The best family calendars in 2026: apps, displays, and your TV

The Callie team · August 23, 2026

There are more ways to run a family calendar in 2026 than ever, and most roundups on this topic are written by companies that sell one of them. So are we (we make Callie, a calendar for the Apple TV), but we'll put the prices next to every option, including ours, and tell you who each one is actually for.

Broadly, you're choosing between three shapes: a phone app everyone checks individually, a dedicated wall display you buy and mount, or an app that runs on a screen you already own (a TV, an iPad, an old tablet).

Phone apps

Google Calendar (free)

Still the default for a reason. A shared "Family" calendar in Google Calendar costs nothing, syncs everywhere, and both parents probably already have accounts. Its weakness is the same as every phone-only setup: the calendar only helps the person who opens it. Kids never see it, and "did you check the calendar?" becomes its own chore.

Cozi (free tier, $39/year for Gold)

Cozi has been the family-organizer staple for two decades: shared calendar, shopping lists, meal planner. Know before you start: the free plan now shows ads and limits the calendar to a 30-day window, a change that landed badly with long-time users. Removing the limit means Cozi Gold at $39/year. If Cozi's recent direction bothers you, we wrote up the alternatives.

Apple Calendar (free)

If everyone in the house is on iPhones, a shared iCloud calendar is free and low-friction. The same caveat applies (it lives in pockets, not on a wall), and mixed iPhone/Android households will fight it. (There's a workaround for mixed households: feed links.)

Dedicated wall displays

Skylight Calendar ($149.99–$599.99 + $79/year for most of it)

The Skylight Calendar is the best-known wall calendar: a touchscreen in 10", 15", and 27" sizes that pulls in Google, Apple, and Outlook calendars and color-codes the family. The catch is the subscription. The features in the ads, like importing events from emails, meal planning, chore rewards, and the photo screensaver, sit behind Skylight Plus at $79/year. We did the five-year math separately.

Hearth Display ($699 + $9/month)

Hearth is the premium take: a large portrait touchscreen with routines and to-dos designed around kids building habits. It's thoughtful, and it's the most expensive path on this page: $699 for the screen (often discounted to $599), then a membership that runs $9/month after the first free month. Head-to-head with Skylight, see our comparison.

Echo Show 15 ($249.99, no subscription)

Amazon's 15.6" smart display does shared calendars, sticky notes, and lists through Alexa widgets, with no subscription. It's the cheapest ready-made wall unit, and it doubles as a kitchen TV. The calendar experience is shallower than Skylight's or Hearth's; it's a widget on a smart display, not the product's whole point.

Apps for screens you already own

DAKboard and Mango Display (free tiers; ~$5–10/month paid)

DAKboard and Mango Display turn a spare monitor, smart TV, or Raspberry Pi into a customizable dashboard: calendar, weather, photos, news. They're flexible and tinker-friendly, and DAKboard in particular has a devoted Raspberry Pi following. The free tiers are genuinely usable; custom layouts and more calendars cost roughly $5–10 a month. If you like building things, start with our DIY wall calendar guide.

Callie ($3/month per family; ours)

Callie is our answer to the wall-display price tag: it puts the family calendar on the Apple TV, iPad, and iPhone you already own. Everyone gets a color, events are tagged to people automatically from names in the title, an iCloud or Google Photos shared album turns idle screens into a photo frame, and shared lists cover groceries and trash day. It reads the private feed links iCloud and Google already publish, so nobody migrates calendars. $3/month or $30/year covers the whole family on unlimited screens, with a 14-day free trial. The limits: you need an Apple TV or iPad for the wall view, and a TV isn't a touchscreen, so you add events from your phone, not the board.

How to choose

The pattern worth noticing: the hardware products all converge on a screen showing a color-coded week. If a screen already hangs in your living room, the cheapest family calendar is software.