This is one of our top picks in the category so we recommend it over others (you're on the right page), read below to learn why we love and recommend it! ⤵
This is one of the better tools in its category, see below if this tool is right for you! ⤵
Not recommended for professional use
Fantastical is more of a personal/family calendar app. But even for personal use, we'd probably skip on Fantastical as there are more modern calendar apps that we'd recommend checking out first, like Morgen Calendar, Routine, and Amie.
For professionals or teams looking for a better calendar, check out Motion (Our Top Pick 🌟), Sunsama, or Akiflow. These tools are much more powerful calendars and will help you manage your time, meetings, tasks and, workload
We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what they do well, and what they could do better. ⤵
A calendar for personal/family events and tasks.
Fantastical is a calendar app for MacOS and iOS users that has been around since 2012 (Android users, skip this review and check out Vimcal, Morgen, Sunsama, Akiflow or our favorite: Motion instead).
The main reason people love Fantastical is that it is a better Apple Calendar, with more thoughtful features that make the calendar app experience, well, better.
For example, Fantastical allows you to add events in natural language, so you can easily type in "Dentist appointment May 29 at 2 p.m." and it will create the event. This makes adding events to your calendar much faster and more enjoyable. Fantastical also has thoughtful features like the fact that you can see the day weather, right within the calendar app so you can plan accordingly ☔⛅️.
A few years ago, the new Fantastical added the ability to add tasks to your calendar with a to-do app integrated, like Apple Reminders, or Todoist. That said, tasks in Fantastical are super barebones.
Think of Fantastical as more of a prosumer app —think of a busy family managing multiple calendars rather than a business calendar app.
In you're considering Fantastical for business, know that there are SO many awesome calendar apps out there today that are so much more powerful for managing your time, appointments, meetings, tasks and even projects. Take Motion, for example. It is a calendar at the core, but you can manage projects and tasks within your calendar, and using its AI scheduler it will even automatically schedule tasks for when they need to get done. Motion is what we use here at Efficient App, and we couldn't imagine using something as basic as Fantastical for the day-to-day.
We found the onboarding experience on Fantastical to be one of the most old-school and kludgy experiences compared to the newer calendar apps on the market. It felt like traveling back in time a decade or so if we're being totally honest 😅
Once you're inside the app, the interface very much looks, well—like a slightly better version of Apple Calendar. It's not the most modern calendar app.
Speaking of Fantastical vs Apple Calendar, some features that Fantastical offers that Apple Calendar doesn't, includes: natural language input, task and event templates, calendar sets, time zones, task management, and meeting proposal features.
So yeah, even though it's a bit more old school that other calendar apps, it is much better than just using the basic Apple Calendar.
Fantastical's natural language input worked perfectly when it came to events. Simply type in your event name, the day and time, and it schedules it on your calendar 👌
When it comes to using natural language for tasks, the experience is a bit more kludgy. First of all, natural language doesn't work if you are just adding a task to your general Fantastical "My Tasks". If you add a task to Fantastical directly, it will just put it on your calendar at the top of the day as an all day reminder, not at a specific time, even if you tell it to schedule it on your calendar at a specific time.
To get the most out of Fantastical tasks, you need to integrate either Apple Reminders or Todoist (or any other third party task manager apps they integrate with).
Then, go to your settings and set the task list from your third-party app as the default task list, and only then will natural language work with your tasks. To get the most out of this feature, Fantastical basically decided that you must use a third party tool for tasks, while with other calendars on the market, you don't need a task management software AND a calendar.
This experience had a lot more friction than what we'd like. For personal tasks, using something like Apple Reminders is fine, but for professional use this is far too basic.
You can create task or calendar templates, which is quite cool if you typically have a certain event format that you generally use (e.g. you invite your spouse to a large number of your events). Using a template auto-invites them, which is saves time. We love this feature!
Fantastical allows you to categorize calendar activities, such as "professional events" and "personal events," and switch between views. This is a feature many users love, as it helps reduce visual clutter on your screen.
Calendar sets more so come in handy if you often have calendar events you're invited to that you don't need to actually attend (like your children's calendar 😬). Again, this is more of a personal-use case category rather than professional.
Like with most calendar apps, you have various calendar views to choose from: daily view, week view, month view, and even a quarterly and yearly view.
Openings in the new Fantastical is similar to any meeting scheduler feature that allows others to request a time on your calendar based on your available time slots.
Meeting proposals allow you to send over calendar invites with multiple proposed times rather than just one.
Fantastical has been a great Apple Calendar alternative for Apple users for a long time, but in the recent years there are just too many incredibly beautiful calendar apps that are giving them a run for their money.
As one Reddit user stated "All features that once made Fantastical unique and recommendable have been commoditized.
Take Amie, Morgen Calendar, or Routine for example, they are all apps with a great user experience and a much more beautiful and modern interface for a similar price (in fact, Morgen and Amie offer free tiers to start with, while with Fantastical Premium, you can't even log into the app without handing over your credit card).
That said, some users have said that Fantastical on mobile is more stable than Amie or Morgen since they are newer apps. While it's something to be aware of, we would still recommend testing Morgen and Amie before settling on Fantastical just because they are much more modern.
Fantastical is not worth it if you are a professional trying to use it for business or team work.
If you're a professional, skip Fantastical and check out Motion first as it's the most powerful calendar with a full task and project management tool—you don't need a calendar and a task tool separately. It also uses AI to schedule tasks on your calendar automatically, so it's much more like having an assistant rather than you needing to manually move and schedule tasks daily, which gets tedious fast. Motion is the calendar and task tool what we use here at Efficient App.
Or our secondary recommendations for professionals that are already using a project management tool like Asana or Monday would be Sunsama and Akiflow as they have have a ton of integrations with third party tools.
For personal use, is Fantastical worth it? It's a tough one because there are so many modern calendar apps on the market with incredible UI/UX, and many of them have a free tier. While it's a good household calendar app and is better than Apple Calendar, we'd recommend reading about the best calendar apps first before committing to Fantastical. We'd personally skip on it and use Morgen Calendar, Routine, or Amie.
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We've tracked and verified the above companies are using this software in their team's stack.
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