Cozi alternatives: four family calendars, one of them ours

People rarely leave a family calendar because a better one came along. They leave because something specific started to grate: the ads, a renewal price that was not the one they remembered, or the fact that half the household never actually opened it.

Which of those it is decides where you should go, and it matters more than any feature list. So it is worth naming the reason before looking at the options.

Start with why you are leaving

• It is the ads. Then the question is which apps carry them on the free tier at all, rather than which paid tier removes them. The table above answers exactly that, with the source for each line.
• It is the price. Then read the small print on renewals rather than the headline. Two of the four apps here are quoted at different prices on their own site and in the App Store, which is worth knowing before you commit a year.
• Nobody else in the house uses it. Then the binding constraint is which devices your family actually holds. An app the teenager cannot install is not a family calendar, however good it is.

Quok, which is ours

Start with the reason not to pick us, because it is the one that disqualifies us outright for a lot of households: Quok runs on iPhone and any browser, and there is no Android app. If anyone in your family is on an Android phone, they get the browser rather than an app, and the other three on this page will serve you better. We would rather you knew that here than after moving a year of appointments across.

What we built it for: no ads on any tier, and every member of the family included on the free plan rather than counted against a seat limit. Alongside the calendar there are shared lists and tasks, and you can connect an AI assistant from a chat app you already use, so adding "swimming, Thursday, 4pm" does not mean opening the app at all.

FamilyWall

The closest thing here to a like-for-like replacement for Cozi. It covers the same ground - calendar, lists, meals - and adds documents and a budget tracker, and it lists itself as ad free on the free tier as well as the paid one, which is the single most common reason people go looking for a Cozi alternative in the first place.

The catch is the one worth repeating: its own page quotes $4.99 a month while the App Store listing shows a monthly Premium at $7.99. Both point at the same $44.99 a year. Check what is actually on the screen in front of you before you subscribe.

TimeTree

A narrower product, and deliberately so: it is a shared calendar with conversation attached to events, rather than a household toolkit. If the thing that broke down was coordination on individual events - who is collecting whom, and has that changed - it fits that shape well, and its pricing is the most consistent of the four.

It does carry advertising on the free tier, per its own App Store listing. If ads are the reason you are leaving Cozi, that is the wrong direction to move in unless you plan to pay from day one.

Or leave the category entirely

A shared household calendar is not the only answer. Plenty of families run on individual calendars shared with each other, which costs nothing and adds no new app for anyone to learn. We wrote about where that works and where it stops working in Cozi vs Google Calendar, which goes into the difference properly.

Before you move the calendar

Two things save a lot of regret. First, check the price you are actually offered rather than the one on the marketing page - on this list of four, two apps quote different figures in the App Store than on their own site. Second, install whatever you pick on the phone of the person least likely to use it, before you move anything. The calendar that survives is the one everybody can open.