Reviewed by Francesco D'Alessio
Rise Calendar Review (2024)
Best Features, Pricing, Alternatives & Verdict
Rise Calendar is one of the rising (sorry) calendar apps on the market with a powerful macOS app and a focus on focus management. Here's our full in-depth review of Rise.
What is Rise Calendar?
Rise Calendar is a calendar app for individuals and teams to manage your schedule.
Used by over 100,000 teams worldwide — Try it now for free / No credit card needed
Run all your work on one platform with customizable products that scale with your needs.
What does Rise Calendar do?
Rise Calendar wants to be your base for managing your time.
They want to help you better manage your focus with a few features that zoom into this. The first is something called FocusGuard - this helps people in the background block out time to focus, instead of having your calendar experience bombarded by other people it will block out suitable deep work time for you to get into the weeds.
This is partly done by the introduction of flexible meetings that are movable and help to avoid double bookings too, these meetings can move to best suit your work schedule and the other person using Rise. Rise has scheduling links that allow for planning with team members and also external parties using a Calendly-like feature.
Rise Calendar is designed for both individuals and teams, you can add up to 5 team members to a free Rise account, but after that, you'll be pushed into the team pricing.
Used by over 100,000 teams worldwide — Try it now for free / No credit card needed
Run all your work on one platform with customizable products that scale with your needs.
Rise Calendar Pros
Here are the bits we loved within Rise Calendar in our review:
1. Performance & Design
Rise Calendar is a speedy, stunning calendar app. In our own tests, and the video we created below, you can see how the app works without any hiccups even in beta.
They do this is a beautiful calendar app designed for macOS that oozes ease-of-use and perfect to look at. Combined with this is the performance that is speedy and really snappy when using on desktop.
Whilst Rise doesn't have a mobile app, the speed performance is notable on the desktop and you hope it translates well to the iOS and Android editions (yet to be announced).
2. Team Scheduling & Meetings
Managing your team's meetings can be tricky when everyone uses different apps.
Rise Calendar wants to help manage your meetings by connecting your team members and allowing you to book slots with them. The meeting booking function allows to window into your team's schedule and book slots that best work for them using AI intelligence.
From this area, you can also share a meeting link for scheduling a meeting externally too. Each meeting can be assigned normal, flexible and all-day allowing you some backbone to each meeting and the openness to moving a 1:1 meeting.
Sharing availability can be done with a pre-created link and you can create multiple of these or you can create specific slots (like we did) above and this allows you to better find the slot perfect for you, although there's still helpful suggestions that pick times that work for you and the other person, if they are routinely used to book a meeting.
3. Focus Features
One of the crown jewels of Rise Calendar is their focus on focus.
Focus Guard is their technology that lives in the background to help book out time for you. This is time that is designed to be focus time, allowing you to focus for a set period across the week and something that can be adjusted and switched off in Settings.
This is built around the Deep Work concept by Cal Newport to promote time to work for yourself that will allow you to accomplish projects, perfect for teams and individuals.
Rise Calendar Cons
Here's the bits we didn't really like or they could do better with:
Lacks Features
Whilst they perform very well as a calendar app.
Rise Calendar is solely a calendar app. This is absolutely fine, but for many the calendar app market is expanding rapidly with lightweight task management, like apps like Morgen and Amie, that have brought these features alongside calendar management.
This is still a public beta, but something to note when looking at it.
How much does Rise Calendar cost?
Rise Calendar is free, for teams it costs $16 per month, per user.
Verdict: Is Rise Calendar Worth It?
Rise Calendar is an impressive calendar experience.
A combination of good calendar speed and features like Focus Guard that want to protect you from overloading your week are all nice. This app is perfect for individuals that allow them to book and manage their schedule.
For now, it is very early days, with their public beta, macOS only app right now and the focus on developing core features. There's a lot to come from Rise Calendar, and a lot of potential here, if they continue to expand their offering in a busy calendar market.
Used by over 100,000 teams worldwide — Try it now for free / No credit card needed
Run all your work on one platform with customizable products that scale with your needs.
Is Rise Calendar good for teams?
Rise Calendar offers good free access to up to 5 team members.
Combining focus, 1:1 bookings and planning links this is a good offering to reduce meeting overwhelm and better make your schedule more flexible. There's a hefty price tag of $16 per month, per user, for this offering which for some people might not be ideal.
Largely, even in public beta, Rise Calendar works well - with a market focusing on the likes of Clockwise and Reclaim in 2024.
Best Rise Calendar Alternatives
Amie, Mayday & Morgen are all good Rise Calendar alternatives.
