Seven Cozi alternatives, sorted by what you are actually leaving for
Ad-free family calendars, chore systems, a wall display and two free options — each restated from our verified comparisons, with us placed honestly.
Compare › Cozi alternatives
Quick answer
FamilyWall is the closest like-for-like swap and cheaper than us. Chickadee Bandit if the calendar was only ever the start. OurHome if chores are the whole problem, Skylight if you want a screen on the wall, and a shared Google or Apple calendar if you never needed an app at all.
Cozi has been the default family calendar for two decades, and for a lot of households it still does the job: a free, colour-coded calendar and a grocery list that everyone can see. People go looking for an alternative for a small number of reasons, and which one is yours decides where you should go — so this list is ordered by what each option replaces, not by a score.
We make one of the seven. It is marked, it is second rather than first, and everything said about the others is restated from the head-to-head pages linked from each name, where it was checked against that product's own site.
The list
Best for: The closest like-for-like replacement, without ads
The same shape as Cozi — a fixed set of features, complete on day one — with the ads gone and the extras Cozi never had: location sharing, place alerts, school timetables and a budget on Premium. If the thing you disliked about Cozi was the ad-supported tier and the restricted calendar window rather than the idea of a single all-in-one app, this is the swap that changes the least. It is also cheaper than us, and we would rather say so here than have you find out later.
Cost: Free tier with calendar, lists and messaging; Premium $4.99/mo or $44.99/yr for unlimited members.
Chickadee Bandit
That's usBest for: A household whose needs kept outgrowing the calendar
Cozi is a calendar with lists attached. We are a hub with a library of over a hundred small apps, so the calendar and the grocery list are two of them, and chores with allowance, shared documents, location with safe zones, meal planning and a wall display for the kitchen tablet are there when a year arrives that needs them. No ads, a separate encrypted database per household, and export of everything at any time. The honest catch: there is no free tier, and if a colour-coded calendar really is the whole job, we are overhead.
Cost: $6/mo or $60/yr for the whole household, up to 10 members. 30-day trial, no card, no ads on any plan.
Best for: Chores, points and a reward store, for free
The one thing Cozi's flat to-do lists never did — assign a chore to a child, give it points, and let the child spend them — is the whole of OurHome, and it costs nothing. Widely reported sync problems and no visible ongoing development are the caveat, and they land hardest on the one number a kid checks daily. Its calendar is basic, so most households keep a separate one.
Cost: Free, with no paid tier.
Best for: A screen on the kitchen wall with zero setup
If what you wanted from Cozi was a calendar everyone would look at, the fix may be a surface rather than an app. Skylight ships as an appliance — unbox, plug in, done — and the core calendar works without a subscription. Meal planning, chore rewards, the photo screensaver and Magic Import sit behind Plus, and you are buying hardware, but zero setup is a real feature.
Cost: $150 to $600 for the display, plus about $79/yr for Skylight Plus.
Best for: Turning school flyers into shared events, in an all-iPhone house
Photograph a flyer, a schedule or a handwritten note and it becomes shared, colour-coded events. Calendar sync runs both ways with Google and Apple, so an event can be edited in either place; Cozi's connections are one-way feeds, and ours send events out without taking edits back. The limit is the device: iPhone only, no Android, no web, so it only works if everyone in the house has one.
Cost: $4.99/mo or $39.99/yr, unlimited family members. Seven-day trial, no ads.
Best for: Two adults moving tasks off one person's list
A different diagnosis of the same problem. Cozi puts everything on one calendar and assumes visibility evens the load; RemindHer argues it does not, and hands each task to a named owner so the reminders follow the person. Voice capture is the fastest way in of anything on this list. It is an app for two adults on two phones, with no web app and the children as schedules rather than members.
Cost: Not published. Free to start, with optional premium features.
A shared Google or Apple calendar
Best for: A household that only ever used the calendar
If you open Cozi for the calendar and nothing else, you may not need a family app at all. A shared calendar in Google or iCloud is free, has no ads, has no forward-view limit, and everyone already has the app on their phone. You give up the grocery list and the meal planner, and there is nothing for chores — but a surprising number of households find that was all they were using.
Cost: Free, with the account you already have.
Prices and features are restated from our head-to-head comparison pages and reflect each product's published pricing as of August 2026. Products change — always check the other product's site for current details.
Why people look for a Cozi alternative
The free tier is ad-supported, and according to Cozi's own materials and widely reported feedback it restricts how far ahead you can see on the calendar unless you upgrade to Cozi Gold. That is the most common reason, and it is the easiest to fix: a plain shared calendar has no ads at all, and FamilyWall's Premium removes them for $44.99 a year against Gold's $39, with location, meal planning and a budget added.
The second reason is that the household outgrew a calendar. Cozi has flat to-do lists but no way to assign a chore to a child with points or an allowance, no messaging, no location sharing, and its connections to Google, Apple and Outlook are one-way feeds. When the ask becomes "a chore system" or "somewhere the documents live", the calendar was never going to answer it, and the options split by which of those asks came first.
Choosing between them
- If the ads and the calendar window are the whole complaint, take the closest like-for-like swap: FamilyWall, or a shared Google or Apple calendar if you only ever used the calendar.
- If the complaint is that chores never worked, decide whether chores are the entire problem (OurHome, free) or one of several (us).
- If the complaint is that nobody looks at the calendar, consider a surface rather than an app: Skylight, or any tablet you already own on our wall-display mode.
- If the complaint is the typing — flyers and notes that never make it in — Calendara does paper-to-calendar as its whole product, and we do it as one feature among many.
- Check the device rule before anything else. Calendara is iPhone only and RemindHer and OurHome have no web app; if one person in the house is on Android or a laptop, that settles it.
What you give up by leaving
Two decades of polish on one job is not nothing. Cozi's calendar and grocery list are genuinely simple to pick up, which matters for the household member who was reluctant about the last app too. Whatever you move to, the first week is the test: if the least enthusiastic person in the house is not opening it by the second Sunday, the calendar you left was doing its job.
Nothing on this list imports your Cozi history. Plan on re-entering the recurring events by hand — it is usually an evening — and on the old calendar staying live for a month beside the new one.
The feature list is not fixed
Every other product on this page is a fixed set of features: it does what it does, and a need it did not anticipate gets a no. Chickadee Bandit is built from small apps, and a household can add one of its own. An admin describes the app in a paragraph on the Apps page and the hub builds and installs it, using the AI credits that come with every plan; someone who writes code can start from any of the open-source apps and install their own version from a URL. A custom app gets the same checks as the ones we ship: it declares what it reads and writes, keeps its data in your household's own database, and the hub refuses anything it did not ask for.
Where this list comes from
We make one of the products on it, and it is marked. Every claim about another product is restated from the head-to-head page that links from its name, where it was checked against that product's own site on the date shown there — nothing on this page was researched separately. The order is how close a like-for-like replacement each one is for someone leaving Cozi, not a ranking of merit.
Read next
If ours is the one you're weighing
30-day free trial, no card. One price for the whole household, no ads, and the whole app library comes with it.
Start a free trial