Things 3

NotePlan

Productivity

NotePlan brings daily notes, tasks, and calendar context into a single planning surface for people who prefer working from text instead of maintaining separate notebooks and task boards. A daily note can hold ideas, checklist items, and time-sensitive work while calendar events remain visible nearby. Markdown, tags, links, search, filters, list views, and Kanban views give the system several ways to move from a quick note to a project overview without converting everything into a rigid template. The service is offered as a subscription across Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Web, with current monthly and annual plans published by the developer. Its sync choices matter: the official guidance describes local storage on Mac when using CloudKit or no sync, with synced copies stored on Apple services. That makes NotePlan a particularly good fit for a personal planning practice that benefits from daily pages, calendar-aware task planning, and text files that remain readable outside the interface. It is less suitable for buyers who want a free tier or who need to avoid a recurring subscription. The trial is the right time to test calendar connections, sync preference, and the amount of structure a daily-note habit adds to an existing workflow.

Fantastical

Calendar

Fantastical is a calendar application for people who need to see several schedules in one Mac workspace without manually switching among accounts. Its free tier provides a basic calendar that works with existing calendars, while the current Flexibits Premium plans add the vendor's advanced features, including Fantastical Scheduling and priority support. The product page frames the app around a unified view for work and personal calendars, and the current pricing material identifies integrations with iCloud, Google, Exchange, and supported CalDAV services for invitations and availability. That can suit someone who moves between personal, company, and shared calendars, but the value of the paid tier depends on whether the premium scheduling or collaboration features are part of their routine. Fantastical is available through the Mac App Store and a direct Flexibits download. Apple lists the current Mac version as requiring macOS 12.4 or later, while local inspection of the current official Flexibits 4.1.18 ZIP found both x86_64 and arm64 executable slices. Premium is a subscription rather than a one-time Mac license, so compare the current monthly and annual terms, free-tier limits, and account or provider requirements before treating it as a replacement for the built-in Calendar app.

Craft

Productivity

Craft is a document and note workspace for people who want to write, arrange ideas, and share finished material without moving every project into a separate task board or database. On the Mac app, documents sit inside spaces and folders, while a document view can expose its headings as a table of contents in the sidebar. That makes it useful for a working set of notes that needs both a writing surface and a navigable structure. Craft also supports styling, media, links, tasks, calendar context, collections, sharing, and publishing, so an individual can begin with a straightforward document and add more structure only where it helps. The current free plan has a 1,500-block limit and 1 GB of storage; Plus removes content limits and adds more storage, history, and assistant capacity. That plan split matters for people who expect Craft to become a long-running reference library. Craft is available on Mac but is not Mac-only: the developer also documents iOS, Windows, and web use. Buyers should therefore try its cross-device workflow and sharing model before treating it as an offline-only notebook or a replacement for a dedicated team project-management system.