Rise Calendar Review

Rise Calendar wants to be your base for calendar events, but more focused. Everything is centred around better management of your time in the new Rise Calendar with FocusGuard, flexi-time & better 1:1 meeting bookings.

What is Rise Calendar and who's it for?

Rise Calendar is focused around focus by helping you regain your focus time during the day. Not just for individuals, Rise Calendar offers a way to add and invite team members who share their calendar times with you for ease of booking meetings & planning time.

There are more features within Rise Calendar that focus on management of time like FocusGuard that helps you better block time for focused work - it helps by blocking that time when meetings come up or your week becomes overwhelmed and shares it externally meaning those looking in won't be able to get that time with you.

The other feature most notable is three types of calendar bookings - flexi, normal and all-day which help to create a more centric focus on what an event is and how it functions.

Rise Calendar Pros

Here's what we liked about Rise Calendar in our tests.

• Flexi Types - Making an event comes in three forms and they've really thought well about how meetings, events and general blocking works. This makes it breathe easier for managing your calendar going forward.
• FocusGuard feature - A neat way to block time for non-meeting, focused time. FocusGuard lives within Rise and just adapts to when meetings are added and makes sure it books the other time as busy for people externally booking.
• Design & Performance - Everything worked snappy and was smooth to use. In Settings you can even go and reduce motion, but on M1 macs onwards, you won't notice this.

Rise Calendar Cons

Here's some of things we weren't sure on in Rise Calendar.

• Expensive Premium - Not everyone will use this for teams, but the $20 pricing is steep when it comes to per user calendar pricing, this is for 6 users or more.

How Much is Rise Calendar?

Rise Calendar is surprising in their pricing. Free for up to 5 users, with most features free too. However, the premium is much more at around $20 per user, per month - very expensive for a calendar application but one that is subject to 6 members or more.

Again, you do get the features free for up to 5 members which isn't too bad for solo users.

Rise Calendar Verdict

Whilst we did our tests, Rise Calendar actually impressed us. The speeds and performance were very good (as fast as Vimcal we found) - the features took some time to get used to, but worked well. And the premise of focus oozed into the features made you feel more in control - especially for meeting centric people. FocusGuard and flexi meeting types were a decent feature.

The value you get in the free plan for solo users is impressive. For team users, this will be a big expense, but again if you're sold on the concept and how it works, maybe an investment for managing all your time better and getting less meetings, more focus time.

Rise Calendar has an exciting route ahead in their new calendar journey.