You can also add calendars from Exchange, Google, Yahoo, or AOL accounts. You can create as many local calendars as you want, and all of them will sync using iCloud. There are four main views: day, week, month, and year. You can also click-and-drag on the calendar itself to create an appointment. Natural language processing means you can type something like 'go for a walk at noon' and expect your computer to figure out what you mean. Not sure where to start? Apple's Calendar, which is already installed on your Mac, is clean, functional, and syncs with your iPhone and iPad without any effort.Īdding appointments is simple: click the + button.

Here they are-one of them is almost certainly right for you. (There were a lot of date icons in my Mac's menu bar for a few days.) Since I've been writing about productivity for almost a decade and updating this list for the past two years, I was already familiar with all of the apps under consideration, but I made sure to evaluate how they'd changed with recent updates to macOS. To test all the apps that potentially met the criteria, I connected my personal calendars and used them over the course of a week to get a feel for how they worked on a daily basis. If you want a more general productivity tracking app, check out our guide to the best Mac to-do apps.

Lots of to-do apps, email apps, and other types of productivity apps have some kind of calendar functionality, but it's not quite the same as being a dedicated calendar app. Even the default Apple Calendar app easily meets my requirements, which is probably why there aren't that many great alternative options-at least at the affordable end of things.Īlso, with one or two exceptions, I only looked at pure calendar apps. Your calendar should be available everywhere at all times-that's the point of using an app. Of course, most of these apps are easier to sync with iPhones and iPads than Android devices-but that's just the nature of Apple's ecosystem.Īpps that couldn't do these things weren't considered, but the best apps offered a lot more. It doesn't matter if this is via iCloud, Google Calendar, Exchange, or some combination of those three-some sort of syncing is a must. Offer syncing, both to mobile devices and other computers. An ugly, hard-to-read user interface was a hard no. Daily, weekly, monthly, and agenda views should all be offered, and they should all be easy to parse. Calendars are only useful if you can actually see what you have coming up, so the ideal calendar app needs to be easy to arrange however you prefer. Make it quick to see your schedule at a glance. Natural language processing, which allows you to add appointments by typing something like 'Drop off dog at the vet Monday at 5pm,' is a big plus here. Ideally, you only need to click one button or use a keyboard shortcut to start typing and add an appointment. If you can't add something to your calendar in a few seconds, you're much less likely to keep it updated. Speed is everything when it comes to a calendar. Make it quick to add events and appointments. The ideal app, like macOS, is easy to use at a glance, but not in a way that compromises on functionality. This means following Apple's design language and integrating well with macOS by offering native keyboard shortcuts, notifications, menu bar icons, and even features like Today widgets. In addition to that requirement, the best calendar apps for Mac all have a few key characteristics:

(They all obviously work with Apple's iCloud Calendars as well, barring one unusual exception.) But any of the apps on this list sync with Google Calendar to bring you the best of both worlds. Let me start with this: there's no Google Calendar app for Mac. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.

Digital budget calendar