Reviewed by Francesco D'Alessio
Fantastical Review
Best Features, Review, Pricing & Verdict
Fantastical has been a player in the calendar market for some time, but does it still rule to roost as one of the best calendar apps out there? Is it worth your time? Let's explore.
What is Fantastical?
Fantastical is a calendar app for macOS and iOS designed for pro users.
Daily planning that flexes to you. Connect your to-dos and calendars. Try it free.
Time block from Notion, ClickUp, Linear, and more, in any calendar for intentional days.
What does Fantastical do?
Fantastical is a powerful calendar tool designed to help users stay organized and on top of their schedules. Formerly known as Fantastical 3 it offers more of an all-round experience for managing your tasks and calendar management.
Whilst this won't replace say Todoist (although in premium it does have an integration) it will be a handy way to set reminders, add small tasks and even time-block them into your schedule alongside your events, but at heart this is a calendar app with intention.
The subscription service with a free plan, Fantastical wants to be your macOS and iOS apps for on the go calendar management with a reliable feel, but does it live up to it?
Fantastical Features
In this review, let's explore the best bits and worst bits about using Fantastical as your calendar app on the daily:
Fantastical Pros
The best bits of Fantastical explored.
1. Great Calendar Experience
The feel of the application is fantastic.
Fantastical is well built on all devices, even the WatchOS edition is solid and can be used without many limitations, which is rare for WatchOS apps to be honest. The macOS and iOS versions are fast and with the combination of dark and light mode, with custom icons make the experience super easy to use.
You can connect Fantastical to Exchange, iCloud and Google Calendar but there are some limitations when using their feature calendar sets that we'll dig into a little later in the review but largely, this application oozes quality throughout.
Daily planning that flexes to you. Connect your to-dos and calendars. Try it free.
Time block from Notion, ClickUp, Linear, and more, in any calendar for intentional days.
2. Tasks & Time Blocking
Tasks is basic but handy.
Adding tasks to Fantastical is really a bonus, on the free plan they can be connected to Apple Reminders, the reminders service provided by Apple but with the premium you can connect it up to Todoist, a popular to-do list application that is a great all-rounder too.
Time-blocking is technically also possible, once you're int he tasks view, you can add priority, duration and some other task management factors - nothing in-depth - but this will allow you to drag the task into the calendar with ease alongside your calendar events and meetings making it a super lightweight time-blocking tool and you can do this with your Todoist tasks too.
3. Natural Language
One of the other QOL (quality of life) things is adding events.
You can use natural language inputs to add calendar events making on the go capture and manage on the macOS version really easy without the need to overcomplicate how you use your calendar app and no weird processes. Combine this with weather management and good settings pages that allows for nice customizations - this is a huge bonus.
Fantastical Cons
Let's discuss the things that weren't as impressive:
1. Premium Limits
The free mode they offer is good, but to really get into it premium is needed.
Fantastical locks their experience mainly under premium, if you want to sync between all your devices, you need premium. If you wanted more than one calendar set, you need premium. This is super common of calendar apps and whilst it won't cost you as much as the premium on apps like Morgen Calendar, it will be something you really won't get all the value from without the use of premium.
2. Speed of Development
Compared to current calendar apps, to be honest, Fantastical doesn't have as speedy of a development cycle. Tools like Vimcal and Morgen are seemingly shipping more AI features on a routine basis. Fantastical ships twice per month, which is still very good.
Daily planning that flexes to you. Connect your to-dos and calendars. Try it free.
Time block from Notion, ClickUp, Linear, and more, in any calendar for intentional days.
Fantastical 3 Pricing
Let's take a look at the Fantastical pricing.
Updated December 2023.
How Much Does Fantastical Cost?
Fantastical is $6.99 per month. Annually that's $56.99 per year.
There is a family and team options with higher pricing and a free mode.
Fantastical Verdict
Overall Fantastical still lives up to the name.
Reliable, Apple-focused, great for solo users - the free plan is less to be desired but the premium packs a lot in and Fantastical brings a clean design with some power abilities like task management, integrations, more calendars and variety of calendar views.
This is the calendar app to get if you use Apple and love solid tools.
Best Fantastical Alternatives
There are a few Fantastical 3 alternatives to consider, we pick these two new calendar apps. Vimcal and Rise are both solid selections with similar grade features.
Daily planning that flexes to you. Connect your to-dos and calendars. Try it free.
Time block from Notion, ClickUp, Linear, and more, in any calendar for intentional days.
