A calendar reminds you of the next meeting and helps you stay punctual and organized. Instead of going through a to-do list every day to check what meetings and activities you plan, you simply look at the calendar and have an instant perspective over your day.
However, a paper calendar gets messy when you start moving meetings around and changing planned activities. And even a digital offline calendar can’t keep pace with your constant adjustments. Not to mention that you still have to inform the rest of the team of a canceled or postponed meeting, a change of plans on your daily agenda, or any mistake you might make. Here your savior enters the scene: an online calendar app.
An online calendar app incorporates a classic calendar with date and time, weekdays and weekends, and even public holidays. But it works with multiple time zones, features organizational tools, and lets you share your agenda. Furthermore, you can quickly and efficiently communicate any change of plans to your coworkers, business partners, or family.
An excellent online calendar app is never just a calendar. It’s a complex tool for organizing your work and personal life. It may include appointment scheduling, task tracking, reminding you about birthdays, showing upcoming public holidays, and even allowing time off tracking. Therefore, it’s not just about what you do today but also about long-term planning. Moreover, an online calendar app is a collaborative tool that helps you communicate more clearly, avoid confusion, and risk no mistakes.
A great calendar app suits your needs perfectly. It doesn’t matter if you just need a reminder for your next meeting or a complex set of tools for monitoring tasks, time off, or daily schedule. Your online calendar app should deliver it.
Then, the calendar app should be easy-to-use and enjoyable. Because it’s something you use multiple times daily, it should be user-friendly and suit you like a glove. A good calendar app is always customizable, allowing you to set your preferences in any aspect, from the interface’s color to notifications to sounds to daily routines. If it’s annoying or boring, you’ll soon find yourself not using it. And that’s a useless app to have.
At the same time, a good calendar app works with all your devices. If you are a gadget enthusiast, choose a calendar app compatible with your laptop, smartphone, and smartwatch. The app should be where you look first. You can access an online calendar from wherever you have an internet connection.
Lastly, an online calendar app should allow you to collaborate with other people, share your schedule, send notifications, and invite people to contribute. Nothing is more annoying than having to accompany any calendar adjustment with sending a long list of emails informing everyone of your plans.
There are so many calendar apps that choosing only one is a challenge. It becomes much easier considering your requirements, workflow, and devices. But even so, you may still end up with tens of apps claiming to be the best for you.
Therefore, we recommend giving the most appealing of them a try. Look for free trial versions and use the calendar apps for a few days. See how well they work on your devices and how satisfied you are with their features. Check out our shortlist for the best calendar app award this year.
The default calendar on Microsoft devices is also available as an app for Android phones and iOS devices and as an online calendar accessible from any device. If you are familiar with Microsoft Office, you probably already use the desktop version of Outlook. However, the online version and apps bring more flexibility and allow you to use the calendar on the go.
Outlook has a long history as an emailing platform, but today it is much more than that. It includes an online calendar, task management tools, journal logging, and a meeting schedule. And because all your contacts are already on Outlook, managing meetings, sending notifications, and sharing your calendar is effortless.
Outlook has a stylish look and plenty of customizable aspects.
Key features: Email and contact management, online calendar, meeting scheduling
Format: desktop, app, online
Cost: Free for Microsoft Office users and between $5 and $20 per month for separate use
Google Calendar is available to all Google users and is an excellent tool for organizing your day, whether at the office or on holiday. It allows you to create a daily agenda, set appointments, invite people to meetings, and create collaborative events. And because it’s a Google app, it knows your Gmail contact list, makes automatic backups, and facilitates the use of Google Meet.
Key features: online calendar, meeting scheduling
Format: app, online
Cost: Free. For companies, the Google Workspace suite has multiple plans starting with $6 per employee monthly.
Related: If you are looking for more advanced functionalities of Google Calendar we share 15 tips to boost your productivity.
Like Outlook365 and Google Calendar, Apple Calendar is designed for a valuable type of audience: the Apple products user. It’s the standard calendar on Apple devices, from desktops to iPhones. And, of course, it synchronizes your activities on all of them, providing a smooth daily flow regardless of the device you choose to use. The data is safely kept on iCloud.
Apple Calendar is intuitive and very easy to use. It provides endless customization and integration options and allows you to share your calendar.
Key features: meeting scheduling, daily agenda, sharing options
Format: desktop, online, app
Cost: Free
Calendly is designed for teams with a straightforward meeting scheduling process. It allows people to schedule meetings on your website, provides tools for organizing shared meetings, and offers customizable reminder and follow-up workflows. Calendly is not about your personal tasks. It’s about teams getting in touch with clients and business partners while maintaining a solid connection within the team.
Key features: team meeting scheduling
Format: online, app
Cost: Free personal plan and between $8 and $12 per month for personal plans with automation and team plans
Designed for Apple wearable device users, Fantastical is stylish and cool. It allows you to schedule appointments and tasks from wherever you are, providing flexibility through an award-winning design. It’s the calendar you take to the gym, business meetings, and on holidays.
Fantastical acts like a normal calendar with daily and monthly views, event and task templates, and meeting scheduling. But it also features task management, lots of filters, 30+ conference call services, and 14 widgets to mix and match.
Key features: design, usability, task management, meeting scheduling
Format: app
Cost: Free personal plan and paid personal plan from $4.99 per month
Asana provides a shared team calendar to allow teams to manage their work together. But the app is more than a simple calendar. It is a collaborative tool for tracking tasks from planning and organizing to assigning and completing. Asana lets you see the progress of each task and project overview, provides rules and templates for automating everyday tasks, redefines approval flows, and creates real-time charts for project status.
Key features: task planning and tracking, team shared calendar, task filters
Format: online, app
Cost: Free personal plan, €13.49 per month Premium plan, €24.99 per month Business plan
LeaveBoard is an HR online platform that takes time off management to another level. It’s designed to track time off among your organization: vacation, sick, work from home – simplifying time-off management by bringing transparency, automation, and access to data to your peers. At the same time, the entire team knows who is at the office and who is on vacation or planning to take some time off. Planning the next meeting when everyone is in the office will be much easier. Additionally, sharing tasks based on the availability of your human resources will be key.
LeaveBoard includes a shared team calendar that covers multiple time zones and public holidays. It’s shareable, customizable, and easy to integrate with other calendars and collaborative tools.
Key features: team vacation calendar, employee directory time off tracking, team PTO reports, dynamic time-off forms
Format: online web app
Cost: Free up to 9 employees and $1.35 per employee per month starting from 10 employees.
Conclusion
Whether it is for keeping up with the daily agenda, organizing meetings, tracking tasks, or managing time off, an online calendar app saves you a lot of time and energy. It’s always at hand and provides the right answers at the right time. You find out your schedule in seconds and can easily share it with your team. But, more important, it provides ways to collaborate and defines smooth workflows that keep you organized in all aspects of your life.
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