Fantastical - Calendar App Reviews

My family uses it exclusively; I find it much better than Calendar. The free-text entries “lunch at Cossetta with Joe at noon Sunday” make it even better.

I’ll start with the negatives in the hope that the developer sees this: Cons: I get notifications for EVERY calendar that my Gmail account is shared with. In other words, when someone at my company invites someone else to a meeting, I get that notification even if I’m not the one who has been invited or the one who is sending the invitation. This is a huge problem since I’m constantly closing out notifications that don’t apply to me. I haven’t had this problem with any other calendar apps, including the original Fantastical. If this one problem can be fixed, I would easily rate this as a five star app. If it isn’t fixed soon, I’ll have to stop using the app. Pros: Looks great, loads fast, has a great UI, is intelligent and functions well (minus the notable problem I listed above).

I was looking for an application that would provide the glances/complications I wanted on my Apple Watch, which I recently purchased. I wanted to be able to merge Reminders and iCloud Calendars into the main complication on the Apple Watch After going through all the different apps I have and none of them getting more than a “meh”, I purchased Fantastical2. There are other things I needed also, which worked out as a win for me because I was able to uninstall a couple apps that were only doing one thing. Every now and then, you find it uncanny when you mess with an application and you get the sense that the developer was in tune enough to meet the needs of such a diverse audience. The price is steep. Each application (OS X, iPad, iPhone) is sold separately. This is common practice for these types of applications and they should be fairly compensated for their work. Especially when it provides the end user something of value. For me it was an acceptable cost and am happy with it’s functionality.

I loved the first Fantastical. All I need it the taskbar widget to add events and quickly check my day to day events. If I needed more, I’d go into iCal and do what needed to be done…which was almost never. If they had given us an option for the widget again, and only the widget for $10-15, I would have jumped at it. As it is now, I feel like I wasted a ton of money on an app I use 10% of. I’ve open the actual calendar part of the app three times in 5 months. So, Fantastical devs, for Fantastical 3, please give me options instead of having to buy the whole cart when all I want is a small piece of it.

I read all review and took the plunge to buy this very expensive calendar app hoping that it would be much better than “calendar”. Have been using it for a week and I feel that I am using a PC instead of a MAC. Fantastical 2 crashes almost every time. Not sure what to do. Probably go back to “calendar”. Sad sad sad. I will love to know if this is a isolated and if it is then please FANTASTICAL tell me how to solve it.

The calendar is great for users of Gmail and other webmail clients. It’s really quite terrible with Exchange. Allows you to see and make events, but after the initial creation, you can no longer edit. Requires you do delete the event and start over. Not great for people who have a schedule that changes a lot. Would love to see it work well to bring together exchange and other types of calendar accounts.

Please… Lunar calendar support~!!

I am writing this review as a user who was frankly a bit shocked that they intended to charge so much for Fantastical 2, considering the first version was much cheaper. However, I’ve grown to really like this software. I feel the integration with Google is better, and the ability to edit calendar sets definitely seems more flexible than the stock Calendar. I have to say, the main staying power it has is the ability to create a new event via a shortcut (mine is ALT+CTRL+C), adding the event with their superb natural language engine, and the menu bar shortcut that I held so dearly since V1. I will admit, the iPad and iPhone apps aren’t nearly as strong, when compared to the stock calendar, as far as interfaces go. However, their notification widgets are far superior and that is a very handy widget to have in your notification center. Even so, I don’t think I would’ve purchased the iPhone and iPad apps if I could do it over again, despite how much I like the widget + natural language, but it’s your call if you think these features are worth the price point. Overall, I was very hesistant buying this for my Mac as they transitioned from a simple menu bar app to a full fledged calendar replacement, but I think they are doing a great job and I now believe this application is worth it’s price tag!

I held off spending $50 for a calendar/task solution I already have native to iOS. While expensive, it does a really good job of parsing my hectic life, with a flow that is broken by separate calendar and reminder solutions for iOS. The companions for my iPad & iPhone/Apple Watch make it even better. I like I can finally have a full visual represenation of tasks/calendars. I love all the options and tweaks. I’ve bounced back and forth between this and the native apps, but since I paid for it, I’m holding out. So far I like the functionality and purposeful menu bar and today widget. It seems to sync flawlessly with iCloud, for both reminders and calendars. I wish the iOS version of the apps synced real time as well. I also wish it would push sync, rather than sync every 5/10/15 min, but believe that’s a limitation to iCloud not allowing non-Apple apps to take advantage of the push platform. Overall, a great, functional system for managing my schedule and tasks.

Full Exchange support added in the most recent update. Fantastical just keeps getting better and better.

This update removes every issue I’ve had with the app, and the “Check Availability" window is a very welcome addition. Highly recommended!

While I cannot vouch for long term usage(Just updated) the fact that the Flexibits team has added this much needed feature I am ready to kick my Outlook Calendar to the curb. So much to love here and Fantastical is one step closer to achieving Calendar perfection! Thanks Flexibits!

Fantastical continues to be the very best calendar app. Natural language event & todo creation, with lots of sweet power user syntax, strong Google Calendar & Exchange integration, support for iCloud calendars as well, and a lovely, clean interface.

Fantastical 2 has been the best bet for calendaring on OS X ever since it was released a year ago. With native Exchange support in version 2.2, it absolutely blows away its competition. Stop reading reviews and just buy it!

Fantastical is hands down the best calendar app for Mac and iOS and the 2.2 update to the Mac app is huge!

Nice to see support for Microsoft Exchage. Works well and very nice views of the day, week and month that make it so much better than the OS X Calendar app.

OK—when Fantistical 2 first came out, I posted a critical review—due to two important things the app did not have at that point: native Exchange integration and printing. Flexibits received that criticism constructively and told me they had these two things on the roadmap for future versions. Well, with v2.2, they delivered on both and I love the new version—finally it is a beautiful replacement for the native Mac Calendar app for me! Great work, guys—thank you very much!!!

Quadrupling the number of stars as timezones are now in the UI and done better than anything else. Well done! I’m going back to using Fantastical. I’m reserving the last star until I can determine if it still gets upset about WiFi captive portals and nags incessantly. **** older reviews below: Updating this review because a recent update apparently added timezone support so I thought I’d give it a second chance since I paid for it. Functionality looks essentially unchanged as far as I can tell. It also still spews error alerts whenever your laptop associates with a captive portal - very annoying while you are trying to sign in to get ‘net access. I end up quitting the app completely because of this. **** original review stil stands: Im traveling 80% of the time and have been using the awful Google Calendar before Fantastical - and now I’m back to preferring Google. Here’s why: 1. Fantastical has basically NO timezone support. It will follow the system timezone, or allow you to override that with a single zone. I’m traveling across Asia, Europe, and USA every week and the people that I need to schedule meeting with are in a different zone much of the time. Fantastical gives me NO help with that. I need to revert to Google Calendar or another meeting planner when setting meetings, putting flights on my calendar, etc. 2. When I am in a hotel or airport (which seems to be very often - I’m writing this review in a hotel) with a captive portal then Fantstical goes into a loop with an annoying error alert window that comes into the foreground and will immediately reappear until dismissed. This will happen until I authenticate to the hotel/airport Internet service - which is frustrated by the Fantastical alerts. Why can’t it just wait quietly LIKE EVERY OTHER APP. Anyway - it has been sufficiently annoying for me to overlook all the nice features it probably has. I despise Google Calendar but still end up using it.

The problems I had have been resolved and the app is looking better and better everyday. I showed it to a friend who didn’t like the cost of entry. Especially considering how many platforms you have to invest in to really get the most out of it.

This is how Apple should have designed its calendar. I’m just amazed at the price. $50 is the same price as Apple Compressor for my film editing, which is a heck of a lot deeper in complexity. What’s more, I wanted to have my iPhone use the same calendar features, so I bought that app, but I was not impressed that I had to pay another $5. Works great on theiPhone. Still, I’ve only had these two apps for about an hour, and theyre quite simple to use and I’m sure I’ll discover more of their wonders. I’m just thinking, though, when there’s an upgrade, I wonder how much they’ll hit me up for? DON’T I SOUND LIKE A CHEAPSKATE? I’m really not, but this is the most expensive app I’ve bought in quite a while.