When comparing BusyCal vs Microsoft Outlook, the Slant community recommends BusyCal for most people. In the question“What are the best calendar apps for Mac OS X?” BusyCal is ranked 1st while Microsoft Outlook is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose BusyCal is:
Alarms may displayed in the BusyCal Alarm Window or the Notification Center. Snooze alarms for any duration, including x minutes before start, Set default alarm intervals for new Events, To Dos, All-Day Events, and Birthdays & Anniversaries.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Custom Alarms and Snoozes
Alarms may displayed in the BusyCal Alarm Window or the Notification Center. Snooze alarms for any duration, including x minutes before start, Set default alarm intervals for new Events, To Dos, All-Day Events, and Birthdays & Anniversaries.
Pro Latteral bar
Pro Weather, moon-phases and graphics
Display a live 10-day weather forecast and moon phases. Drag-n-drop images into your calendar with the Graphics palette. Customize event fonts, sizes, styles and colors.
Pro Custom number of days/weeks
You can customize the number of weeks shown per month, or days shown per week
Pro Great support and development team
Pro Smart Filters
Create Smart Filters to display Calendar Sets, a custom view, or events that match a certain criteria with a single click.
Pro Integrated To Dos
To Dos can be displayed directly in your calendar and carry-forward until completed. To Dos in BusyCal are compatible and sync with the Reminders app on OS X and iOS.
Pro Snappy and light on resources.
Pro Sync with OwnCloud and others
Connections are more stable than in Calendar.
Pro Good built-in calendar
The calendar includes agenda, day, and three-day views.
Pro Integration with calendar and tasks
Quick conversion of a received email to a task with the deadline.
Pro Fun to use
clean and smooth experience, very nice and i like it.
Pro Smart lookup
Smart lookup is a feature where the Bing search engine is bundled in the app to allow users to automatically search for relevant websites, information and images based on the word highlighted by users, without need to open external browsers. The results will be shown on the right pane of the window.
Pro Priority messages
Microsoft Outlook comes with feature called "Clutter" to filter out incoming email based on the priority of the message set by user. User will be alerted when the high-priority message is incoming, whereas the low-priority message will be put in a separate folder.
Pro Attach files from cloud
Microsoft Outlook allow users to directly attach an attachment directly from cloud services without need to download an entire file before attach to the intended e-mail.
Pro VBA macros
Pro Conditional formatting
Pro Cloud
can attach files and use cloud, very good.
Cons
Con Expensive
Con No MS Teams Meeting Integration
Con Displays parallel tasks strictly without overlap
This can lead to not being able to read text in Week view.
Con OSX and iOS Only
Keeps you tied into the Apple ecosystem, not that it's a con, just an observation.
Con Doesn't have a widget
Doesn't contain a widget for the Today section in the Mac Notification section.
Con Doesn't support sync of event colors from a Google calendar
Con Online sync only
Con It's from Microsoft
Con Rather buggy
Con Crashes frequently
The only issue with Outlook 2017 is that when the Mail folder increases in size, it sometimes crashes for no reason it, causing loss of data.
Con Categorize email IMAP not good
Con Frustrating user experience
The "Clean Interface" approach means that normal and necessary user interface elements have been removed, such as certain scroll bars, and even the "replied to" indicator. This program becomes more frustrating with each new update.
Con No unique Inbox / global folders
Con No portable bundle available
Con No aliases
Outlook does not support email aliases other then outlook aliases