Most of us use calendar apps to organize our daily schedules. Google Calendar, Samsung Calendar, and Outlook are three of the most popular calendar apps out there with unique features and customization capabilities. Which one is ideal for you?

We've got you covered with an easy guide to help you decide which one's best for your needs.

1. Interface

Google Calendar has a sleek interface to match Android 12's Material You design, which includes redesigns for navigation bars and action buttons. It uses a timeline format with each day split into blocks. Further, you can see all your events and organize them in a day, three-day, week, month, or a schedule view. You can also set up color-coded events with your calendar.

If you're looking for an intuitive and easy-to-use calendar app, Samsung Calendar is the perfect choice for you. The calendar includes a default monthly view, and lets you quickly add events and assign event colors from four available choices—very muted, muted, bright, or very bright—as well as add themed stickers for birthdays, anniversaries, and other important events in your life.

Outlook is an easy-to-use calendar app that can be accessed from multiple devices and includes powerful tools like task management and collaboration, so you can stay organized.

It comes with flexible view options (agenda, daily, three-day, and monthly view). It's also compatible with popular calendar services (such as Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and more) and integrates smoothly with these apps for email reminders, scheduling meetings, and more.

Winner: Google Calendar

2. Customization

If you're looking for an intuitive way to catalog your schedule, Google Calendar is an excellent choice. Its smart design makes it easy to stay on top of everything that comes your way. You get plenty of customization options for tracking your events, including different colors to help keep everything organized.

It works perfectly with Google apps like Gmail. Try creating new calendars to organize your day, and add additional custom calendars to keep tabs on things like holiday lists or your favorite sports teams. You can also auto-accept invitations that don't conflict with existing events.

Samsung Calendar helps you manage your schedules easily. Offering three levels of priority for alerts, the app gives you a better understanding of what's coming up on your calendar. You can highlight short events (less than a day) and also view weather forecasts in your calendar to help plan out your events more carefully. In addition, you can choose from a selection of lunar calendars.

Outlook is a handy app for business and personal users who wish to sync calendars and applications and make quick changes when needed. Calendar customization in Outlook is surprisingly robust. You can show or hide busy hours, change scheduling colors and fonts, apply different types of calendars, and much more.

Here's a quick overview:

Customization

Google Calendar

Samsung Calendar

Outlook

Create new calendars

Yes

Yes

Yes

Other calendars

Yes (Holidays, Sports)

Yes (Lunar calendars)

Yes (Sports, TV, Holidays, Birthdays)

Auto-accept invites

Yes

No

No

Highlight short events

Yes

Yes

Yes

Custom colors

Yes

Yes

Yes

Priority alerts

No

Yes (High, Medium, Low)

No

Winner: Google Calendar

3. Integration With Third-Party Services

Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook are the best options for anyone who wants to integrate their calendars with other apps or services. GCal can be integrated with popular Google Workspace applications such as Gmail and Google Drive as well as other calendars including Outlook and Apple Calendar.

Not only that, you can link Google Calendar to third-party apps, so you can sync your to-do lists and personal calendars.

Outlook offers a host of third-party integrations for personal and business use, including calendar and project management apps. For example, you can sync Outlook with Google Calendar, which allows you to add events from your computer or smartphone into your shared calendar in real-time.

While Samsung Calendar is a super convenient tool to keep your schedule organized and up to date, it isn't great at keeping up with third-party apps, other than native Samsung apps such as the Weather widget, and calendar apps such as Outlook and Google Calendar.

Winner: Outlook

4. Scheduling Events, Tasks, and Reminders

All three calendar apps can be used to create events, tasks, and reminders.

Creating and scheduling goals, tasks, and events is easy when you use the Google Calendar app. You can create an event and choose the date and time of your choice, as well as set up a location to add more specific details. You can also set up the reminder feature to set a custom alert for meetings and use Google Meet as a video-conferencing tool.

Setting due dates, times, repeat options, locations, and more is a breeze. You can use Google Assistant to automatically add appointments for you based on your schedule and location.

Outlook's calendar is a great choice for those who want a reliable, user-friendly experience. Outlook's calendar menu is simple yet powerful, letting you easily create new events and tasks, and organize your schedule across multiple calendars.

The best part about the Outlook calendar is its ease of use. You can set meetings via Skype, add locations, re-schedule existing meetings, and send reminders to participants. If you're a Microsoft power user, Outlook is probably your best choice.

Samsung Calendar offers similar functionality when it comes to creating events and meetings. You can easily add dates, repeat options, reminders, and more as you like.

Here's a quick overview of the features across all of these apps:

Event Creation and Scheduling

Google Calendar

Samsung Calendar

Outlook

Creating events, tasks & reminders

Yes

Yes

Yes

Create goals

Yes

No

No

Online meeting aids

Yes

No

Yes

Google Assistant integration

Yes

Yes

No

Schedule view

Yes

Yes

Yes

Add location

Yes

Yes

Yes

Winners: Google Calendar and Outlook

5. Sharing and Collaboration

Sharing calendars is a great way to keep track of events, appointments, and tasks with your team or anyone else. When it comes to sharing calendars, Outlook and Google Calendar are the best options for collaboration purposes.

You can share a Google calendar via a public shareable link on the Google Calendar website. Here's how to do this:

  1. Go to the left menu select My calendars and choose your calendar.
  2. Select the three-dot menu and choose Settings and sharing.
  3. Next, scroll down to select Access permissions for events.
  4. Tick the box adjacent to Make available to public.
  5. To get a public shareable link, click on Get shareable link.
  6. You can now copy and share the link with your friends or teams, or anyone else.

Google Calendar provides several sharing options so that only the people you want can view or edit your events. The different modes allow you to set permissions such as view busy or hidden status, edit events, or full edit and sharing access.

You can share calendars in Outlook with other users by email. You can also publish your calendars online, though this feature may be limited to specific accounts only.

Samsung Calendar offers limited functionality when it comes to sharing calendars. Here's how to create a shared calendar in Samsung Calendar.

  1. Open the Samsung Calendar app.
  2. Tap Settings in the top-right corner of the left menu. Tap Manage calendars.
  3. Under Samsung account, tap Create shared calendar.
  4. Name your calendar, and choose a color. You can choose to give access permissions to those in your contact list, or by sending an invitation to their Samsung account, if they have one.

Winner: Google Calendar

Which Calendar App Should You Use?

Overall, the calendar apps provided by Google, Outlook, and Samsung contain many of the same essential features. Ultimately, choosing the right calendar app will depend on your personal preferences.

The clean, streamlined Google Calendar app has a user interface that doesn't take any time to get used to. The simple layout provides a smooth experience for casual users who simply need a little more than a basic organizer to keep track of dates and appointments.

Microsoft's Outlook calendar is also packed with useful features, but might be better suited for business users rather than casual users. Samsung's calendar app falls somewhere between these two extremes, packing several useful features while keeping an easy-to-understand interface.