BusyCal: This App is The Smarter Choice for Mac Users

TheSweetBits Highlights

• BusyCal offers advanced scheduling tools with a familiar Apple Calendar-like interface.
• Ideal for Mac power users who need detailed task management and time tracking.
• Integrates smoothly with iCloud, Google, and Exchange calendars.
• A great balance of features and price compared to premium alternatives like Fantastical.

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While Apple Calendar offers its share of benefits, such as better continuity within the Apple ecosystem, it is far from the best calendar app for Mac. You don’t get many features that can actually enhance how you manage schedules and planning.

BusyCal, a popular third-party calendar app, is an alternative people swear by. It is made for both beginners and professionals who need a productivity-focused calendar. It claims to become a central space where you can manage anything and everything about your days ahead.

What Is BusyCal?

BusyCal for macOS calls itself the most powerful, flexible, heavily customizable, and reliable calendar app for macOS. The calendar app ships with all the standard features you would expect, but there are additional options to explore. It is impressive that BusyCal leaves ample room for customization.

The app is developed by Busy Apps, which also creates BusyCal for iOS and BusyContacts for macOS. Since these two apps work well with BusyCal, we will occasionally mention them here. However, the focus is on how BusyCal offers a superior calendar experience compared to its competitors, such as Apple Calendar.

Features Overview

• Flexible Day, Week, Month, and List views with appearance adjustments.
• Quickly create events and tasks by typing naturally (e.g., “Lunch with John tomorrow at 1pm”).
• To-dos appear right in your calendar and automatically roll forward until marked complete.
• Organize events with tags and build saved searches to surface exactly what you want.
• Easily handle travel time, time zones, and complex recurring events.
• Get native macOS alerts plus customizable alarms by email, text, or pop-up.
• See local forecasts directly in your calendar views for better planning.
• Add locations to events with map integration and travel time estimates.
• Deep ties with system services allow quick actions and smooth performance.
• Tweak fonts, colors, layouts, and display preferences to match your workflow.

BusyCal Review

As mentioned earlier, we wanted to understand how effective BusyCal is as an alternative to Apple Calendar and other calendar apps. We didn’t want to give you a cursory overview, either. Instead, to understand how it feels to use BusyCal, we used BusyCal as the default calendar app on our M2 MacBook Air.

For the last 30 days, BusyCal has been assisting us with planning, scheduling, and everything else you’d rely on a calendar for. Here are some insights on this professional-friendly calendar app. We tested the latest version of the app, called 2025.3.2, on a Mac running macOS Tahoe.

The Setup

Getting started with BusyCal is a breeze. After installing the app, a setup wizard guides you through customizing your calendar layout. You can easily integrate your existing Apple Calendar, but BusyCal also supports various calendar services, including Google Calendar. Syncing with Apple Calendar requires creating an app-specific password due to Apple’s security measures.

Overall, it doesn’t take an expert to set up and get started with BusyCal. The process barely takes more than a few minutes.

The Interface

In our opinion, the overall design of BusyCal is quite minimal. We might have liked it a bit more if there were a more vibrant color palette, but that is a personal preference. On the bright side, it leaves plenty of room for customization.

So, if you want to make your calendar look a bit more interesting, you can do that with the help of stickers and sticky notes. In particular, we appreciate how the month view functions seamlessly across both macOS and iOS. You have the option to track your progress throughout the month quickly and easily.

The intuitiveness of the BusyCal UI is demonstrated in various ways. For example, you don’t always have to open separate event icons to make changes. Instead, you can simply drag and drop the event item to adjust its duration. Similarly, you can easily move events between different dates or months.

Additionally, the quick-access sidebar on the left side allows you to manage both active and inactive calendars easily.

Calendar Management

Regardless of the calendar you’re using, BusyCal makes it easy to create and edit events. For starters, you can double-click on any date to create an event, type the name, and change specifics later. While at it, you can use natural language to create events.

We told you that BusyCal offers built-in support for task management and to-do lists. You can go about these features in two ways. One, you can use the built-in interface to manage tasks, which also offers powerful reminder options. Two, you can use a third-party to-do list app and keep everything in sync.

As someone who manages multiple deadlines, the combined interface of BusyCal is impressive in many ways. For instance, we can easily start a timed or untimed task and cross them off as we go about the day. The Task Management module of BusyCal also features well-designed sorting options.

Scheduling & Time Management

BusyCal offers smart filters and search options. Both are great for organizing all your calendars from a single space. Since we use multiple types of calendars for both professional and personal needs, it makes sense to organize the content and filter it accordingly. You can enable your favorite filters from the top part.

The search function is also quick and effective. Once again, you can use natural language to search for events across all those calendars you have enabled. When combined with smart filters, it felt easy to find whatever you are looking for within BusyCal.

You also get plenty of control over recurring events and reminders. These were pretty handy while managing meeting entries from multiple platforms. As long as you have connected the respective calendar accounts, you will get on-time reminders on all connected devices.

If you work with people in a different time zone, you will love the multiple time zone support feature from BusyCal. It allows you to set up your preferences for different time zones and easily consider them when creating or modifying events.

Sharing & Collaboration

The collaboration experience with BusyCal is quite impressive, as it enables seamless work with shared calendars. So, whenever you make changes to a shared calendar, the syncing process is quick, and you don’t have to worry about what happens in the backend.

Thus, you get to focus more on the content and scheduling than on whether it works. It is worth mentioning the integration aspect briefly, as BusyCal can be integrated with various CRM solutions or other contact management apps you may have.

Compatibility & Integration

You get support for calendars such as Reminders, iCloud, Google Calendar, Office 365, Exchange, and others. But if your company uses a CalDAV server such as FastMail or Zimbra, you can easily set it up as well. And depending on the mail server, the reminder and task list facility would also be set up rapidly.

The unified syncing system ensures that changes you make are reflected as soon as possible. Now, when it comes to integration, BusyCal is known for its seamless compatibility with busy contacts, an app developed by the same company.

If you use the calendar app for work-related needs, you can utilize BusyContacts for CRM, which is beneficial when setting up meetings and other engagements.

We also appreciated some nifty integrations, such as weather and maps. Information from both modules is useful when planning your day or week.

Performance & Responsiveness

In our experience, BusyCal has been quite fast, and because it runs natively on Apple Silicon, everything is as quick as possible.

For instance, even when you put a lot of pressure on the system with tens of calendars, it can handle all the tasks very efficiently. At the end of the day, you just need to ensure that there is a stable internet connection that can keep everything synced.

Security & Privacy

BusyCal comes with numerous features designed to protect your privacy and security. In terms of data security, you have the option to create backups and store them in a location of your choice. Similarly, there are ways to ensure that your information is safe by authenticating the servers and verifying that the links are secure.

Overall, you don’t have to worry about your security or privacy while connecting different calendar accounts to BusyCal. The company is one of the most reputable options in the industry, and it has been recognized for its transparent privacy policy.

Pricing & Availability

BusyCal is currently available for macOS 11.0 or later. You can check out its full-feature version for 14 days as part of the free trial.

Post the free trial, you can purchase the app for $49.99. This license bundles the software and 18 months of updates from the developer. After these 18 months, you will continue to have access to the app, but not any updates.

You can also get BusyCal through a Setapp subscription, which we believe offers the most value. BusyCal for iOS, the iPhone/iPad companion app, costs another $9.99.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Highly customizable calendar views (day, week, month, year).
• Built-in to-do and task management alongside events.
• Smart filters, tags, and color coding for organization.
• Supports multiple calendar services like Google, iCloud, and Exchange.
• Travel time, weather, and location integration for context-aware scheduling.
• Customizable alerts, templates, and repeat event options.
• Menu bar, quick view, and natural language event entry.
• Offline functionality for viewing and editing events.
• Strong privacy—no account or cloud lock-in required.

Cons:

• Mac and iOS only; no Windows or Android support.
• Manual setup required on each device, no unified sync.
• Occasional sync delays with certain calendar services.
• Lacks collaborative features like shared task comments.
• Limited automation or integration with third-party workflow tools.

BusyCal Vs Alternatives

Here’s a quick table comparing BusyCal with some popular alternatives like Fantastical and Morgen:

Feature / Criteria	BusyCal	Fantastical	Morgen
Platform / cross‐device	macOS + iOS only	macOS, iOS, Windows, Android (and web)	macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, Browser
Pricing model	One‐time (or perpetual license) option	Subscription based	Subscription based, free / basic tier available
Customization & power features	Very high (custom views, filters, tags)	High, with strong UI polish	Moderate‐high with strong task + calendar integration
UI / design polish	Functional, “pro” look	Very polished, slick UI	Clean, modern, minimalist interface
Integration with tasks / planning	Good (tasks, reminders)	Strong (events + tasks, meeting links etc.)	Excellent at merging multiple calendars + tasks, time-blocking
Ideal user profile	Power user who prioritizes control	User who values UX and cross‐device access	User who wants calendar + task + time-blocking in one tool
Potential trade-offs	Limited to Apple ecosystem; UI can feel busy	Higher cost; many features behind paywall	May lack depth in “enterprise” project features; newer app

As you can see, though there are some limitations, BusyCal competes well with the options that we have covered. Although this application is limited to the Apple ecosystem, its performance is almost unmatched.

The functional professional look of this application appears to be far superior to other options when you are focused on productivity. It is also less distracting from a usability standpoint.

What Users Say

Brian Clark, founder of United Medical Education, notes:

“BusyCal is my go-to Calendar App on my Mac as it has the one-of-a-kind feature of Customizable Display Filters, which is very important when working with multiple schedules.

My role as both the CEO and a Healthcare Professional requires me to quickly switch back and forth between my ACLS course development calendar, my PALS certification scheduling and my business operations without breaking a sweat.

BusyCal allows me to set up Smart Filters that will immediately hide every event/task that isn’t relevant to what I am currently doing and remove approximately 70% of visual clutter, thus allowing me to focus on exactly what requires my attention at any given time.

Using BusyCal to create instant targeted views saves me an enormous amount of time in each of my daily planning sessions.”

Brian Gunterman, founder and CEO at DDR BBQ Supply, adds:

“BusyCal allows me to keep my work and competitive cook schedule on track and follow reminders through customizable views.”

The Final Verdict

Though there are caveats, BusyCal is a great calendar app when you prioritize simplicity and productivity. It is a convenient option when you want maximum customizability bundled with a standard set of features. Sure, you don’t get many collaboration or AI-scheduler features, but BusyCal checks all the boxes you need to take care of your schedule across multiple calendars, tasks, and reminders.

We also believe BusyCal offers impressive value compared to the features and support you get.