8 Best Calendar Apps for iPad

If there’s one thing that a mobile device is good for these days, it’s managing your life, and there are many different companies and developers out there that have looked to take advantage of this particular niche in the app market. The iPad does come with its own built-in software for managing your days and weeks, either in your personal life or professional life, but there are many other useful functionalities that have been introduced through other apps which – I’ll be honest – I don’t know where I’d be without these days.

As with many of these kind of categories for apps, the calendar apps market on iTunes is really headed up by a couple of different apps that represent most of the users out there, but with the likes of Google weighing in with their own app, things are certainly changing for the better.

Best Calendar Apps for iPad

We recently put a few of these iPad calendar apps through the ringer, coming up with our own Top 8 favorites – here they are!

8. iCalendar ($2.99)

We’ll start with iCalendar, a beautiful but simple calendar apps for the iPad that allows you to easily track and manage your schedule through its user of pretty color coding. There are preset colors as you can see in the screenshot above but you can also create your own. This one might lack the depth of some other third party calendar apps that we’ll mention below, but it’s useful enough and notable for its visual prowess. – Download from iTunes

7. Cal (Free)

Cal from Any.Do has a great deal of interactivity, and is great in that you can actively mark tasks as done through the app and have it sync with other shared apps so as to update this informatino across the board. One thing that some calendar apps don’t boast is the ability to contact people through the app, which is something you can do through Cal. This is great for those moments when you’re browsing your calendar and need to talk to someone about organizing something – perhaps a work event – then have to contact them right away when and as you remember, without having to go through the process of exiting the app and finding them in your contact list, or whatever. – Download from iTunes

6. Calvetica Calendar ($2.99)

The big thing among productivity apps these days is the ability to bring everything together in one place and under the roof of a single app, removing the relatively arduous process of switching between apps in order to get certain things done. Now, many users many still be into the whole switching between preferred apps thing, but most developers – certainly those of productivity apps – would rather you stay put and not change the channel, so to speak. We’ve seen this in the rush of inbox management apps recently that allow you to pull together all different email sources and messages in one place, and you can also see the same thing among calendar apps.

Calvetica calendar is one of those that imports any existing calendars that you may have on your iPad and on third party apps like Calendars 2. The best thing about this app however is the custom nature of its views, allowing you to toggle between a lot of different interfaces so as to find one that suits you. – Download from iTunes

5. Calendate ($2.99)

If there were an award for the most stylish or best looking calendar app out there these days on the iPhone or iPad, then Calendate would probably win that contest hands down. While the likes of Fantastical and Calendars are very efficient apps, they are somewhat lacking on the aesthetic side – only the introduction of Sunrise showed us that calendar apps don’t always need to look like boring work spreadsheets, and that’s definitely the idea that Calendate runs with.

The functionality is fairly simple, but the personalization side of things will really draw users in – finally, we have a calendar app that is both useful and easy on the eye! – Download from iTunes

4. Calendars 5 ($6.99)

Readdle is a big name upon the landscape of productivity apps, with their excellent title that allows you to scan stuff and now this, the fifth edition of their popular Calendars app. Calendars 5 presents what seems a fairly simple interface, but there’s a huge amount of power under the hood with easy input and excellent task management functionalities.

I particularly like the color coding system that simply makes managing your day easier, as well as the ability to organize things in grids and tables which will be attractive to those spreadsheet users among you! – Download from iTunes

3. Fantastical 2 ($9.99)

Fantastical is one of those names that we’ve been hearing for some time when it comes to calendar apps, and a few hours with its detailed and in-depth second edition will allow most people to see why. The app easily allows you to enter appointments by quickly typing in the details, then allowing you to find it in a flash using their handy bi-directional interface.

What this means is that you can basically move in several directions at once to browse through weeks, days and hours in order to find something quickly. The developers here have clearly realized that most people don’t have the time to painstakingly set up calendar entries and reminders, so have looked to make the entire process of writing stuff down and finding it again as easy and as painless as possible. – Download from iTunes

2. Google Calendar (Free)

In Fall of last year, Google turned heads with its beautifully redesigned Calendar app for Android devices, promising that an iOS version was also in the making. Earlier this year, this promise was fulfilled as the app descended upon iTunes, pulling in many of the users from Fantastical and Sunrise in the process. As you may well imagine, this is something of a big deal in itself but there are many things that Google Calendar brings to the table that really do help boost productivity.

One of those that sets it apart, and indeed the central focus for the marketing campaign behind the app, is the convenient ability to take details from emails in your Gmail account and then “automagically” turn these emails into calendar entries without any input from the user. – Download from iTunes

1. Sunrise Calendar (Free)

Unless you don’t keep you ear to the ground in tech world, it can be easy to miss such news as Microsoft’s acquisition of Sunrise Calendar recently. And, since a purchased app’s name will either remain as it is so as to take advantage of an existing brand and userbase, or fall into obscurity as it is sucked of all functionality and discontinued, it can be easy to overlook such news.

The buy does show however how important a name Sunrise is in the world of mobile calendars, and usage of their improved app certainly shows that. With Sunrise, you can easily keep track of your calendar appointments, but also social media elements such as check-ins on Foursquare and Twitter feeds. It also integrates with other apps such as to-do list software Trello to make switching to Sunrise a lot easier. – Download from iTunes