I went with BusyCal iOS since I actually own BusyCal on Mac through Setapp ! My calendar need is not intense so it completely suits me !
Fantastical on iOS - Just beautifully crafted software.
BusyCal on Mac. Just so used to it after many years.
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I’ve been using Calendars 5 and I’m really liking the day and month views. Also really like having the views always available across the top of the screen.
Getting around in Calendar 366 will take some getting used to for me. The extra swipe to show the different views, and then the laundry list of views, slows me down. I don’t use a lot of Reminders so that one view of just tasks that they have is wasted on me…but I am accidentally on that view a lot.
I still pop into Fantasical from time to time, but I haven’t set up an account just yet and that hesitation it does when it reloads and repopulates with calendar entries drives me nuts.
On Mac I’ve been using the stock calendar and haven’t noticed. I’m sure there’s going to be some kind of clunk that trips me up but so far it’s been fine. I may pop back into Fantasical to see if I really feel the difference.
While part of me feels like I want to be using power apps, there’s another part of me that thinks I would be happier if I stopped worrying about apps and revenue models and what’s worth a subscription renewal and just used the stock calendar.
Anyways, the non-rational part of my brain has been enjoying this tour through the other calendar offerings.
I still need to check out that iOS widget app mentioned above.
I’ve gone back and forth a bit with Fantastical 3. I like the design and the natural language processing, but as I’ve said before, my EA handles most of my calendar so this is not a big feature for me. However the thing that finally convinced me that the non-subscription version of Fantastical was not an option was the lack of travel time notification, which requires a subscription. So after a brief dalliance with Fantastical 3, I’m back to to the stock calendar on all devices.
Messed with Fantastical off and on… Prefer Calendars 5 iOS , Don’t calendar on the Mac.
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Me too. I tried the Launchbar actions for some time. I never got used to them and was always entering into the Calendar to adjust stuff anyway. One reason I found it easier to go with Alfred when I started to find Launchbar glitchy recently as I said before. I found, during trial periods of other calendar apps that I was always going into the native app anyway. Reminders of different kinds too I never found more useful and had more friction than just making a caledar entry? Am I strange?
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I am going the exact same way. Like @Bmosbacker who almost gave me the idea, I was on the brink of it I think.
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Like many here I am back, quite happily with the Native app, after uninstalling Launchbar for Alfred. What really upped my Calendar game was a tip from @MacSparky to make an alert by making a separate Calendar event at the time you want the reminder or alert and keeping Alerts preferences set at ‘time of event’ in preferences. That streamlined me far more than Launchbar or other apps did. I am looking more and more at strategic solutions rather than app ones these days. Credit to David Sparks though, he is one smart guy.
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Well those who know you better will have to assess your “strangeness 
but what you described is not strange.
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Deep breath…
iPhone: WeekCal as my main app to take in my life in week view, Fantastical for their great widget, FirstSeed Calendar for quick, smooth scrolling in month view for long-term preview and planning, CalZones for travel outside my home time zone (it’s possible that premium version of Fantastical would be as good at it, but I haven’t had reasons to upgrade, and I already own CalZones).
Watch: stock app most of the time, Fantastical in the “large complication” slot when using Infograph.
iPads: mostly, FirstSeed Calendar.
Macs: BusyCal as my main app, Fantastical in the menu bar, and occasionally log into gcal in the browser to tweak server-side settings.
Also, NotePlan, but that’s a story for another time.
And finally, one of these
on my office wall
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I am very interested to hear about this. Maybe you can explain your use case in another thread? Thank you in advance 
The app seemed to have made quite a progress since v1 and wasn’t even on my radar anymore.
Can you embed images to a note? That’s one thing that the website doesn’t show or talk about, so I almost assume it won’t be possible. You can since v2.3! How does this work in conjunction with the “show note in Finder” function?
I’m largely happy with Readdle’s Calendars (+ CoCoCal for big picture planning and zooming views), but I second the notion that Fantastical’s iOS widget is outstanding!
For every note that has an image, a subfolder is created, named notefilename_attachments, and the images are placed there. Unfortunately, the Markdown syntax included in the note does not include the folder — just the image file name, which, I guess, NotePlan knows how to interpret, but other Markdown editors do not. It’s a new feature, so it might still evolve.
Another vote for BusyCal through SetApp. I also have pretty intense contact-management needs, so having both BusyContacts and BusyCal available through SetApp has been a great fit.
A zap that creates a new google contact after client hires me, which then goes into BusyContacts and syncs with BusyCal means I can almost instantly have their email populate in event invites without any search/copy/paste has made things way smoother for me.
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Hi @Bmosbacker, just curious, did you go back to the Mac after your iPad only experiment you wrote about , if so why? or are you still using the iPad as your main computer?
Good question. I use my iPad Pro (12.9) for 85-90+% of my work. I will sometimes switch to the MBP if I have multiple files to manipulate or if I need to put my iPad on the charger. I have also reduced the total number of apps that I use to simplify my workflow, which is valuable in and of itself but also when using the iPad. I try to avoid MacOS specific applications. I hope this helps!
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Yes thanks, I am trying to use my iPad Pro as much a possible now and it has almost replaced my MacBook Pro. I hope that when my iMac comes to its end of life, in a few years time that I can rely on an iPad Pro as my primary computer and depending what the future holds for all apple platforms, if I needed MacOS I may get by with a Mac Mini on the desktop. I too have culled my apps right back to essential ones which i can rely on. Recently after the controversy about Fantastical I went back to Apples Calendar app which is working out just fine for me as I use Things to organise everything else. Thanks again
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In the weeks leading up to Fantastical 3, I was starting to rethink my use of Fantastical 2. It’s an amazing app no doubt, but there are some things it just couldn’t do as well as the stock app.
For one, shared calendar notifications (I share iCloud calendars w my family) are non-existent. Also, a lot of notifications were being missed (e.g. my boss cancelling a meeting 15 mins before it starts would not show up in Fantastical). I was also starting to wish for a “day” view within Fantastical and travel times, so I found myself always using two calendar apps; the stock app for reliable notifications and Fantastical for creating events.
When they dropped Fantastical 3 I liked the redesign, but the weather integration is a bit sketchy (check out John Oliver’s show on the bit he did re: Accuweather) and unneeded. I also find the subscription cost to be a little excessive, so I decided to look elsewhere.
I ended up back on TimePage for a while because it is free for me as I purchased the app when it first came out. It’s well designed and fun to use but in terms of navigating around it’s a little busy and again – I was still using it in conjunction with the stock app.
So after several years of avoiding the stock app, I now find myself back on it and actually enjoying it. The current date and day of week is displayed right on the icon, there are multiple views, all notifications come through in a timely fashion – yeah, I’m happy with it. Who knew?!
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I have something similar. There’s something valuable about seeing the big picture, and being able to see it from a few feet away. My calendar too has the weekend at the week’s end (which is the standard in much of the world - would be interesting to learn the history of the split-weekend variant so common in the USA).
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I used to use Mozilla Sunbird, but now I use the built-in calendar in Mozilla Thunderbird and the regular Apple calendar app.