Fantastical - Calendar App Reviews

Some random crashes, weird font display and bugs of non alignment of dates across panes makes the experience less than exciting.

I have been waiting years for Fantastical to support our Exchange Server. Now that it does, I have switched almost entirely from Calendar to Fantastical 2. Pros • Exchange Server support, including attendee availability (killer feature for business users) • Calendar Sets to move between home, work, and business rhythms (incredibly useful for those with complex calendars) • Integration of task lists onto the calendar list and onto the actual calendar (finally a one-stop shop for meetings and tasks) Cons • Printing is currently landscape only, with no portrait support • Next available time does not respect work day limits, providing less functionality than Calendar Wishlist • An option to see tasks with no due time appear as all-day events at the top of the calendar (this would be incredible)

Please… Lunar calendar support~!

My requirement for a suitable calendar app is that it read all my required inputs, perform properly and without frustration on my Mac and all my IOS devices, and sync flawlessly and reliably between all these devices. Fantastical 2 is now running on all my OS X and IOS devices, and quite well. It pulls from FB, Google, Yahoo, local and iCloud calndars and contacts, and Wunderlist as well. I’ve asked for some help from the devs and received useful responses in a reasonable amount of time. The display is quite well layed out on both OSX and IOS, and the app has quite a bit of options available for fine tuning. Recommended. The recent update to 2.2.2 adds more very useful function to an already well-rounded app that I use daily on all devices. STill higjly recommended.

I love this calendar!! It is overpriced, yes. But I believe it totally worth it. If you love the app, and support works great, you should pay for the app the good price. And I love every bit of it: design, ability to quickly add reminders and events, etc. I use it every day 24/7. So I’m really happy of what developers/designers have created. Thank you.

So let me say that I run multiple calandars off this software and it works great. The only issues I have are the notifications are broken. At 5 PM every day all the notifications for the day pop up. If my calendars were not sync’d with my phone as well I wouldn’t get any notifications until that time. I messaged support about it and really didn’t get any help at all. I jumped through all their hoops and provided them will log files etc and in the end, in typical “developer” fashion I was essentially blown off. So my other complaint would be their support isn’t very good. Other than those two issues however, the software does what they say it does and syncs very well.

I think this is an amazing app that works seamlessly with any other calendar/reminder accounts. Events will update immediedetly from other accounts. $50 is a bit pricey for a calendar app, but when you really use, it totally pays off!

If you are looking for a calendar app, just buy this one and be done. It is the best one out there, I have tried them all. I live and die by the calendar, this is where it is at. The new version however is a memory hog. I start it in the morning and by dinner time the app has consumed 2+GB of memory. I am sure they will fix it.. they update the software often.

Since the update, I can no longer use my $50 software. It crashed while I was entering an item on the calendar & continues to crash every time I try to open the software. When this issue is fixed, I’ll update my review accordingly. UPDATE: The company responded quickly with a fix. However, the fix still does not work properly. My calendar continues to crash or show empty dates for days where I know I have scheduled appointments.

Cannot even keep the application open without constant sync errors which I never had before updating. So sick of this junk software.

I am a State Prosecutor and that means I manage an entire court. Certain simple functions like duplicate, search and even the colour for work, home etc makes this the best calendar app out there. Yes the cost is exorbitant as far as apps go but if you make the investment at least from a professional standpoint you will not be dissappointed. I will reccommend this for any person, now I run my court seemlessly. This is one of my essential apps that I use every single day it has made apple calendar obsolete in my view!

I just upgraded to El Capitan. I have an old iMac, a new iPhone 6 and an iPad mini. Before I upgraded I used the Mac Calendar. Worked great. After installing El Capitan I had trouble with Calendar - it would not transfer dates, it would not show appointments sent to me by email, etc. I was a wreck so I spent the money on Fantastical2. It is a very complex app and if you need all the colors, bells and whistles it might be great for you. It is difficult to use and, frankly, just plain silly. I just want a really good calendar that transfers between my devices. And go figure - after messing around with my settings and checking into Apple support community groups, I was able to bring Calendar back to life! It does all I need and I am happy again.

Regarding 14-day week view, which I use all the time: The left sidebar with the mini-calendar and event list could be tightened to make better use of the 13” screen. (A rough guess is that 50 pixels could be squeezed out.) Every pixel counts for those of us who don’t want to use the smallest font size. Better yet, give me an option to hide it entirely! In the main weekly display, the gutter between the sidebar and the times (9:00am etc) could be tightened to shave a few more pixels. I’d be fine with an option to suppress the “AM” and “PM” on those labels. All of this horizontal space adds up, usually causing the event names wrapping in week view. That’s ugly, hard to ready, and it suppreses part of the event name.

This is the first ever app that I’ve dropped a significant amount of $$$ on and I am a bit dissappointed. Honestly, it’s beautiful and user-friendly but I’m having issues with it crashing multiple times through the day. I’ll have it open in the background and it will just shut down and ask me to submit a report. That, or while I’m typing in an ‘event’ it closes. Beyond that, I was upset that I have to pay AGAIN for the mobile version of this app. At this price point, I think we should have access to both the desktop and mobile version. I’ll look forward to revising my review when we can at least get the crashing problem to subside :)

I’ve used Fantastical since the first version and am now getting around to writing a review. It’s a really convenient app for plugging in all your appointments since the language recognition makes updating your calendar much quicker. With that said, the Apple Calendar app tends to crash whenever I have Fantastical open (or vice versa) and I’m not sure why. In fact, I’m not able to my appointments in the Calendar app. SInce I also have the mobile version of Fantastical, this is not much of an issue. However, I hope that this is something that the developers can fix.

I enjoyed using it until it gave me a sync error I couldn’t bypass - so back to Mac calendar for now...

Years ago before the native Apple Calendar app accepted “natural language” input, I could certainly understand all the hype about Fantastical. It allowed you to create events on your calendar by simply typing things like, “Lunch with Barb tomorrow at 1:00 pm” and voila, Fantastical would turn that into an event on your calendar. No fussing with tedious little date and time spinners. It was slick. Magical even. But not anymore. The Apple Calendar app now allows you to do exactly the same thing, yet Fantastical still promotes this feature as though it is the only app that allows natural language input. Well, it isn’t. They may have been pioneers in that arena, but they aren’t anymore. So that is simply not a selling point now. What, then, would cause me to shell out fifty bucks of my hard-earned money just to replace my native calendar with Fantastical? Besides the fact that Fantastical has a slightly “prettier” face than the Apple calendar, and that it provides a quick-access icon on the task bar… I can’t find a single reason to buy it. With Fantastical’s natural language input now being a totally ho-hum, that’s-so-yesterday feature, I can’t imagine anyone being willing to plunk down fifty smackeroos to buy it! Twenty… maybe, but certainly, most definitely, absolutely not fifty! I’ve tested both apps in A/B comparison tests, performing exactly the same tasks first in one app, then the other, and there just isn’t enough difference between the two anymore to matter. Sorry Fantastical. You had your shining moment in the sun, but your glory days are gone. Time to admit that and get real on your pricing. Or not. But if you don’t, you will continue to see your market share shrink as more and more users recognize the reality of what I’ve pointed out here. My advise to people considering paying fifty clams for Fantastical is to download the free trial from their website first. Do your own A/B comparison and decide for yourself before paying what is a totally outragious asking price for this piece of software.

After having used the iOS version of Fantastical on multiple iPhones, I decided to buy it for my MacOS systems after having used BusyCal for years. I should have made the jump long ago. One of the biggest headaches I had was centered around Reminders. While I was able to create custom, repeating reminders in FC on my iPhone, sometimes the reminder would repeat incorrectly on my MacOS systems due to the other Calendar app I was using there. This no longer happens! No more reminder alarms at 1am when they should be going off at 8pm. Having a list of my Calendar and Reminder items on the left side of the screen and a different view (day/month/year) in the middle helps me schedule my life a lot easier than I thought it would be. The ONLY complaint I have is the wish that there was 2 keystrokes to create a new reminder vs a new event instead of the single ⌘-N for all new items. Would save a mouse click when I need to switch to the creation of a reminder. Setting it up was dead simple: I installed the app, it found all my accounts and my events/reminders just appeared. And this happened on my personal Macs as well as the one at work using Exchange!

Updated to the latest version of Fantastical and now it crashes every time upon opening. Fix please!

I never use my apple calendar anymore. Entering the events in natural language is a game changer. I do feel I have to leave the apple version of calendar running in the background because Fantastical is not as good at picking up calendar invitations as the native app. That is the only downside. Otherwise operating within the app is a pleasure.