Hangouts vs Google Calendar

Start chatting on your phone, then on your computer, then on your tablet seamlessly!

Hangouts uses Google account credentials. If you use any other Google service, then you already have an account set up.

If you have signed in your Google account, Hangouts allows making video calls with up to 10 people or one-on-one. There are business, education and government solutions that increase the participant count to for video calls to 15 as well as offers support for those accounts.

Additionally, you can switch between using either the front-facing or rear-facing camera on your phone or tablet.

Google offers all features of Hangouts completely free on iOS, Android and web with quick and reliable sync across all platforms. It's also tightly integrated in other Google services - it can be accessed from services such as Gmail, Google+, Chrome.

While the standard Hangouts offering is completely free, there are business, education and government solutions that increase the participant count to for video calls to 15 and offers support that may cost money.

Use the extension on any computer you can run Chrome browser to text from your computer or tablet!

It's possible to know what each and every participant of the group has read. Their icons are displayed below the last message.

If you have gifs in your mobile phone, you can share them in the conversation and your partner will be able to see it animated in the chat.

Google Voice is a service that enables making and receiving free phone calls within US. Google Voice forwards incoming calls to all connected devices and allows placing calls from any of the connected devices, but they will show as coming from the Google Voice number.

Hangouts completely integrates Google Voice, allowing you to place calls and receive texts and voicemail from all of your devices. The Hangouts app for Android also includes a needed dialer for making calls with the users Google Voice number.

Hangouts app for Android can be extended with an optional dialer for making calls. Most calls to US and Canada are free and international calls have cheap rates.

A Google Voice account will be needed in order have a number that allows these calls to be made.

Hangouts can inform about the status of other users including what device they are currently using, whether they are in the middle of a call and when were they last seen. This allows making sure that you're not disturbing someone when initiating a conversation. It's possible to granularly turn off status sharing.

Hangouts can add different effects and overlays to video calls that can be viewed on your device. Unfortunately, they can't be set from your phone.

Hangouts can be used completely hands free, even if the app is not open and the phone is locked: "OK Google, send a Hangouts message to Mary".

The app leverages Google Maps when adding location for an event by offering suggestions as well as offers opening Maps to help get directions to an event via shortcut on a reminder notification.

Google Calendar is a free Android calendar app without ads that comes already installed on Android devices that have stock support for Google Services.

Google Calendar has a monochrome base design that's accented with colored-coded events and image banners that separate months in schedule view.

The app has 5 different views - schedule, day, 3-day, week and month.

Day, 3-day and week views split up the days horizontally and hours vertically. Month view lays out all days in a grid and displays up to 3 events in a day.

Schedule view displays an agenda view that allows browsing all events by swiping vertically. Additionally, the way events are displayed in the agenda view is context-aware. For example, adding an event called "gym" will display the event on a background with a dumbbell.

All views except for month view can be split horizontally to display a condensed month view at the top that can be navigated by swiping horizontally.

Events can be added from any view by clicking the red plus button that's available at the bottom-right corner of the screen.

Google Calendar integrates with e-mail for quickly creating events from e-mails that contain the word "meeting" or dates or times, or any other information about events or plans that it can understand.

Google calendar allows setting how many reminders are needed with each having the ability to set how long before the event the notification should remind and if it should be done via on-screen or e-mail notification.

Google Calendar is part of the Google ecosystem, it integrates with services like Google Now for creating events, Google Maps for directions and Gmail for pulling information about planned flights.

The app will color-code different calendars in different colors as well as allow selecting a different color for each event.

All views have an option of adding a new event by tapping the plus sign at the lower right corner of the screen. This opens up a form and allows the user to add a location, start/end times, guests, description, color-code as well as choosing if it's an all day event, how often it repeats, how many and what kind of reminders are needed and setting the users availability and privacy settings.

Whenever you enter agenda / event title with the keywords (when available), the event will show up interesting flairs whenever the keyword inside the agenda / title you typed matches the flairs that are available inside the system, examples such as haircut, cycling, swimming, coffee, movie etc.

Through the Google Calendar's web client, it is possible to subscribe to any public calendar. Google also maintains a list of public calendars for various sports events and holidays in different countries and for different religions.

Google Calendar can be integrated with any calendar that support iCalendar format, including Exchange and iCloud, via URL, but it has to be done using the web client.

Google Calendar comes with a home screen widget, and there are also many third party widgets developed for this calendar app.

IFTTT offers over 198 channels to plug into the users Google Calendar.