When comparing Sunrise vs Google Calendar, the Slant community recommends Google Calendar for most people. In the question“What are the best free calendar apps for Android?” Google Calendar is ranked 3rd while Sunrise is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Google Calendar is:
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.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Great interface
The interface is easy to use. The app's main view combines an agenda view with a two week view above it. This lets you keep an eye on your high level schedule over the next few weeks while also seeing the highest priority upcoming events. The two week view can be expanded into a month view by swiping down on it. Swiping to the right from the main view gives access to a 3-day view that's split into hours.
Agenda view includes various informative details such as information about upcoming weather conditions, a countdown for upcoming events and contextual icons, such as "meeting", "movie", "food", "flight" to events to help get a quick overview of what's planned at a glance.
It also looks good with a monochrome base design that's accented with colored icons, titles and profile pictures.
Pro Integrates with many third-party apps
Sunrise will automatically pull important information such as Facebook events, Asana tasks and Evernote reminders and add them to the calendar. Currently Sunrise integrates with Facebook, TripIt, Asana, Producteev, Evernote, GitHub, LinkedIn, Songkick, Foursquare, Twitter, and there are new integrations added on a regular basis.
Pro Allows easily creating events using natural language input
The application allows natural language input for events. For example, typing in "Lunch with Stuart Kearney at 2pm" will set the appointment and even send and invite to Stuart if needed.
Pro Google Maps integration
Sunrise integrates with Google Maps to display the location of an event, making it easy to find where to go for any appointment.
Pro Gives weather updates
Sunrise will show inline weather updates for current and next day.
Pro Widget support
Sunrise Calendar includes a widget for use on Android devices that displays the agenda view and allows adding events. Widget's agenda view also includes details such as context-aware icons and location information.
Pro Pulls information about people with which meeting have been scheduled
The app will show information about people with which meeting have been scheduled. The information is pulled from social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Pro Can send event invites from within the app
Sunrise makes it very easy to send invites to events from within the app by using the contact list on the device.
Pro Adjusts timezone based on location
Sunrise will display the event information and notifications in users current timezone.
Pro Includes calendars for holidays, sports, TV shows and more
As part of "Interesting Calendars" Sunrise includes over 25,000 calendars covering things like name days, holidays, sport teams (with score updating in real time), and TV shows.
Pro Helps quickly schedule one-to-one meetings
Sunrise includes a feature called "Meet" that's designed to help two parties that wish to schedule a meeting to find a time that works for them both. Sunrise user can select available times for a meeting and then send a URL to the other party that will allow the other party to select one of the available times.
Pro Integrates with Google Maps for directions
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.
Pro Comes pre-installed on most Android devices
Google Calendar is a free Android calendar app without ads that comes already installed on Android devices that have stock support for Google Services.
Pro Clean design with 5 different views including an excellent schedule view
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.
Pro Offers creating events from e-mail messages based on content
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.
Pro Can set on-screen and e-mail reminder notifications
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.
Pro Integrates well with other Google services
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.
Pro Color-coding for events and calendars
The app will color-code different calendars in different colors as well as allow selecting a different color for each event.
Pro Straightforward event creation with autocomplete
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.
Pro Awesome flairs / images view inside the agenda view / event page
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.
Pro Allows subscribing to public calendars through web client
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.
Pro Supports non-Google calendars (requires accessing web client)
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.
Pro Lots of third-party widgets
Google Calendar comes with a home screen widget, and there are also many third party widgets developed for this calendar app.
Pro Advanced functionality available through IFTTT
IFTTT offers over 198 channels to plug into the users Google Calendar.
Cons
Con Discontinued
Sunrise was discontinued in August 2016 with promises that Microsoft Outlook would gain some of its features
Con Missing search in Android version
Sunrise lacks search in Android version making it very hard to use.
Con Widget is not customisable
There is no way to change the layout etc of the widget for Sunrise. Some other calendar apps offer a lot more control over what data is shown in their widgets.
Con Likely no longer in development
Shortly after Microsoft’s appquisition of Sunrise, development stopped. The future of the service itself is uncertain.
Con It requests extra permissions
Requests access to everything not just the calendar.
Con Can't quickly distinguish between multiple calendars
Dev dictates that everyone's calendars should look the same and to this day refuses to provide an option to color code individual calendars.
Con No vertical scroll
Like iOS and outlook for Android.
Con Privacy concerns
Google integrate all their services to connect and mine information on an individual to better profile and target advertising.
Con Google tasks do not show on Google Calendar
You can create tasks in your desktop Google Calendar but they will not sync nor show up in your android Google Calendar
Con Setting up non-Google calendars requires accessing web client
There is no ability in the Android app to access other calendars. This limits the usefulness for people that use more than one calendar, such as OSX and iOS users.
Con No weather forecast
The Android app version of Google Calendar does not show any weather forcast information, even if it is added as an extra calendar in the web application. Being that weather is tied into Google Now, the absence is surprising.
Con Setting up CalDAV or iCAL from other sources is not working or not working well
A lot of people share events between different sources: professional, private, family or friends.
Not everybody is on Google and of course a lot of corporations.
Con Month view shows limited information about the event
Month view does not show how many events there are in each given day or color-code them in any way, only informs of their existence.
Con Does not work well with Apple / iCloud Calendar
Apple and Google calendars have syncing issues, which is annoying if you want to have shared calendars with friends / family.
Con Some recurrence options not available
If you want to add a recurring event based on quirky (but normal) calendar rules, it's not supported by Google Calendar. For example, if you set up a financial calendar in Google Calendar and an event falls on a weekend or bank holiday, Google Calendar cannot schedule the occurrence properly. Worse yet, if you submit those calendar occurences via VEVENT details, Google Calendar displays different information if you use the mobile calendar vs. the desktop web calendar.
Con Once you create a event on a Calendar, you can't move to a different Calendar
Con Horizontal Scroll
Does not vertically scroll like ios calendars on outlook calendar.
Con Slow syncing of external calendars
Google Calendar is known to sync external calendars very slowly, takes hours if not a full day before the updated events are reflected.
Con No natural language input support
The Android app has no natural language input support, while it's available using the web client and in a limited capacity using Google Now.
Con Weak default view
Even if month is set as default view, as soon as you touch a day or an event, you have to carefully select twice to get back to month view.
Con Time zone is incorrect no matter what's done
Con Timezone for Moscow is incorrect
Timezone for Moscow is 1 hour off. This makes the calendar unusable in Russia.