For many of us, our calendar is a centre point of our life. We are seeing fewer households with a wall calender or a paper day planner to organize their schedule. Instead, more households have moved over to managing their life with a digital calendar helping them to keep track of events, appointments and everyday tasks.
As with countless other tools, you don’t need a proprietary hosted solution for your calendar needs. There might just be an open source project that’s a perfect fit.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 12 high quality open source graphical-based calendar software. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to manage their daily activities.
Let’s explore the 12 calendar applications at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources. Some of the applications are personal organizers including calendar, tasks, address book and other functionality. It makes sense to integrate a number of different functions into a single application.
| GUI-Based Calendars | |
|---|---|
| Nextcloud | Personal cloud storage, text editor, photo gallery, file share, calendaring |
| Kontact | PIM with good calendar support |
| Evolution | Provides integrated mail, address book and calendaring functionality |
| Calindori | Touch friendly calendar application |
| Merkuro Calendar | Kirigami-based calendar and task management application |
| GNOME Calendar | Simple and attractive calendar |
| StarCalendar | Full-featured international calendar |
| Orage | Graphical calendar for the Xfce Desktop Environment |
| AgenDAV | CalDAV web client which features an AJAX interface |
| Events | Adaptive calendar app for GNOME and Phosh |
| Osmo | Personal organizer with calendar, task manager and address book |
| gsimplecal | Simple and lightweight GTK calendar |
This article has been revamped in line with our recent announcement.
 Read our complete collection of recommended free and open source software. Our curated compilation covers all categories of software. The software collection forms part of our series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. There are hundreds of in-depth reviews, open source alternatives to proprietary software from large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. There are also fun things to try, hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. |
Of all the calendars listed, Orage is the absolute best. It’s small, can sit on the desktop without taking up too much real estate, but is quite versatile. Osmo is a good second, but is too big for the desktop. The rest, I’ve tried but found too big and/or complicated.
Orage sits at the right on my desktop and I can easily glance over to check or verify a date, and set appointments. I would recommend it over the rest.