I’m about to make the move. I would appreciate if everyone who is or has been a user of either or both apps would please reply with a 1-10 rating and comments.
Just to let you know, I would give Agenda a well earned 9. It amazes me how far it has come in the last few years.
Thank you for the 9/10! Appreciate that.
I don’t have any experience with these apps, I’m afraid. As long as they work with the built in EventStore of Apple, you should get integration with Agenda. AFAIK they do use the EventStore.
I use BusyContacts with MailMate to index my Mail.app emails… and be able to retrieve all email related to one contact.
MailMate.. because Apple locked the search of emails through Spotlight… so MailMate re-index the emails (in another directory) and BusyContacts can use this index.
Recently, BusyContacts starts to add direct indexation of Mail.app emails, but (apparently) only for the emails that are opened/read/sent… not the whole bunch of your emails. But I do not (yet) use this function.
For Busycontacts, I rate it as 7/10
I do not use BusyCal
Notes:
(1) Yes, you have to run MailMate on a regular basis for indexing
(2) MailMate is also an email client. But if you do not send emails from it, the trial release of that tool is sufficient for just indexing your emails
I have tried BusyCal and BusyContacts multiple times, (and currently own up to date licenses), because I love the one time purchase price. However, I always return to Fantastical/Cardhop. They’re just better apps, the native language support and quick calendar access are amazing, and it’s just a very seamless integration. They are the apps that should be in Tahoe. And honestly, I don’t think BusyCal is all that much better than the built in Calendar in Tahoe, especially now that it integrates reminders.
It’s not that they’re bad, they’re just not great.
BusyCal gets a 10 from me. It has always excelled at integrating calendars from multiple servers and settings, and I can’t recall a stretch over the past 15 years when it has gone longer than 3 months without at least one material improvement. I appreciate it works equally well on MacOS, iOS, and iPadOS, as well as my Watch.
BusyContacts is about a 7 right now, up from 4. Even though it is integrated with BusyCal (and they technically are descendants of Now Up-To-Date and Now Contacts), it languished painfully in a 1.x version for several years. For some reason BusyMac decided to start developing it again and it has improved tremendously over the past 18 months. It really reflects poorly on them that there is no version for the mobile platforms. It is still a big step up from the Mac Contacts app.
Fantastical is also worth looking at, and I used it on iOS for quite a while. I dropped it in favor of having a single calendar interface, and at the time I did so BusyCal seemed like the better option for me.
And yes, Agenda is well worth it for me, and I love how easily it integrates with BusyCal.