Fantastical for Windows: an excellent calendar app comes to PCs

Fantastical is one of the best and most powerful calendar apps on the market. Since it first launched in 2011, it has been both nicer to look at and easier to use than your average calendaring tool. I’ve been a user for years, and every time I switch away, I come back for the design, the natural-language processing that lets you create events just by typing “Lunch with Arthur 12:30 Friday at Panera,” and the integrations with to-do list apps. It’s an expensive app, at $57 a year or $7 a month for all its features, but it’s worth it for anyone who lives out of their calendar. And as long as you only have Apple devices.

Now, at long last, Fantastical is coming to the most important productivity platform: Windows. Flexibits, the developer behind Fantastical, says the Windows app includes all the features from other platforms, and is a truly native app rather than a web wrapper or a hacky port. There is one caveat, though: it’s not yet an Arm-native app, so if you’re on a Copilot Plus PC or something similar you’ll have to run Fantastical through an emulator for now. But Flexibits says the Arm version is coming soon.

Windows support has been a top feature request among Fantastical users for years, Flexibits CEO Michael Simmons said in a press release announcing the app. The company is calling this launch Fantastical 4.0, though the new platform is the only new feature. Fantastical now works across Mac, iOS, iPadOS, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, and Windows; the big name still missing there is Android, but there’s no word on that.

If you’re a Windows users and you end up downloading Fantastical for the first time, here are a few pro tips. Start with the free version, which includes most of the basic calendaring features and will be plenty for lots of people. If you do pay, my favorite thing about Fantastical is the one-click way to join video meetings, so make sure you integrate all your video apps. Fantastical Openings, which is basically like Calendly built into Fantastical, is also very good if that’s a feature you need. But after all this time, the best thing about the app is still how good it looks, and how easy it makes it to add and move events. It’s very much a power-user tool, but it’s a good one.