Best Calendar Apps

A good calendar is a handy addition to your smartphone, helping you stay on top of upcoming appointments and events, whether they're personal or for work. Several calendar apps also offer variety of extra features, from event management and social features to highly customizable and easy-to-read view modes. If you're having a hard time keeping track of all the places you have to be today, these 25 calendar apps for Android and iOS can boost your productivity now that a new year has begun. (Image Credit: Conejota/Shutterstock)

Fantastical is an iOS calendar that delivers a clean presentation of events in daily, weekly, and monthly calendar views, backed up by really easy reminder and event management. Users can create events through a traditional menu-based interface, or simply type or speak a quick audio note that the app automatically parses into an event (which users can further tweak). The Day Ticker is especially great, allowing users to view and manage their events and reminders. Apple Watch integration pushes your events and appointments right to your wrist for easy reference. An iPad version takes advantage of the expanded screen space with a more detailed Fantastical Dashboard.

Readdle's Calendars 5 is a neat iOS app that does a deft job of displaying everything you need to know about your schedule, whether you're on an iPhone or an iPad. It's got all the requisite views, from monthly down to daily, and natural language support means it's easy to enter new events in plain speech. The app also has solid task and event management, which syncs easily with the built in iOS calendar app, Reminders, and Google Calendar for easy event importing. We particularly like the timeline view, where events are categorized with icons for a good at-a-glance look.

Google Calendar service has grown to become the backbone of a variety of calendar apps, but the mobile Google Calendar app (Android, iOS) itself is no slouch, with a clean and bright interface and a variety of views, such as traditional month and week views as well as more focused schedule views. The app integrates with Gmail to give you the option of automatically creating events for flight, hotel, and restaurant reservations based on your emails, and also works in to-dos and reminders, as well as habit-forming goals (pulled in from Google's acquisition of Timeful). It's a feature-packed and nicely designed calendar app that works great.

Accompany brings together calendar and contact management features so you can up your meeting prep A-game. Sign up for the service with your work email account, and Accompany turns itself into your mobile chief of staff, assembling detailed profiles for people and companies in your upcoming events and meetings, all of which you can look up on the fly or consult via an Executive Briefing emailed to you the night before the event. You can look up your last communications with contacts, their social media posts, or news stories featuring them, as well as company profiles, financial reports, and news, meaning you'll never walk into a meeting unprepared.

BusyCal is an excellent calendar app for Mac, and comes with a solid iOS companion app that brings the experience to mobile. BusyCal supports iCloud, Google, and other CalDAV calendar systems, and offers color-coded month, day, week, and list view of your upcoming events. Natural language parsing for event creation helps you set up appointments, with tags and a wide range of configurable attributes to get the details just right. Map support can show you an event's location and estimated travel time, and BusyCal comes with to-do list functions that are compatible with the iOS Reminders app. About the only thing we can fault is its bland but functional look.

Sunrise Calendar is dead. Long live... Outlook? Sunrise Calendar's days were numbered when Microsoft bought it, but it's also given a calendar and scheduling shot in the arm to Outlook (Android, iOS). In addition to its powerful email functions and MS Office app integration, Outlook on mobile has been improving on its scheduling and events functions, with new Calendar App tie-ins for Facebook, Evernote and Wunderlist, event directions from your favorite mapping apps, and a new "Interesting Calendars" feature that you can subscribe to for things like sports games and TV shows.

Moleskine may be better known for its notebooks than its mobile apps, but the company's Timepage calendar app for iOS does a good job at being stylish and feature-packed. A smart calendar and day planner, Timepage works with existing calendar providers like iCloud, Facebook and Google, while providing some nifty calendar views and easy event creation. The base view provides a simple timeline of the day's coming appointments, with a date tab on the side for selecting specific days of the week. A month "heatmap" view quickly shows which days are free or busy, with filters surfacing particular events or calendars. Natural language parsing for event creation, maps and weather info, and natural language support are among the other additions. The iPad app provides expanded view modes and split-screen support.