When comparing Fantastical 2 vs Calendars 5 , 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 Calendars 5 is ranked 5th. 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.
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Pros
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.
Pro Syncs with iOS reminders
Calendars 5 uses the reminders that already exist, and can add new reminders with Siri.
Pro Unique portrait week view
Unique and efficient way to display weeklong agenda in portrait view.
Pro Natural Language Input
Calendars 5 makes it very easy for users to create an event by just typing it in human language.
Simply write something like 'Meet Ben tomorrow at 5PM at Starbucks' and Calendars 5 will parse everything, creating an event for tomorrow, inviting Ben from the address book and picking the Starbucks on the map.
Pro Pleasant and intuitive interface
The choice of font size, color and user interface widgets are all esthetically pleasing.
Pro Notification center
The new notification center puts all the info in one place, and lets users choose from several different views.
Pro Repeating tasks is easy
The UI provides a very simple approach to repeating events or reminders. Users can choose from daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly, number of weeks, or by specific days.
Pro Supports Drag-and-drop of events to reschedule
Moving the date of an appointment is easy.
Cons
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.
Con Have to pay again for the iPad version
Con Not as good as Moleskine cal
Con The Calendar does not clearly show dates
Con Limited map compatibility
Calendars 5 only uses Apple's Maps app, so Google Maps is out of the question.