Cozi, FamilyWall or Skylight: which family calendar is better for two kids in two schools?

Which is better, Cozi or FamilyWall?

Cozi for a calendar and lists that anyone in the house will actually open. FamilyWall if you also want messaging, photo albums and location in one app. Since 2024 both belong to the same company, In Tandem, which also owns OurFamilyWizard.

Cozi does a few things and does them plainly: a colour-coded calendar, shopping and to-do lists, recipes and a meal plan. The free version carries ads and only shows the next 30 days; Gold, $39 a year for everyone in the household, removes both limits and adds month view on the phone, calendar search and up to three reminders per event. Cozi's daily or weekly agenda email is free and is the closest thing on this page to a brief, with the catch that it can only tell you what somebody already typed in.

FamilyWall is bigger. The free tier has the shared calendar, lists, a family messenger, contacts and 100 MB of storage. Premium, $4.99 a month or $44.99 a year after a 30 day trial, adds the two-way sync with Google and Outlook calendars, real-time location with place alerts, a meal planner, a budget tracker and 25 GB. If your family will use the messenger and the location layer, that is the extra you are paying for. If you only ever open the calendar, the extra tabs are in the way.

For two kids in two schools the honest answer is that the choice matters less than the inputs. Neither app sees the school's email. Every early dismissal, picture day and bake sale still has to be read by a person and typed in, and that person is usually the one reading this.

Is Cozi or Skylight better?

Cozi if you want the calendar on every phone for free. Skylight if the point is a screen in the kitchen that everyone walks past, and you can spend around $379 in the first year.

Skylight is a touchscreen ($299.99 for the 15 inch Calendar 2, with a 10 inch and a 27 inch either side) that shows a family calendar in colour blocks and runs on a phone app for edits. Syncing your Google, Apple, Outlook, Yahoo or Cozi calendars is free. So it is not really Cozi or Skylight: a Skylight can display your Cozi calendar.

The Plus plan, $79 a year after a free first month, is where the school-email question lives. Magic Import gives your Skylight an email address; forward a school email, a PDF calendar or a photo of a paper schedule to it and the events appear on the screen. It reads what you forward, not the inbox, so the day you skip forwarding is the day it misses. Plus also brings meal planning, a chore chart with rewards and the photo screensaver.

If you want the fridge-screen effect, Skylight is the polished way to get it. If you want the dates found without you doing the forwarding, that is a different kind of product, covered in the last two sections.

Is Cozi really free?

Yes, with ads and a calendar that shows 30 days ahead. Gold, $39 a year for the whole household, removes both.

The free version of Cozi still has the calendar, the lists, the recipes and the agenda emails. Two things changed in May 2024: ads appear in the free app, and the free calendar stopped showing events beyond the next 30 days. If you plan a school year, that limit shows up the first time you try to enter the spring concert in September. Gold lifts it, removes the ads, and adds month view on mobile, calendar search, change notifications, a birthday tracker and shopping mode. One Gold subscription covers everyone in the account on all their devices.

A fair test: if the 30 day window bothers you, you are the family that plans ahead, and $39 a year is cheaper than a second calendar app.

Is there a better alternative to Skylight Calendar?

If you want the screen without the subscription, a tablet on the wall showing a shared Google Calendar does most of it. If what you want is the Magic Import part, that is software, and it does not need a screen.

Skylight sells two things in one box. The first is a display: a calendar that everyone can see without picking up a phone. Any tablet in a stand showing Google Calendar, Cozi or FamilyWall in full-screen does that, with no $79 a year and no lock-in, at the cost of a less finished look and some fiddling with sleep settings. Cozi and Skylight are adjacent, not rivals: Skylight syncs Cozi, and many families run both.

The second thing is the promise that school emails turn into calendar events. On Skylight that is Magic Import, and it works on what you forward. A handful of apps now connect to the inbox itself and do the reading as messages arrive; we compared them, with prices and what each one can and cannot read, in School email and class chat apps for parents, compared. Whichever you pick writes into the calendar you already have, so the wall screen, if you still want one, keeps working.

What fills these calendars?

Mamigo. It reads the class group chats and the school emails, and writes the dates it finds into the calendar you already use, so a Cozi, a FamilyWall or a Skylight screen shows them without anyone typing.

Mamigo connects to Gmail with a read-only permission and to the class WhatsApp groups you choose, as a linked device that can only read. It reads everything, including the 900-word PTA newsletter, and hands you one short brief a day with the few things that need a parent: the form, the early pickup, the costume. Dates go to Google Calendar, or to any calendar that takes a feed, and when the group moves the date the calendar follows. It also keeps the facts that live inside the messages, like the teacher's name and which day is swimming, and saves only the photos with your kid in them from the class photo dump.

It cannot send, reply or react, anywhere. It keeps what a message means, never the message itself. The details are on the privacy page. Mamigo is on a waitlist and opens in batches; it is not a replacement for a shared calendar, it is what puts the school year into one.

How we checked

One person read each vendor's product page, pricing or Plus page and help centre on 16 September 2026: cozi.com and its FAQ, familywall.com and its support articles, myskylight.com and the Calendar Plus page, plus the App Store listings where a site left a gap. Prices are US list prices on that day. If we got something wrong about your product, write to hello@mamigo.family and we will fix it and update the date at the top.

Questions parents ask