I’m always on a quest for the best digital planner for the school year, because I have developed a very bad habit: Every year I get tempted by the beautiful, fun, old-fashioned paper planners I discover on Etsy or in our local stationery stores. They’re just brimming with possibility! So beautiful! So inspiring!
So…I buy them.
And never, ever use them.
Because, come on. Digital planners just make so much more sense for a parent like me, who’s managing multiple kids with different schooling, extracurricular, and therapy schedules, on top of my own and my husband’s.
So, I headed to our Out Tech Your Kids Facebook Community and asked other parents to help me find the best digital planners for parents that they really find useful for the school year in particular. And wow, did they come through.
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Related: Is the Skylight calendar worth the splurge for big, busy families? We tried it.
The 3 best digital planners for parents
I’ve narrowed down all the helpful suggestions of digital planners that I got, did some additional research, and was able to narrow it down to these three as the best digital planners for parents right now.
And to help you even further, I’ve tried to describe what kind of parent (or planner) would benefit most from each kind. Because hey, we’re busy! We don’t all have time to plan out time to research planners, right?
The best digital planner for a parent who likes the idea of a paper planner, but really only uses digital:
Artful Agenda
When I first stumbled on Artful Agenda, I finally felt like I was fully seen…by a digital planner.
It looks just like a paper agenda, but it’s all on your desktop computer (see the photo at very top), plus your phone and tablet. It has tabs for different views (day, week, month), to-do lists you can check off digitally, and even a place to track your water intake and meal plan, and best of all, it all syncs with iCal, Google, and Outlook. So if say you like your iCal or your Outlook, while your kids are using Google for classroom needs, you’re covered.
If you love all the bells-and-whistles of a new paper planner like I do, but hate erasing and changing and managing it — let alone lugging it around —then you need Artful Agenda. It is just brilliant.
The best digital planner for a busy parent of teens who needs everything shared in one convenient place:
Family Wall app
Family Wall app is a digital planner that helps your family share everything—from grocery lists to calendar events to meal plans and even locations.
On one clean, convenient dashboard you’re able to see everything from to-do assignments (take out the trash, kids!) to shared contact info (what’s the coach’s phone number again?). It’s a great one-stop planning location for sharing all the important details of your day, however it’s best optimized if you require all your family members with their own phones to use it consistently.
If you have teens with their own busy lives, this app could be a lifesaver.
A digital planner for the parent who just can’t give up paper but loves digital, too:
Moleskine Smart Planner
Is it cheating to include the Moleskine smart paper planner in my picks for the best digital planners?
No! And here’s why.
If you cannot give up your paper planner but really want the ease of digital shared calendars, Moleskine has you covered, brilliantly. Using the Moleskine smart pen, you can scribble appointments into the paper planner…and it magically appears formatted perfectly in your digital calendar.
Just link it up with iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook and more and you’ve literally got the best of both worlds.
My mind is blown and I don’t even know how they do it (okay, I kind of do but we don’t need to get into it here) — I mainly know that it’s going to be a game-changing digital planner for a whole lot of parents like me.
