Cozi vs TimeTree (2026): Which Shared Calendar Fits?

Cozi and TimeTree are both free shared calendars used by millions of households, and they get compared constantly because they overlap on the basics. But they were built for different rooms of the house. Cozi is a family organizer — calendar plus lists, meals, and a weekly digest — with a 30-day cap on its free tier. TimeTree is a shared calendar with a comment thread on every event, free with ads, built for couples and small groups. Match the app to the household and the choice is easy. Here's the full comparison, plus the option neither one offers.

The short answer

What Cozi does well

Cozi is the veteran. It's on iPhone, Android, and the web, and it bundles the pieces a family with kids uses every week: a color-coded shared calendar, shopping and to-do lists, a recipe box, and the Sunday digest email. If the PTA and the carpool already live in Cozi, that matters.

The tiers: Cozi Free ($0) shows ads and, since May 2024, limits how far ahead you can see to roughly 30 days. Cozi Gold ($39/yr) removes ads and adds month view, calendar search, and a birthday tracker. Cozi Max ($79.99/yr) adds AI Event Import from your email inbox plus an AI recipe creator and meal planner. The 30-day cap is the change that pushed a lot of longtime users to look around — our Cozi 30-day limit explainer covers what happened.

Cozi's Google Calendar sync is one-way: Cozi → Google. If a parent lives in Google Calendar for work, Google events never appear in Cozi.

What TimeTree does well

TimeTree is a shared calendar first and only. It's free with ads, has more than 70 million users, and its signature feature is a comment thread on every event — "should we invite the Parks?" lives on the dinner plan, not in a separate text. Couples, roommates, and friend groups love it, and it's cross-platform. TimeTree Premium ($4.49/mo or $44.99/yr) removes ads and adds extras.

TimeTree's limits: no lists, no recipes, no family-organizer features. Google Calendar integration is display-only plus a one-way iCal export — TimeTree can show your Google events, but edits don't sync live in both directions. And its Event Scan photo feature only reads English and Japanese and isn't available in the EU, UK, or China. TimeTree also rolled out a major UI overhaul in late January 2026 that not every longtime user loved. Our Calendara vs TimeTree comparison goes deeper on the sync gap.

Cozi vs TimeTree on price

For a household that plans more than a month ahead — which is every family with a school calendar — Cozi Free isn't really an option, so the practical comparison is Cozi Gold ($39) versus TimeTree Free ($0 with ads) or Premium ($44.99).

Cozi vs TimeTree for families with kids

Cozi, clearly. Shopping lists that everyone can check off in the store, a recipe box, the meal planner on Max, and a calendar designed around multiple kids' color-coded schedules. TimeTree can hold the same events, but you'll be running a separate list app and there's no family-specific layer.

Cozi vs TimeTree for couples and friend groups

TimeTree, clearly. Two calendars overlaid cleanly, a comment thread on each plan, no kid-oriented clutter, and no 30-day wall. Our best shared calendar apps for couples ranking covers where TimeTree sits among the couples-focused options.

Do Cozi and TimeTree sync with Google Calendar?

Both do, and both only one way — which is the detail that bites a household where one adult keeps a work calendar in Google.

• Cozi pushes its events into Google Calendar so they show up there, but anything you add or change in Google never comes back into Cozi. You end up checking two calendars, and the family one is always slightly behind.
• TimeTree can display your Google events inside the app for reference, and it can export your TimeTree calendar out via an iCal feed. Neither direction is a live two-way sync: edit a Google event and TimeTree won't update it, edit a TimeTree event and Google won't see it.

If two-way sync matters, neither app has it. Our Cozi vs Google Calendar comparison explains how much friction the one-way limit creates over a school year.

What about the free tiers day to day?

Cozi Free is genuinely usable if you never need to look more than a month ahead — which describes almost no family with a school calendar. Ads appear throughout. TimeTree Free has no forward-view cap, but ads are more visible in the interface, and the Premium upsell to remove them is $44.99/yr, more than Cozi Gold. In practice, families end up paying for Cozi and couples end up tolerating TimeTree's ads, which is roughly how each company designed it.

Where both apps leave the hard part to you

Whichever you choose, someone still types the schedule in. The school's year calendar, the camp PDF, the coach's photo of the practice schedule — in Cozi that's twenty minutes of manual entry (Cozi Max can only import from email); in TimeTree, Event Scan can draft events from a photo, but only in English or Japanese and not in the EU or UK.

The third option: Calendara

Calendara is an iPhone and iPad shared calendar built around capture. Photograph any schedule — printed calendar, PDF, screenshot, whiteboard, handwriting — and AI reads every event into a shared, color-coded family calendar. There's no language restriction and no region exclusion. It has true two-way Google Calendar sync (fixing what both Cozi and TimeTree get one-way), shared grocery and to-do lists with photo-to-list capture, family invites by QR code, and view/edit permissions per member. No ads, no 30-day cap. Free during early access — a 7-day full-access preview, then $4.99/mo or $39.99/yr once pricing begins.

The caveat: Calendara is iPhone and iPad only. Android partners or relatives can see and edit the shared calendar through Google Calendar via the two-way sync, but they won't have the app. Mixed-device households should stick with Cozi or TimeTree, or read our Calendara vs Cozi comparison with that in mind.

Who should pick which

Pick Cozi if you have kids, want lists and meals in the same app as the calendar, and your household spans iPhone and Android. Get Gold; Free's 30-day window will frustrate you by October.

Pick TimeTree if you're a couple, roommates, or a friend group who wants a free shared calendar with conversation attached to each plan.

Pick Calendara if everyone's on iPhone and you'd rather photograph the schedule than type it — and you want Google Calendar to actually stay in sync both ways. If you're leaving one of these apps, see our best Cozi alternatives or best TimeTree alternatives.

Bottom line

Cozi for families, TimeTree for couples and groups — that's the honest split, and both are cheap or free. Both also make you do the typing. For iPhone households, Calendara does the typing for you and keeps Google Calendar in two-way sync, free during early access and then $4.99/mo or $39.99/yr once pricing begins.