Keeping track of your daily life and scheduling meetings, appointments, commitments, and tasks can take a lot of time and effort. The good news is, maximizing productivity and effortlessly managing your hectic schedule is possible through the help of a powerful calendar app.
In this article, we'll review the five best calendar apps of 2023 to help you find the calendar application to best fit your lifestyle and provide the necessary tools to manage your schedule most efficiently.
First, we'll discuss what makes an effective calendar app before shifting our focus toward Motion Intelligence Calendar, the most powerful AI calendar app designed for productivity, project management, and collaborative teams. We’ll then delve into Google Calendar, Fantastical, Vimcal, and Cron, each tailored toward specific use cases.
So, let's get started and find the perfect calendar app to ease your busy schedule.
Choosing the right calendar app for you
With so many calendar apps available, choosing the right one that suits your needs or use cases can be overwhelming. Understanding the features that make a good calendar application that caters best to your lifestyle and specific needs is of the utmost importance. All calendar apps are not created equal.
What makes a good calendar app?
An excellent calendar app should offer advanced premium features for optimal event scheduling, project management, and meeting or appointment planning.
Calendar apps have to be easy to navigate with a clean interface while having the ability to sync across multiple devices and platforms, including desktops, mobile, wearables, and tablets.
Today’s most effective calendar apps also take advantage of cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. With the help of these breakthrough technologies, it has never been easier to manage your calendar.
Why you need a calendar app that suits your specific needs
A calendar app that suits your needs will save you valuable time each day while boosting daily productivity. These tools free up space in your busy schedule, so you have more time to spend on the things and people you treasure most.
Standard calendar apps help keep track of daily and weekly events, appointments, deadlines, and scheduled meetings. They allow you to schedule tasks in advance, manage your time, and give you a clear overview of your schedule.
The right calendar for you will act as your personal assistant, making your life simpler, more productive, and less stressful.
How effective are calendar apps at improving productivity and time management?
Studies have found that during the average 8-hour work day, office workers are productive for a mere 2 hours and 23 minutes. This means employees are unproductive for 5 hours and 37 minutes daily.
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With nearly two-thirds of each workday spent unproductively, the opportunity for increased productivity is abundantly clear. Powerful calendar apps can, and will, significantly improve efficiency for individuals and organizations.
Now, let's review the five top-rated, popular calendar apps available in 2023 that'll significantly help you with time management and daily productivity.
1. Motion's Intelligent Calendar
If you're looking for a powerful calendar app to help you manage your schedule, projects, and teams, Motion's Intelligent Calendar is likely the right choice. This shared calendar app is designed to provide a productive and collaborative experience for busy individuals and large teams who prioritize features built specifically for project management. Motion is the only calendar application that fully leverages the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning so the app can be your productivity pro and personal assistant.
What makes Motion one of the best calendar apps?
Motion's Intelligent Calendar offers several features that make it one of the best calendar apps available in 2023.
Artificial intelligence and the entire suite of features of Motion provide office workers using the tool with more than twice as many productive hours per day as the average employee. You don’t waste time juggling which of 20 things to do next; Motion does it for you.
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This feature significantly bumps productive hours for office workers each day as it automates many mundane tasks. When tasks take longer or shorter than initially estimated, the built-in AI scheduler automatically and optimally updates your entire schedule.
These smart suggestions immediately make any busy life a lot simpler.
Motion users save 2 hours each day using the artificial intelligence powered calendar.
The features of the Motion Intelligent Calendar that stand out are:
- Automated scheduling and planning with AI. You'll never double-book or over-commit your time again.
- Automatic task management as AI re-optimizes your schedules as tasks are completed or added.
- Reschedules uncompleted tasks to new time slots.
- Set reminders, track time, and allocate tasks to team members.
- Offers a visual timeline of your projects, tasks, and deadlines so you can see your progress and deadlines at a glance.
- Includes real-time collaboration features, such as comments and file sharing, to help you work with your team more efficiently.
- Choose between daily, weekly, monthly, and custom views.
- Intuitive interface that's easy to learn.
- Eliminates the need for traditional to-do lists.
Pro tip: Check out these strategies to successfully manage work projects.
Can you sync all of your calendars with Motion?
Yes! With Motion, you can sync multiple calendars from different platforms, such as Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Outlook Calendar.
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In fact, nearly all calendars that individuals use will be compatible and sync seamlessly with Motion, making it a great choice as a shared calendar for even the largest organizations.
How much does Motion cost?
Motion offers a 7-day free trial, after which you can choose from two premium plans:
- Individual plan - $19 per month
- Team plan - $12 per user per month
2. Google Calendar
If you're a Google user heavily entrenched in the ecosystem, your default calendar on your device is Google Calendar, a simple-to-use calendar app. The application is straightforward and integrates with other Google products.
Why use Google Calendar?
Google Calendar offers several benefits making it ideal for average Google users. It integrates with other Google products, such as Gmail and Google Meet. This compatibility makes appointment scheduling easier and more efficient. This feature allows users to add events from their emails or join online meetings directly within the app.
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Google Calendar makes it possible to create multiple personal calendars for different purposes. This can be great for separating sections of your life such as work, personal, and shared team calendars.
What are the drawbacks of Google Calendar?
One of the drawbacks of Google Calendar is that it offers fewer features and customization options than its competitors. It also doesn't provide advanced project management and collaboration features.
How much does Google Calendar cost?
Google Calendar has a personal plan available for free. For businesses, it's part of the Google Workspace suite, which offers three pricing tiers.
- Basic plan - $6 per user per month
- Business Standard - $12 per user per month
- Business Plus - $18 per user per month
3. Fantastical
Fantastical is a beautifully designed calendar app exclusively for the Apple ecosystem. It is a very user-friendly calendar application and offers a wide range of features that cater to different personal and work needs. It can seamlessly integrate with built-in Apple apps and services such as Siri and Mail, and is available for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac.
What are the benefits of Fantastical?
One of the fan-favorite features of Fantastical is its natural language input. Users can simply type in their plans or appointments using everyday language, and Fantastical will automatically convert it into a calendar event. It also supports multiple calendars, allowing users to view and manage events from various other popular calendar applications such as Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Outlook Calendar.
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Fantastical also implements a unique DayTicker view which shows all the events for the day in a scrollable list. This makes it easy to quickly see what's happening without switching between different calendar views.
Another useful feature of this app is weather forecast integration into your calendar. This data can help tremendously when planning your day-to-day life.
Other premium features include:
- Block out travel time
- Apple Watch support
- Zoom, Google Meet, and WebEx support
- Automatically block meeting scheduling slots based on your current calendar
- Time-to-leave notifications
- Task lists
- Email reminders
What are the drawbacks of Fantastical?
One of the main drawbacks of Fantastical is the constraints when used for project management. As it is only available on Apple devices, users and team members who use Android devices or other platforms cannot access Fantastical.
Another weakness of using Fantastical for geographically disbursed teams is the inability to view the app based on timezones of different team members. A final con of the Fantastical app is the pricing structure for the premium subscription plan becomes quite pricey for larger teams due to the per user fee structure with no team licensing option. These drawbacks mean Fantastical might not be the best choice for teams prioritizing project management, teams across several timezones, or teams that operate outside the Apple ecosystem.
How much does Fantastical cost?
Fantastical has a free plan. The premium version is priced at $4.75 per user per month.
4. Vimcal Calendar
Vimcal is a new calendar app designed for users who prefer a minimalistic, customizable, clean interface without sacrificing project management and scheduling features. Vimcal is also the only calendar app explicitly built for remote work.
What are the benefits of Vimcal?
One feature which proves valuable for remote or geographically dispersed workers is the option to add cities to your calendar inputs. Vimcal will automatically manage the difficult and confusing aspect of keeping track of clients or colleagues across multiple time zones.
Another standout feature of Vimcal Calendar is its customizable, intuitive user interface. Users can choose from a variety of themes and colors to create a calendar that suits their personal style. Hotkeys and quick commands allow for efficiency without sacrificing the integrity of the app's simple visual design.
Additionally, Vimcal offers multiple views, including a month view, week view, and agenda view, which can be customized to show different types of events (such as meetings, personal appointments, or deadlines).
Vimcal also leverages a smart scheduling feature, which suggests the best times to schedule events based on the user's availability and previous behaviors.
What are the drawbacks of Vimcal?
One of the main drawbacks of Vimcal is that it doesn't integrate with other apps or services besides Google Calendar and Windows Outlook Calendar. You are, however, required to connect to either a Google or Microsoft account when joining Vimcal.
A major weakness of this calendar app is that Vimcal is only available on iOS, Windows, and Mac. A Vimcal Android app is currently not available.
Due to the constraints of this app's cross-platform interoperability and syncing with other calendar apps, Vimcal might not be an ideal calendar app for larger teams in 2023.
How much does Vimcal cost?
Vimcal Calendar has a free plan for iOS users only. For access to both iOS and desktop (Windows & Mac), the monthly subscription fee is $15 per month.
5. Cron
Cron is an innovative scheduling app that helps users to manage daily tasks, schedules, and appointments using natural language processing. The app is designed to be clean and elegant while providing additional features that enhance Google Calendars’ capabilities.
What are the benefits of Cron?
The biggest standout feature of Cron is its intuitive and user-friendly interface. The app's design is straightforward to navigate.
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Premium features of Cron include:
- Availability sharing
- Hotkeys to quickly change meeting times and availability
- Team overlays to combine one calendar with another team member.
- Simple drag-and-drop time zone adjustments
- Zoom compatible
- Add multiple accounts
- Convenient dropdown menu bar that shows a list view of all scheduled appointments and tasks
What are the drawbacks of Cron?
Cron currently only syncs with Google Calendar accounts on macOS, Windows, web, and iOS. This negatively affects use cases for collaborative teams as well as Android users.
Another potential drawback of Cron is its limited advanced features compared to other fully built calendar apps.
While it has many useful features, the Cron calendar hasn't had its official release, and new users must reach out to request access.
How much does Cron cost?
Cron Calendar is available for download free of charge. Paid versions will be added when the company releases its official version.
Find out for yourself how Motion does it all
A calendar app is a must-have and easy-to-access tool for anyone wanting to save time, improve daily productivity, and efficiently manage busy work and personal schedules. Choosing the calendar application best tailored to your needs is essential to get the most out of this technology.
While each app has strengths and weaknesses, Motion is the most powerful calendar app to improve productivity while managing projects and teams. Its state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms automate the scheduling process, helping significantly increase productive hours.
In addition to this, the Motion Intelligent Calendar is extremely user-friendly and easy to learn. It provides real-time collaboration tools and automation features, all while allowing users to sync each of their calendars across different platforms and devices.
To experience the benefits of 2023’s most powerful calendar app, start your 7-day free trial of Motion today!
