When comparing BusyCal vs Fantastical 2, 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 Fantastical 2 is ranked 3rd. 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 Very polished natural language text entry
Fantastical makes it really easy to add events using their superb natural language parser. For instance, an entry like "breakfast at 9am at The Diner" will be handled correctly.
In addition to their best in class natural language processing, Fantastical has awesome features such as allowing users to append "/work" or "/personal" in order to add events to the specified calendar and setting up abbreviations that will add snippets of text.
Pro Awesome syncing support
Google, iCloud, Facebook, CalDAV, Exchanged, and iPhone calendar are all supported out of the box.
Pro "Dayticker" is a great way to quickly see appointments
Although pretty simple, the Dayticker view, located at the top of the user interface, is simply fantastic for quickly seeing which days are booked out. It also acts as a convenient way to add new events (long press on a day).
Pro Displays inline map of the event's location
The app displays inline map of the event's provided location. Additionally, users can choose between Apple's Maps or Google's Maps applications to use the feature with.
Pro Allows adding reminders
Using the natural language parser, reminders can be added with the keywords "reminder", "todo", "task", or "remind me to."
Pro Syncs with iOS reminders
Existing reminders can be used or adde with Siri.
Pro Functions as a widget
With Fantastical 2, the calendar can be accessed through a widget in order to save time.
Pro Gesture driven
Fantastical 2 lets users flick, scroll, and swipe to quickly move through different views and types of information.
Pro Custom colors
Tasks can be color coordinated in order to see their categories at a glance.
Pro Resizeable window
The divider between the two views can be dragged for customized viewing.
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 Uses “dots on a day” style interface
This is not the way calendars should work.
Con V2 discontinued, V3 too expensive as a subscription model
Con Only one way to display your events
It would really help to have an actual calendar with the events written into it instead of a list and dots.