Best Digital Wall Calendars

So if you’re having trouble managing, you’re not alone. A good calendar can help, but as helpful as a calendar app on your phone or computer can be, it’s not front and center for the whole family. Likewise, a paper calendar on the wall can help everyone keep track of dates, but it requires that someone remember to transfer digital events to a poster on a wall—not the worst thing in the world, but it requires some degree of discipline, which not everyone will have.

Digital wall calendars are meant to make family schedule-planning easier. They often connect to a companion app but can also be controlled via a large, wall-mounted screen, and in theory, they make it so that everyone in the family can easily see everyone else’s schedule. But at several hundred dollars or more for each, it’s a considerable investment for a product that primarily does one thing.

I tested four wall calendars to find out whether any of them could help my husband and me keep our calendars aligned. I ended up falling for one, but, as I discovered during the reporting of this article, keeping your digital calendar in the right spot is crucial to its success. If it’s tucked away in the office, where I did most of my testing, its usefulness is limited; you’ll likely want to install it somewhere the entire family congregates in the morning, which in my experience tends to be around the kitchen area.