Maple is shutting down: the best alternatives

What is actually happening

Straight from Maple's own notice, which has replaced its home page: Maple has been acquired by Wander, a travel company, and the app will sunset on 31 December 2026. Maple says it will send guidance and recommendations between now and then. Until it does, four details from the same notice matter more than the headline.

• Your account works until 31 December, then closes. Not read-only afterwards. Closed and inaccessible.
• All data is deleted at shutdown, with no way to recover it. Maple's own advice is to export or transfer it beforehand.
• The calendar connections go too. The notice names Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook and TeamSnap specifically. The events that came from those calendars are still safe where they came from. Everything you typed into Maple itself is not.
• Annual Maple+ subscriptions no longer renew. Monthly ones keep running until the end of the year, so if you pay monthly, you decide when to stop.

That last point about the connections is the one to sit with. Maple's whole pitch was that it pulled your scattered calendars into one family view and then let an assistant turn school emails into tasks and chores. The calendars survive, because they were never Maple's. The to-dos, the chore rota, the meal plans, the notes and whatever the assistant filed for you only ever lived in Maple, and that is the part that disappears.

Do this before 31 December. It takes ten minutes

1. Work out which calendar is the real one. If Maple was reading from Google, Apple or Outlook, open that calendar on its own and check the events are there. They should be. If you created events inside Maple only, add those to the calendar you are keeping now, while you can still see both side by side.
2. Save the things that only lived in Maple. The recurring chores, the standing to-do lists, the meals you actually cook on repeat. There are probably a dozen that matter. Screenshot them or type them into the next app. Maple says it will provide resources for moving; a one-tap export may arrive and may not, and your Tuesday chores are not worth the gamble.
3. Reconnect TeamSnap somewhere else, if you used it. It is the one source the generalist apps mostly do not read, so the practice schedule may need to go back to living in TeamSnap's own app or in a calendar it can publish to.
4. Pick the next app now, not on 30 December. Every closure goes the same way. The move happens in the final week, in a panic, during the holidays, and the family ends up on whatever sat at the top of the search results. You have three months. Spend a fortnight of it actually running a week from something.

The six, compared

Prices are the publishers' own list prices at the time of writing and they move about by region and by sale. Check before committing.

FamilyWall: the nearest thing to the same shape

If you want the app that most resembles the one you are losing, start here. The free tier carries a shared calendar, shopping and to-do lists, location sharing and a family messenger, and Premium, at $4.99 a month or $44.99 a year, adds the parts Maple refugees will actually miss: Google and Outlook calendar sync, a meal planner and a shared budget. There is a thirty-day trial, which is exactly long enough to run two real weeks through it.

What it does not have is the assistant. Nobody here turns a school email into three chores on its own. That feature was most of Maple's magic and, so far, most of the industry's unfinished homework.

Cozi: the veteran, with a paywall on month view

Cozi has been doing this for well over a decade and its lists are still the best in the category. The free app shows ads and keeps month view on a phone behind Cozi Gold at $39 a year, which is the detail that sends people looking elsewhere. On calendars, Cozi's own help page is honest: it subscribes to a read-only feed of your Google, Apple or Outlook calendar, and publishes its own events back out the same way, with updates arriving within an hour one way and up to two days the other. Fine for seeing the week, not the two-way sync Maple ran. The longer version, including where Cozi is still the right answer, is in Cozi alternatives: six family organisers compared.

Skylight: if what you liked was the import, and you have a wall

Skylight is a different kind of thing, a touchscreen for the kitchen, and it is on this page for one reason. Its Calendar 2 syncs with Google, Outlook, Apple Calendar, Cozi, Yahoo and any calendar with a public link, and the $79 a year Plus plan adds meal planning and Magic Import, which forwards a school email or PDF and turns it into events. That is the nearest surviving relative of the Maple assistant. The 15-inch device is $299.99 on top, so this is a household purchase, not an app swap, and the phone app on its own is not the point.

TimeTree: the calendar that expects a conversation

TimeTree is built to be the calendar rather than to gather the others, and its distinguishing feature is a comment thread hanging off each event. If your family discusses every pickup, it is the most established option. The free tier shows ads; Premium at $4.49 a month or $44.99 a year removes them and adds attachments and pinned events. There are no lists, meals or money features, so it replaces Maple's calendar and nothing else.

Google Calendar: if the dates were the whole job

Plenty of families used Maple as a prettier window onto a Google Calendar that already existed. If that is you, the honest move is to stop paying for the window. Share the family calendar with each other, subscribe to the school's public one, and put the chores in whatever list app you already have. Free, no ads, no shutdown risk worth mentioning. The how-to for a mixed household is in how to share a calendar between iPhone and Android.

Cria Planner: the calendar, the chores, the meals and the money

I build this one, so read the next paragraph with a suspicious eyebrow raised and go and poke the free tier yourself.

Cria is a shared planner for two people first and a family tool second. One calendar you both see, tasks you can assign to each other and repeat weekly, which is what a chore rota is once you take the chart off the fridge, this week's dinners writing one shared shopping list, and a budget that works out who owes what. On a phone it imports the calendars the phone already shows, Google, iCloud, Outlook, one way, so the school term lands next to the chores without anyone retyping it. The assistant, Cria, sits on the paid tiers and the rewarded-video path, and it answers questions about your plans rather than reading your inbox.

The calendar, tasks, notes, this week's meals, the list and the shared budget are free for two. If you need five family members, a wall screen or an inbox that files itself, this is the wrong page of the catalogue and FamilyWall or Skylight is the better answer. The alpaca can afford to be honest. It has no sales quota.

How to pick, in one question

Forget the feature lists. Answer this: was Maple your family's calendar, or your family's assistant?

If it was the calendar, the view that gathered Google, Apple and Outlook into one place, you want FamilyWall Premium, Cozi, or simply Google Calendar shared properly. If it was the assistant, the thing that read the school email so you did not have to, the nearest surviving relative is Skylight's Magic Import, and it comes with a screen. And if the honest answer is "it was where the chores and the shopping lived", pick Cria Planner or FamilyWall and skip the calendar theatre entirely.

The short answer

You want the same breadth in an app: FamilyWall. You want the veteran with the best lists and will pay for Gold: Cozi. You loved the email import and have a kitchen wall: Skylight. Your family comments on every event: TimeTree. The dates were the whole job: Google Calendar. Two of you, and the chores and the money matter as much as the dates: Cria Planner.

Whichever you land on, the routine matters more than the app. The twenty minutes a week that make any of them work are in the 20-minute weekly reset.