device world. The second you step out of the office, you expect to be updated on what’s coming next through your phone. Sometimes you use both laptop and desktop, and then your Mac calendar app is better to sync in time over a web server.
- Integration. Every year, more and more automation helps us in our work. APIs are omnipresent. Already lots of people use Slack and IFTTT to get notified about any changes in any part of their digital lives. Plugging your calendar into the larger ecosystem is something to consider, even if it’s just a possibility at this point.
There might be other aspects you’ve come to expect from the best calendar app for Mac. So your list might differ. The important idea here is to create a small framework that will aid you in comparing all the available options on the market. Now let’s break down some popular calendars and select the best ones.
Keep to the basics with Mac’s default calendar
For the first contender to become the best free calendar app for Mac, why not consider the Calendar app you already have pre-installed?
Mac Calendar app is straightforward and easy to use. The calendar itself is taking up most of the interface, and you can easily switch between different views using the tabs in the top bar.
Creating new events is simple too: just double-click on any time in the day and fill out any of the fields. If a similar event has been created before, you can pick an auto-suggestion. Likewise, your event location will be automatically suggested by Apple Maps. You can also invite anyone to your event by email, even if they don’t use Calendar. For the event itself, you can choose one of many custom-created and color-coded calendars.
Due to its simplicity, Calendar is a very speedy app. Built by Apple itself, it takes full advantage of having access to the whole sandboxed system, something not possible for third-party apps to do.
Calendar comes pre-installed on all iPhones, making it easy to access on the go. A web version is available too, but unfortunately only if you use iCloud to sync your calendars.
In terms of integration, Calendar is not big on integrating its API in other apps. It does however cover all popular calendar apps out there, from Google to Yahoo and Microsoft Exchange.
Work in sync within the Google ecosystem
If your whole office is already committed to the Google world, thinking of using Google Calendar would be a wise move.
Many consider Google Calendar to be the best shared calendar app around. While boasting clear and beautiful interface, the app makes adding other people’s (or even room’s) calendars just as easy as yours, especially if they are on the same Google corporate account. Additionally, all your events are created with an automatic Hangouts link for video calls.
Working in Google Calendar app means benefitting from its connection with all other Google services. Events from Gmail would automatically be added to your calendar and Google-powered auto-suggestions are truly powerful.
Fast and reliable (when was the last time Google servers went down?), Google also offers native apps for Android and iOS. Sadly, Google Calendar desktop app Mac is not available at this time — only the web version, which can be accessed via any browser.
Google Calendar app for Mac is frequently integrated with other services, much more so than the default Apple option. And just like the Apple calendar, it’s a worthy contender to be the best free calendar app for Mac.
Access in a single click with InstaCal
When your days are frantic and ease of access becomes top priority, InstaCal is a worthy alternative that lives right in your menu bar.
InstaCal is hard to beat on usability. Click on its menu bar icon and it will show you all your tasks for the month in both calendar and list views. From here, you can easily edit or create appointments, as well as add new attendees. Simple reminders can be managed here too — something that differentiates InstaCal from competitors.
While InstaCal doesn’t support any unusual features, it’s as fast as an app can be due to it being preloaded in the background at all times.
A Mac calendar app first, InstaCal doesn’t have mobile or web versions available, but it syncs perfectly with iCloud, Google, and Microsoft calendars. InstaCal is the ideal example of an app that’s been optimized to the limit for speed and convenience. No fluff.
Power up on all fronts with BusyCal
Looking for the most feature-packed Mac calendar app around is likely to lead you to BusyCal. From being present in your menu bar to incorporating to-dos to even showing you the moon calendar, BusyCal has every feature you’d ever expect from your calendar.
In terms of design, BusyCal looks and feels like a mix between a pumped up default Mac calendar app and InstaCal (due to the menu bar extension). You can create a quick event using natural language by simply clicking on the plus icon in the top bar. To save a new to-do, right-click on the To Do panel on the right and choose New To Do.
Built as a native app for macOS, BusyCal feels quick and nimble. In addition, a full-featured iOS app is also available. Both versions are highly popular among heavy Mac users and thus integrate well with lots of other applications.
Which Mac calendar app is right for you?
Discussed above are four of the best calendar apps out there. In the end, it all comes down to what you value the most. If you’re looking for the best free calendar app for Mac, the default Apple option or the one from Google could be your choice. However, compared to the other two competitors, they lack functionality and convenience.
InstaCal is by far the fastest and the most at-hand Mac calendar app. It doesn’t distract you from your work when you need to quickly check the next meeting or correct a few details. Sometimes you might even feel you have a personal assistant right beside you.
BusyCal takes the default Mac Calendar app as its foundation and improves it on nearly every dimension. Use to-do lists, get more context around the weather, briefly peek at what’s going on in the menu bar, and much more.
Best of all, both InstaCal and BusyCal are available for a free trial through Setapp, a platform of over 150 Mac apps and tools created to streamline your work processes, from task management to web development. Let’s see what you have scheduled for today.
Our search for a perfect note taking app might never come to an end, but sometimes an app comes out which gets as close to perfect as it can. Bear did it last year and now it seems to be the time for Agenda to do the same thing. Now, keep in mind that the definition of a perfect note taking app differs from person to person. Depending on your needs, you might prefer one which is truly cross-platform and has extra features like a web clipper, and sadly Agenda is none of those things.
That said, Agenda is a fairly capable app which offers a ton of novel features which none of the other note taking apps do. Think of Agenda as an amalgamation of a note taking the app, a calendar, and a task manager. And what’s best is Agenda brings all those things by creating a harmony between them, such that none of the features it offers feels out of place. If the premise of the app has you even a little bit intrigued by now, here is my in-depth review of the app to help you decide if it’s the one for you or not.
Agenda Review: Overview
As the title of this article suggests, Agenda is a note taking app which is based entirely on the calendar. Well, that’s good, but what does it actually mean? It means that Agenda has utilized the good old calendar to help you organize your notes in a way that none of the other note taking apps do. Every note you create can be assigned a date. So, you can easily file them, search for them, and more. You have the ability to assign dates to note in the past, present, or future, which really comes useful, but more on that later.
First, let’s take a tour of the app. In the picture above, you can see how the app looks like. The app offers a three-pane view. The leftmost pane houses all your categories and projects which are the primary level of notes categorization. When you click on a project, it will show you all the notes inside that project.
The middle pane is where all your notes are stored in a reverse chronological order. You can click on any note to edit it or collapse it. The last pane is where all your calendar events and recently edited notes will show.
You can easily close the first and the last pane by dragging on the handle shown in the picture above. It will appear as soon as you hover near on the boundary lines of adjacent panes. That is pretty much it. As you can see, it’s a very simple looking notes app, but it is also very powerful. We will see all its powers and the features it offers in the coming sections.
Note Taking and Organizational Basics
As I mentioned above, Agenda gives you three major hierarchy for notes. First is called a category, then comes the projects, and then there are individual notes. You can create notes only inside a project, so you must at least have a single project to be able to create notes. Creating a project is really easy, you can either click on the obscure plus button at the bottom of the left pane, or you can just hit the keyboard combo ⌘⇧N (Cmd+Shift+N).
Similarly, you can create a category by hitting the ⌘⌥N (Cmd+Opt+N) key combo and a new note by hitting ⌘N. Another easy way to create a new note is by clicking on the yellow plus button present in the notes panel.
1. Editing and Note Styling Options
Now that you know how to create a project, category, and a note, let’s see what you can do with your notes. Whenever you create a new note, it will be created with an “Untitled Note” title, which obviously you can edit. Below the title is the place where you can type. Once you start typing, you will notice a simple blue dot at the left of the line you are currently on. Clicking on the blue dot will give you different styling options like creating a heading, sub-heading, italicizing, bolding, and underlining among others.
Of course, you can use the usual key combos like ⌘I, ⌘B, and ⌘U to italicize, bold and underline the texts. However, if you want other options, like creating headings and indentations, you will have to go through the blue dot menu. The blue dot menu is the place where you will also go if you want to create a list, whether it’s a bullet list, numbered list, or a checklist. You can also add tags and assign notes to a person from the same menu, but there’s an easier way to do that and we will talk about that in the next section.
Apart from text notes, you can also attach pictures to your notes. However, attaching pictures in Agenda is a little bit different from how the function is handled by other apps. To attach a picture, you will have to drag and drop the picture inside the note. But when you do that, the picture actually doesn’t show up in the notes, rather it creates a link to the picture. So, if you delete or move the picture from its original location, you won’t be able to open it.
2. Tagging and Filtering Notes by People
Apart from the usual hierarchal form of organization, Agenda also allows you to categorize notes by using tags and filters. Tags work just like they do on any other note-taking app. You just put a hashtag(#) symbol before the word you want to use as a tag and that tag will be added to that note.
You can add any number of tags on a single note and the same tags can be used in multiple projects or categories. Tags give you a relatively relaxed way of organizing your notes. It’s an easy way to keep track of similar notes, even when they are in different projects.
Another way to organize notes is by using filters. Filters work a little differently on Agenda as the app basically lets you filter notes using people. For example, if you are working on a project with multiple people under you, you can easily assign specific notes to different people by using the filters. Just type the name of the person preceded by the @ symbol (@Jena). Both the tags and filters are searchable entities which makes it really easy to use them as fluid categories.
3. Importing and Exporting
One of the best features of Agenda is its ability to easily import and export notes. Agenda support imports for Agenda files, Markdowns, and Apple Notes. To import a note, one needs to follow this path, the File menu → Import and then select the relevant option.
In my testing both the imports for markdown and Agenda files worked perfectly, however importing files from Apple Notes did bring certain problems. I like the fact that Agenda turned folders of Apple notes into its projects which helped in keeping the note hierarchy.
That said, none of my links or photos were imported which made the whole import process useless. I can understand the photo import problem as Agenda doesn’t support native image imports, however not being able to import links was unexpected, especially when it easily imported links from my markdown files.
When it comes to exporting, Agenda support exporting in PDF, markdown, Rich Text, and Agenda file format. However, when exporting as PDF, I was not able to export individual notes as Agenda was exporting the whole project in one big PDF file. Also, exporting in markdown is a premium feature, so if you need that, you will have to pay for the service.
Calendar, Events, and Note Links
At last, we have come to that section which you can call as the USP of the Agenda app. As I mentioned in the introduction, Agenda utilizes calendar as its base and then weaves all its features around it. First, Agenda organizes all your notes in a reverse chronological order. But that doesn’t mean that you are stuck with only that option. In fact, you can change the date of any note to a past or future date. Remember that changing the date doesn’t change the order or the note.
The benefit of creating a note in the past or future is plenty. For example, if you wanted to jot down some notes from the meeting you had a few days back, you can assign that note to the date of your meeting which will help keep things organized. Similarly, you can mark a note in future if you have notes for an event which is going to happen in future. Dates are important because Agenda also allows you to search for note using a date or a date range. When you click on the search icon, a calendar icon will open beside it. You can click on it to perform date specific searches.
Agenda can attach notes to events on calendar using a custom URL
Another great use of dates is that Agenda can access your Mac’s calendar and show all your upcoming events. The calendar events live in the rightmost panel. From here, you can click on any event and attach a note to that event. Agenda will also create a custom URL for your note and add it to your calendar. Clicking on the note link on your calendar will open that specific note in Agenda. If you are using the paid version of the Agenda app, it will also let you create new events on your calendar from inside the app. The free version only allows you to add notes to an already existing event.
Lastly, the custom link that Agenda automatically attaches to events can be copied separately by clicking on the gear menu in a note and then clicking on the copy option. You can attach this link to any app or service of your choice and it will act the same as it does in the calendar events.
Search and Interlinking
The last major feature that we need to talk about is the “Search”. Like other well-made note-taking apps, Agenda gives you a lot of control over your searches. First, you can easily search a note by its title. Once you type in the right title, the search results will automatically bring up the note. One thing to note here is that by default, Agenda searches notes inside the project you are currently in. If you want your search to span over projects, you need to click on the “Search in All Projects option”.
Another way to search for a note by its content. If you remember a line or even a string of word you have used in a note, just type it in and it will bring up the relevant results. You can also search notes using the tags and people filters. Once, you type in a word, the search box will give you the option to consider that word as either Tags or People. You can click on the relevant option and the search result will bring back all the notes with that specific tag or filter.
Mac Calendar Apps Searchable Tags 2017
Another way to search notes is by using dates or date range, something which we have already talked about. Just click on the search button and then the calendar button which appears next to it, and select the date or date range. The app will show you all the notes which are assigned to those dates.
Lastly, there’s a separate “On the Agenda” list which we have not talked about till now. Any new note you add is by default added to the agenda. However, you can remove the notes from agenda by clicking on the yellow dot at the start of each note. The notes which you leave on the Agenda can either be accessed by clicking on the “On the Agenda” button present on the left panel or by clicking on the search button and then on the agenda button which appears.
On the Agenda tab is a place to quickly access notes which you are currently working on without having to open different projects or searching for them. Another great way to quickly access a related note is by interlinking of the notes. You can copy a note link and paste it inside another note to interlink them. You can do this for multiple related notes to create a set of related notes which are interlinked to each other.
Agenda Review: Shortcomings
By now, if you read the article carefully, you have gotten a pretty good idea about all the shortcomings of Agenda. First and the biggest problem for me with Agenda is that since there is no snippets view for individual notes, you are left scrolling a lot if you have a lot of long notes in the project. Of course, you can collapse individual notes, but the process is a bit cumbersome and takes a few attempts to get it right.
Secondly, since for now, this is a Mac only product, you will find it difficult to use if you want to jot down notes on the fly. The developer has assured that the iOS app is in works and will be released soon, still for someone who is looking to switch right now, that might be a big problem. Agenda also doesn’t allow you to collaborate on notes like Apple Notes does. Of course, you can share a note with someone using its export feature but that’s not the same as real-time collaboration. So, if your work depends on collaborating with others, Agenda might not be for you.
Lastly, there are minor nuances such as the failure of import feature to import links and images from Apple Notes app, and no inline image attachments. Also, I was unable to find any trash or recently deleted option, so as far as I know, once you delete a note, it’s gone forever, which is really scary.
Agenda Review: Pricing and Final Thoughts
After using this app extensively over the last week, I personally like it a lot. It has its kinks, but the ability to link notes to dates is just genius in my opinion. I also like that I can link notes to events, although for that feature to be really useful, I will need an iOS app. It’s still hard to say that I can completely switch to Agenda as it misses a few key features, however, once the developers drop the iOS app, I for one will be using this as my personal note-taking app.
Mac Calendar Apps Searchable Tags For Iphone
I also love Agenda’s pricing structure which is one of the best pricing strategies I have seen in a while. Users are allowed to use most of the core features of the apps for free. You only need to pay if you want extra features like the ability to create events from inside the Agenda app, exporting in markdown, and saving different search parameters.
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Also, if you pay now and decide not to pay after 12 months once your subscription comes to end, you get to keep all the premium features which are here and the ones that will be added before your subscription ends. Only the premium features which are introduced after your subscription ends will not be available to you.