After being a long-term user, I’ve canceled my Fantastical subscription. The reason is the proposals just don’t work well on Microsoft Exchange, which I’m forced to use at work. I was getting 2 or 3 repeated calendar events for every proposal, since they introduced the feature.
I’ve been back and forth with support for over a year and they’ve been amazing. However, after installing lots of patches, setting developer options, and sending logs, there was never a fix.
2 weeks ago, I decided to take a trial of Calendly, which I’m using with Apple Calendar, and I’ve decided to switch. It’s Fantiastical’s proposals on steroids, so I’m happy. It costs much more than Fantastical, but my company pays for the subscription. Unlike with most people, the proposals were the main reason I subscribed.
I’m also super impressed with the progress Apple has made with Calendars. It’s a joy to use, and Siri’s natural language input has come a long way.
I left them a while ago because I just didn’t need the features they were offering at that price.
I use Calendars by Readdle on my phone, but I use Apple’s Calendar app on my iPad. I really wish Apple would enable their iPhone Calendar app to display events on a monthly view when in portrait mode (like basically every other calendar app in the App Store)…then I’d switch over completely!
I am thinking I’m not going to renew soon either. While support is always quick to reply, I am left to imagine that my feature requests are merely used as bonfire fuel to keep Flexibits’s office warm. Meanwhile it seems like they are doggedly pursuing a new “Flexibits Premium for Teams” business model, so I suspect new development for individual users is going to be an aside form here on out.
BusyCal is probably the closest feature-wise (including natural language input and calendar sets). It’s a one-time purchase (though separately on Mac and iOS) that gets you updates for 18 months (with no requirement to renew). I switched to it as I didn’t need Fantastical’s scheduling features.
Perhaps this will also help (folks over at /r/macapps keep this up to date):
I’m giving this some thought. Currently, the primary reason I’m using Fantastical is for its Openings/options feature and I wonder if that’s worth it to me.
Fantastical advocates say its user interface and text entry are intuitive. I have not found that to be the case.
A couple of years ago, I tried to use Fantastical for corporate calendars and Cisco SecOps refused to support it, instead they suggested the only approved option beyond MS-Outlook was BusyCal. Been happily using it since, even thought I retired last year. Reliable everywhere and being part of Setapp helps. I’d re-up the license if not a Setapp user.
Busycal calls them calendar sets on iOS/iPadOS and Smart Filters (more powerful) on MacOS - they allow you to quickly switch between collections of calendars and events.
Thanks for the tip on Notion Calendar. This and other discussion here recently have convinced me the only reason I’m using and paying for Fantastical is for Proposals. I will look into Notion Calendar.
I use BusyCal, mostly because it was on BundleHunt and it was a one-off cost rather than a subscription. (I’m sure my feelings on subscriptions are well-known by this point, but in any case I’m not subscribing to a service that Apple or even a piece of paper can largely do at cost. There are more exciting things to spend money on.)
I actually only switched away from iCal as my primary calendar app, which I used for years, because I was having a recurring problem with calendar events not presenting correctly and it was seriously irritating me (e.g. calendars remaining in calendar view even when unticked in the sidebar). Throughout the couple of years I’ve been using BusyCal, I continued to use iCal as well (habit - detailed below) and have noticed that particular issue seems to have finally resolved itself, so I suspect at some future date when I need to reinvest in BusyCal, I shall simply switch back to iCal.
Having said that, three things I love about BusyCal:
It just looks better on a Mac. There’s nothing specifically different about its design compared to iCal, but it’s cleaner and more visually appealing (to me)
Multiple calendar alert options, and you can format alerts to present anywhere on screen, different noises, take control of the window, etc. As someone with a tendency to ignore calendar alerts, this is amazing. It may in fact be enough to keep me in BusyCal when time comes to renew. It’s the one reason I recommend it to other people!
Regardless of whether I keep BusyCal on my Mac, I will be keeping the iOS app. It’s so much better than iCal on iOS, and the widgets are far more customisable (I have multiple widgets: I keep a two-week view on iPad and iPhone, a two-day view and a day view).
Because I tend to have both apps running side-by-side, I’ve not made as much use of calendar sets as I would do otherwise. I tend to have BusyCal showing all my own time commitments (which are on different calendars, many iCloud ones as well as GCal for work) and iCal showing a larger holistic view that includes my organisation’s calendar of key dates and the calendar of the colleague I work most closely with. I mostly just need my own calendar so this set up means BusyCal is my primary app, but I can click on iCal to quickly get team info without changing any settings. If I was just using one calendar app I’d have set up calendar sets properly.