By AJ · April 2026
Best family calendar app? We compared Skylight, Hearth, Cozi and found the same gap in all of them
parte. is a family calendar that runs on any iPad. Forward a school newsletter and the events appear automatically. No dedicated hardware, no £290+ touchscreen — just an iPad on the kitchen wall showing your family's week. AI intake is included free, it syncs with Google and Apple Calendar, and it costs nothing to start.
Before we built it, we looked at every family calendar product we could find — wall displays, shared apps, AI organisers, chore trackers — to understand what existed and where the gaps were.
What we found surprised us. Not because the products were bad — some are genuinely good. But because they all share the same blind spot: they're all solving the display problem, and the display problem isn't the hard part.
The wall displays
The most visible category is dedicated hardware: a touchscreen you mount on your kitchen wall that shows the family calendar. Skylight and Hearth are the two main players.
Skylight Calendar
£290+ for hardware · £60/year for Plus
Skylight is the market leader and deserves credit for popularising the category. A 15" or 27" touchscreen that syncs with Google, Apple, and Outlook calendars. The whole family can see the week at a glance. It does one thing and it does it well.
The catch: the best features require a £60/year subscription on top of the hardware. That includes "Magic Import" — forward an email or photo of a school flyer and it extracts events automatically. It's the closest any product has come to solving the intake problem, and they put it behind a paywall on a device you've already paid £290+ for.
Practically: the screen needs a power cable at all times (no battery), wall mounting means cable management, and the touchscreen is a fingerprint magnet. No yearly recurring events means you can't easily set birthdays. If you just want a visible shared calendar on the wall, it works.
Hearth Display
£550 for hardware · £7/month membership
Hearth wants to be a "family operating system" — calendar, routines, chores, rewards, an AI assistant. At 27 inches it's a striking piece of hardware. It syncs with Google, Apple, and Outlook, and the companion app works on both iOS and Android.
But it's expensive. £550 up front plus a membership that's effectively required to complete setup — without it, most features disappear. Their AI assistant ("Hearth Helper") lets you snap a photo of a paper flyer to extract events, which is a smart idea. Some users have reported slow processing times, which can erode trust — if you're not confident the AI caught everything, you end up checking and typing things in manually anyway.
At ~£650 in year one for a product your family depends on daily, it's worth checking recent user reviews before committing. The hardware is impressive, but it's a significant investment in a single-purpose device.
The pattern: Both Skylight and Hearth are display products that have bolted on intake features. The display is excellent — there's real value in a calendar the whole family can see. But the AI intake, the part that would actually reduce the mental load, is an afterthought. A subscription add-on. A feature, not the foundation.
The shared apps
If you don't want dedicated hardware, there's a category of apps that let families share a calendar from their phones. Cozi, FamilyWall, and TimeTree are the most established.
Cozi
Free (limited) · £30/year for Gold
Cozi has been around since 2005 and has massive brand recognition among families in the US. Shared calendar, shopping lists, to-do lists, meal planning. The shopping list is genuinely great — it's probably the main reason people stick with it.
The calendar has aged badly. Free users can only see 30 days of events — anything further out requires Gold. Calendar sync is one-way only: Cozi pushes to Google or Apple, but changes in Google don't come back. So if both parents use Google Calendar at work and Cozi at home, they're maintaining two calendars that drift apart. No AI, no smart intake, no way to forward an email. Every event is manual entry. In 2026, that's a lot to ask.
Cozi is now owned by Dotdash Meredith (a media conglomerate), not a focused product company. Development has slowed. It feels like a product being maintained, not one being built.
FamilyWall
Free (limited) · £4/month for Premium
FamilyWall is broader than a calendar: location sharing, finance tracking, meal planning, shopping lists. It tries to be everything. The free tier gives you a shared calendar, but with no external sync — Google and Outlook sync are locked behind Premium. No Apple Calendar sync at all.
Reports of buggy notifications, unreliable calendar sync, and a UI that takes getting used to. No AI features. Editing a recurring event reportedly breaks all instances, not just future ones. Functional but unpolished.
TimeTree
Free (with ads) · £35/year for Premium
TimeTree is the best pure shared calendar in this list. It syncs with Google, Apple, and Outlook on the free tier. You can create shared calendars with anyone, comment on events, and set up virtual calendars for family members who don't have the app (kids, grandparents). 50 million downloads, huge in Asia.
The tradeoff: it's only a calendar. No shopping lists, no meal planning, no chore charts. The free version has aggressive full-screen ads. And like every app in this category: no smart intake — every event goes in by hand.
The actual problem
Every product above is a calendar display. They show events beautifully — colour-coded by family member, with reminders and week-at-a-glance views. The display problem is solved.
But display isn't the bottleneck. Families already have calendars. Google Calendar is free, it syncs, it sends notifications. The problem isn't seeing the calendar. The problem is getting information into it.
Think about how family scheduling information actually arrives. A school newsletter as a PDF attachment. A WhatsApp message from another parent: "Swimming is cancelled Thursday." A flyer in a book bag. An email from the dentist confirming an appointment you booked three months ago.
None of that arrives as a calendar event. It arrives as text that one parent has to read, interpret, and manually type in. Research shows that parent is almost always the same one — 70–88% of the time, mums are the sole person managing the family schedule.
That's the cognitive labour. Not entering events on a touchscreen. Reading the email. Deciding which dates matter. Filtering out the noise. Typing it in. Checking it's right. Remembering to do it at all. Skylight's Magic Import and Hearth's Helper are steps in the right direction — but they're add-ons locked behind subscriptions, and if the results aren't consistent, you stop trusting them and go back to doing it yourself.
What we're building differently
parte. starts from the intake problem, not the display problem. Forward an email to your family's parte. address and the events appear on the calendar. School newsletter with twelve dates buried in four pages? Forwarded, parsed, done.
The AI knows that parents don't need "Term 5 starts" on their calendar — they know when term is. They need inset days, dress-up days, early finishes, the things that break the routine.
The display is any iPad — not a £290–£550 purpose-built screen you can only buy from one company. An old iPad from a drawer works. A refurbished iPad Mini works. For around £350 you can pick up a second-hand 13-inch iPad — comparable to a Skylight, but one that's still a fully functional tablet if you ever stop using parte. A dedicated display only does one thing — if you stop using the service, the hardware has no other purpose. An iPad is still an iPad.
And because it syncs with Google and Apple Calendar, there's nothing new to learn. Your existing calendars still work. parte. doesn't replace them — it feeds them. The wall display just makes everything visible.
The comparison at a glance
| Type | Year 1 cost | Smart intake | Two-way sync | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skylight | Hardware | £350–£550 | Yes (paid add-on) | Google & Apple only |
| Hearth | Hardware | £630–£650 | Yes (mixed reviews) | Google only |
| Cozi | App | Free–£30 | No | One-way only |
| FamilyWall | App | Free–£50 | No | Google & Outlook (paid) |
| TimeTree | App | Free–£35 | No | Google, Apple & Outlook |
| parte. | iPad app | Free – £3.99/mo | Yes (free tier included) | Google & Apple |
Who should use what
Let's be honest about when each product makes sense:
- • Skylight if you want dedicated wall hardware and don't mind the subscription. Most polished in the category.
- • TimeTree if you just need everyone to see the same events from their phone. Best free shared calendar.
- • Cozi if your main need is a shared shopping list and basic calendar. Just don't expect it to evolve.
- • parte. if the problem isn't seeing the calendar — it's the invisible work of getting information into it. AI intake on every plan, including free. No features gated behind a paywall. £3.99/month for unlimited use, or 20p per intake.
The bottom line: every family organiser on the market can show you a calendar. Hardly any of them help you fill it. That's the gap. That's what we're building.