Fantastical Calendar

What is Fantastical Calendar

Fantastical does not rest on its laurels but continues to be at the forefront of calendar apps on iPad. It brilliantly combines both your calendar entries and reminders in a snappy dashboard view, whereby it effectively renders Apple’s two stock apps completely expendable. What’s more is that its simple gestures let you navigate effortlessly between every calendar view, from monthly to weekly and daily breakdowns. Navigating Fantastical, you will find refinement wherever you look (and touch). Needless to say it’s also capable of split screen multitasking on iPad.

What's it about

We’re now living in the time of the great subscription model gold rush, in which developers find themselves desperate to snag the attention of users that –  thanks to the popularity of Netflix, Spotify, and others – are now finding themselves increasingly willing to pay monthly for a service. But not everybody is happy with such a switch. 

There’s now feature parity across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch – as well as seamless compatibility between the lot. That means Fantastical’s apps are no longer individually priced; one subscription covers everything. There’s a free tier, too, and even these basics outshine the default iOS Calendar app. The devs were keen to ensure that any users who previously paid for Fantastical 2 will keep all their existing features without requiring a subscription – a fact that seems to have been largely missed by the naysayers.

In terms of new features, highlights include the ability to switch between Calendar sets based on your location. That means when you’re in the office Fantastical will only interact with your work appointments, but as soon as you get home it switches back to your personal calendar.

Elsewhere, we have souped-up meeting tools and an upgrade to the app’s natural language input tools for predictive event creation. Fantastical also boasts 10-day weather forecasts for meetings and events (3 days on the free plan) and the ability to browse a variety of pre-populated calendars for various things like sports or entertainment. There’s also decent task support with Todoist and Google Tasks, and the ability to explore full day, week, month, and annual calendar views.

Visually, the app has received a general spruce-up – nothing drastic, but a pleasant redesign across the board.

This controversial subscription will no doubt alienate some of Fantastical’s fanbase, which is a real shame when the app is still hands-down the best calendar on the App Store. Power users won’t balk at $5/month for this level of productivity, while for the first time free users can have a slice of the Fantastical pie. It’s those medium-level users in between who may shudder at the long-term subscription costs, and for those people there are certainly cheaper alternatives out there. 

Bottom line, Fantastical is fantastic for anyone religiously organizing and planning their days and tasks. It might be one of the apps in our roundup asking for a somewhat steep investment for all of the features, however once over the hump, it is going to make you a very happy user as Fantastical is probably the best iPad productivity app available.

Will Fantastical for iPad work on my iPhone or iPod touch?

Fantastical for iPad will not work on an iPhone or iPod touch. You will need to download Fantastical for iPhone, which is a separate app.

Does Fantastical work on Mac?

Fantastical works seamlessly across your Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch. Add your existing calendar accounts directly to Fantastical and keep all of your events and tasks in sync. 

Related: Mac Apps for Students