Cal vs Fantastical 2
When comparing Cal vs Fantastical 2, the Slant community recommends Fantastical 2 for most people. In the question“What are the best calendar apps for iPhone?” Fantastical 2 is ranked 1st while Cal is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose Fantastical 2 is:
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.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Can import Facebook birthdays with one tap
As long as Facebook is already set up on the device, Cal integrates with it with a single click to show all birthdays.
Pro Clean interface with beautiful background images
The app displays agenda as a combination of events and to-do list items and uses different background images for each calendar day based on chosen themes.
Pro Integrates with Any.do for task management
Cal integrates with Any.do to-do list app for task management.
Pro Integrates with Waze, Uber and Google Maps for navigation
Cal uses Google Maps to show event location, Waze for real-time traffic information and Uber for hailing a car to the event.
Pro Clean widget with event creation
Cal has a good-looking resizable widget that has a shortcut for event creation.
Pro Nicely designed actionable notifications before, during and after meetings
A feature called HeadsUp will show pop-up notifications on phone's homescreen specifically designed for meetings. The content of the pop-up will change based on whether it's before, during or after a meeting.
Before a meeting it will show shortcuts for getting a taxi or a car, seeing attendees, getting directions and notifying other attendees if the user is late via e-mail or Skype. During a meeting it will give shortcuts for setting the phone on vibrate, taking photos, video or audio-recording, adding tasks that will be synced with Any.do or e-mailing a summary. After the meeting it offers sharing task list and scheduling a follow-up.
Pro Predictive text
While adding an event the app will offer suggestions, help invite other people, pick a location, allow making a note and set it as a recurring event if needed.
Pro Voice entry support
Cal allows adding events simply by speaking.
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 Cal may give your personal and non-personal information to thrid parties
In the privacy-policy of any.do the following is stated:
"We may share your Personal Information to third parties (with or without compensation) including potential and actual advertisers, sponsors, our third party service providers and partners. We use commercially reasonable efforts to only engage or interact with third parties that post a privacy policy governing their processing of Personal Information."
and
"Use of Non-Personal Information. We may collect Non-Personal Information in order to provide and operate the Service, including for statistical and research purposes; to enable us to further develop, customize and improve the Service based on users’ common preferences and uses; to create and provide our business partners and affiliates with aggregated statistical data and other aggregated and/or inferred Non-Personal Information. We may also disclose Non-Personal Information (with or without compensation) to third parties, including advertisers and partners. We are not aware of the identity of the user from which the Non-Personal Information was collected."
Con Not actively developed any more
Last update was January 2016, and any.do includes a calendar by now.
Con Forces creating an Any.do account
An Any.do account as well as the app has to be used to create tasks, that then will show in the calendar, but cannot be created from the calendar. This can be not only inconvenient but also quite slow.
Con Shallow Any.do integration
Any.do tasks can't be managed from within the app, it requires the user to switch applications.
Con No natural language input support
Cal does not support natural language input, though it may get added in the future.
Con Can be sluggish and buggy
Cal has issues with freezing, sluggishness and other buggy behaviors.
Con Lacks weather information
There is no way to add a weather calendar to the normal calendar view, meaning no weather integration.
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.