The use of shared calendar apps can be the determining factor in the success or failure of work and team schedule planning.
If you want to:
- See who’s doing what and when
- Avoid scheduling conflicts
- Plan work and time off without overworking
It is crucial to select the most suitable calendar app for your team and projects due to this reason.
To compile this list of the top shared calendar apps, we underwent the process of reviewing and testing more than 30 calendaring software tools.
Shall we begin diving in step by step?
8 Best Shared Calendar Apps to Manage Schedules in 2023
1. Toggl Plan
The starting price for this service is $9 per month.
Toggl Plan provides all the necessary features for work and schedule planning, including timelines, kanban boards, time tracking, and additional functionalities.
When using Toggl Plan, it feels effortless to manage team availability and stay organized with your team’s schedules due to its user-friendly and intuitive interface.
What we like
- Unlike calendaring software, Toggl Plan’s Team timelines help you plan work schedules, track team availability, manage capacity, balance workloads, and get a high-level overview of your entire team’s schedule.
What’s missing
- Toggl Plan doesn’t come with experience matching features. While you can organize teams by skills using multiple Team timelines, you can’t segment team members by experience.
Best for
Toggl Plan is an ideal choice for agencies, consultancies, and other knowledge-based service businesses seeking a user-friendly team planning and project scheduling tool.
Top features
- Unlimited shared Team timelines: Track your team’s schedule so you know who’s available and how to assign team members to projects.
- Visualize team availability: Plan your team’s time off. Prevent scheduling conflicts with vacation time.
- Track team members’ capacity: Know who can take up more work and who’s overworked.
- Recurring tasks: Save time by scheduling recurring tasks and events.
- Mobile apps: for Android and iOS devices.
- Drag-and-drop interface: Easily add and edit schedules and make day-to-day work management simple.
- Integrations: Integrate tools like Google Calendar or Toggl Track to track schedules and time spent on tasks.
Tool integrations
Included in the integration are Toggl Track, Google Calendar, and Slack.
2. Teamup
The price starts at $12 per month when considering step by step.
You can use Teamup, a versatile group calendar app, to easily schedule work and manage availability.
With color-coded, real-time updates and a user-friendly interface, Teamup makes team collaboration easier.
What we like
- Teamup’s ease of use is a highlight of this tool. Users can organize their work effortlessly and communicate with team members more efficiently.
What’s missing
- With Teamup, you can only track schedules and time off. There’s no way to know a team member’s capacity or workload.
Best for
Teamup is the ideal choice for teams, regardless of their size, who are seeking a simple calendar application to coordinate their projects and check their availability.
Top features
- Multiple calendar views: See your team’s availability in multi-day view, agenda view, timeline view, and more.
- Customized access: Teamup provides nine levels of access permissions so you can securely share your calendars across your organization.
- Third-party integrations: Integrate tools like Slack or Google Calendar into Teamup to keep all your tools in sync.
Tool integrations
Included in the integrations are Google Calendar, Microsoft Teams, and Slack.
3. Trello
The starting price is $6 per month.
While Trello primarily serves as a Kanban-based project management tool, it can also function as a shared team calendar.
Whether you’re organizing a to-do list or scheduling a content calendar, Trello’s calendar view allows you to effectively manage teamwork.
What we like
- With Trello, it’s easy to visualize your team’s projects and track deadlines. It has a clutter-free and simple Kanban interface.
What’s missing
- Trello’s limited native calendar functionality means you miss out on essential scheduling features like recurring events or event customization. As Trello focuses on tasks, you also don’t see team availability and capacity.
Best for
Trello is an ideal choice for teams of any size that require a straightforward tool to handle their tasks and represent the work schedule on a calendar.
Top features
- Calendar view: See your tasks in a visual calendar format to keep track of task deadlines.
- Color labels: Apply color-coded labels to cards so you can quickly identify and organize tasks and events.
- Collaborative comments: Leave comments and updates on cards and track the status of your tasks in real-time.
- Integrations: Get your tools together and work more efficiently.
Tool integrations
Included in the integrations are Google, Outlook, Apple, and Slack.
4. Asana
The price for this service begins at $13.49 per month.
Asana possesses robust task scheduling capabilities and serves as a tool for managing goals, portfolios, and projects.
Teams can achieve their goals faster by visualizing their work better using Asana’s calendar and timeline view.
What we like
- Asana’s advanced search feature lets you easily navigate and find tasks, projects, people, tags, or groups within your organization. This way, you can avoid scheduling conflicts.
What’s missing
- If you want access to advanced features like capacity and workload management, Asana can be quite expensive ($30.49 per user per month).
Best for
Asana is the ultimate choice for teams of any size seeking a complete project scheduling tool.
Top features
- Calendar view: Visualize your project schedule and stay informed on your team’s daily or weekly tasks.
- Gantt timelines: Plan projects more efficiently, coordinate better on tasks, and allocate your resources accordingly with Gantt timeline views.
- Integrations: Integrate other tools that your team uses to streamline your workflows.
- Mobile app: Take your work with you wherever you go. Asana is available on Android and iOS.
- Time tracking: Track and make the most of your team’s time.
Tool integrations
Integrations such as Google Calendar, Outlook, and Gmail are included.
5. Wrike
The starting price is $9.80 per month.
Another project management software that offers a calendar feature, which can be tailored to meet your specific requirements, is Wrike.
What we like
- Wrike comes with project and resource management features like Toggl Plan and Asana.
What’s missing
- For resource management features, you have to spend quite a lot ($24.80 per user per month). They only offer an annual billing option on the pricing page.
Best for
Wrike is the ideal solution for teams of any size, provided they are not restricted by budget constraints, and require a comprehensive tool equipped with robust scheduling and planning capabilities.
Top features
- Team calendar: No more delays or unbalanced workloads. Plan projects and schedule team tasks with ease.
- High customization: Customize your calendars to suit your project and team needs, and maximize your efficiency.
- Filters: Color-code your tasks to gain a clearer view of your deadlines and keep track of your team’s work.
- Easy-to-use interface: With Wrike, it’s simple to visualize and edit departmental, team, or individual tasks.
- Multi-platform availability: See and manage your team and projects’ schedule from your Apple device, PC, or mobile device.
Tool integrations
Some of the integrations available are Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and Slack.
6. Basecamp
Price: The starting point for the monthly cost is $15.
Basecamp is a tool for project management and collaboration that provides scheduling capabilities to a certain extent.
The feature for project scheduling and the tools for collaboration, such as file sharing or chats, assist you in planning your team’s schedule.
What we like
- Basecamp lets you add recurring events so you don’t miss activities that repeat regularly.
What’s missing
- There’s no easy way to visualize your team’s schedule. Also, you cannot manage your team’s availability, capacity, or workload with Basecamp.
Best for
Basecamp is the ideal choice for small businesses or groups within large organizations that seek a straightforward solution to effectively manage their work together.
Top features
- Scheduled events: Create, organize, and plan events for your team projects.
- Recurring events: Automate events for repeated activities and keep your focus on important tasks.
- Automated notifications: Make sure your team doesn’t miss meetings and deadlines.
- External calendar synchronization: Keep your team’s schedule in one place by synchronizing with external calendar apps.
- Collaboration tools: Work together with your team using group chats and message boards.
Tool integrations
Included in the integrations are Slack, Google Drive, and MS Teams.
7. Google Calendar for Google Workspace
The price begins at $6 per month.
The free basic calendar that comes with a Gmail account has fewer scheduling features compared to Google Workspace Calendar.
What we like
- With Google Workspace Calendar, it’s easy to visualize team schedules in a single calendar so you can efficiently plan events.
What’s missing
- Google Workspace Calendar is a calendaring software. It doesn’t come with capacity or workload management features.
Best for
Google Workspace Calendar is a suitable shared calendar application for businesses of any size aiming to effectively manage their team’s events.
Top features
- Book shared resources such as meeting rooms.
- Visualize co-worker schedules in a single calendar to schedule events based on their availability.
- Share calendars publicly or with limited access.
- Access calendars from all devices, including tablets and smartphones.
Tool integrations
Some of the integrations available are Slack, Outlook, and Notion.
8. Outlook
The price begins at $6 per month.
One of the tools that the Microsoft 365 suite includes is Microsoft Outlook.
In addition to being an email tool, Microsoft Outlook also possesses a highly functional shared calendar.
What we like
- Microsoft Outlook’s shared calendar integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft ecosystem. You can easily share calendars with colleagues, set permission levels, or synchronize data across Microsoft 365 tools.
What’s missing
- New users might find it challenging to learn how to use Outlook’s advanced features. And like Google Calendar, you don’t get capacity, and workload management features.
Best for
Microsoft Outlook is the ideal choice for teams of any size who want to enhance their efficiency in scheduling and coordinating events and projects.
Top features
- Group calendars into folders. Share folders with specific individuals, teams, or projects.
- Share your availability calendar publicly or with specific teams within your organization.
- Capture tasks on the calendar, prioritize them, and track them with Microsoft To-Do.
Tool integrations
The integrations consist of Google Calendar, Slack, and OneDrive.
BONUS: An overview of Microsoft Teams shared calendar functionality
To effectively collaborate on a project or as a team with a shared goal, it is often necessary to have a designated space where team members can access essential dates concerning events, milestones, and deadlines related to the group’s work.
Please provide the text that you would like me to rephrase step by step.
Examples of real-life situations that demonstrate this concept include a calendar specifically designed for a group of individuals going on vacation, industry conferences that are of interest to a team, a repeating meeting that is scheduled for a project, or daily meetings for agile teams typically known as “standup meetings”.
Before we discuss the functionality of the Microsoft Teams shared calendar, let me provide some background on group calendaring. A Microsoft team is supported by an Office 365 Group, which includes an Exchange Online Group Mailbox and a corresponding calendar. However, until recently, this group calendar could not be easily accessed within the Microsoft Teams client. This posed a challenge for teams that required group calendaring, leading them to use cumbersome workarounds such as utilizing the group calendar in Outlook Web Access or integrating a SharePoint Webpart into the Microsoft Team as a website tab. For years, the absence of a dedicated Microsoft Teams shared calendar option was a highly requested feature by the user community.
Enter the Microsoft Teams Channel Calendar app
Microsoft is developing the calendar features in the Teams client in order to meet this requirement. They have recently introduced a Teams Channel Calendar App, which can be added to a regular Teams channel and is displayed as a tab alongside the default “Posts” and “Files”.
The shared calendar in Microsoft Teams can be accessed by all team members, with the exception of guests. Team members have the ability to create events and meetings in the channel calendar, which will automatically appear for other team members. This calendar is a filtered version of the Exchange Online mailbox calendar that is linked to the Microsoft 365 Group. Users who are not part of the team, including guests, can be invited to any event or meeting in the calendar. All attendees of a channel meeting will receive the corresponding meeting invitation. However, their ability to join the meeting is subject to the usual Teams meeting controls, such as administrative policies and meeting configuration. For further information on Microsoft Teams security configurations and best practices, you can refer to my previous post.
The team member who created the channel calendar event serves as the organizer of the meeting, and the meeting invite is sent on behalf of the team name.
Even though Teams has been widely adopted, end-users continue to use Outlook for their calendaring management on a regular basis. This raises the question of whether users can view the channel calendar entries through the Outlook client.
Yes, there are a few things to consider. If a user receives an invitation to a channel calendar event and accepts the meeting invite, the event will be added to their personal Outlook calendar. However, to view the entire channel calendar, Powershell must be used to make the associated Microsoft 365 group calendar visible in the Exchange Address Book. By default, it is hidden. This process needs to be repeated for each Microsoft team that has one or more channel calendars. The “Set-UnifiedGroup” cmdlet can be used with the parameter “HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnable:$False” to make the calendar visible in both desktop and web versions of Outlook. Once this is done, the user can choose to display this calendar in Outlook.
