Calendars are an important part of our lives. In today’s world, people mostly use the web or mobile calendars. They can be found everywhere, including various software: booking apps, travel software, project management, admin panels, etc.

Users may need calendars on websites for several reasons. The user may need to pick a date from the calendar to fill up a form or provide a date while delivering any information.

Undoubtedly, this component can be called critical for business applications. Just imagine how much your business can suffer due to a badly tuned and developed calendar. Thus, this component should be given special attention and meticulousness in development.

In this article, we will look at criteria for a good calendar in web applications. Also, we will show you the best libraries in different frameworks for building your own solutions based on them.

Qualities of a good calendar for web apps

We have picked the criteria for a good calendar from our previous article on date-pickers. Obviously, we can adapt these to calendar plugins. We divided our evaluation criteria into 4 blocks.

Documentation. It is vital for whatever you’re using to be well-documented in order to learn how to build or reconstruct it. The product with no or lacking documentation does not have a right to exist.

Customization. A great library should come with options that can be updated to add or remove certain functionality. This especially applies to open-source software.

Compatibility. Who wants to visit a site with a datepicker that only works in recent versions of Chrome and Webkit browsers? Many business apps still work in legacy browsers.

User Experience. Ask yourself whether the plugin will be convenient for the needs of your user? Does it fit your product style? The looks and quality of the docs are not that important compared to how the library will actually deal with your task.

Top calendar libraries

We have included various calendar libraries based on React, Angular, Vue, Bootstrap or jQuery. Some of them are more developed, some are easier to customize. We hope this catalog will help you with your work.

Fullcalendar.io

GitHub stars: 11.4k

Price and License: MIT

Website/Demo: https://fullcalendar.io/

Github: https://github.com/fullcalendar/fullcalendar

Type of installation: NPM, Yarn

Frameworks: React, Vue, Angular

This is a good choice for those who know what they want. There are no detailed step-by-step guides that describe what to do to get the goal. Only a brief Getting Started Guide and Documentation Page. Lightweight.

The library is easily customizable and has many different components. The website, demos, and documentation give the impression of a mature product, which you’re not scared to use. With this, you can plan resources and mark events. Timeline view and various themes are also there. A good asset of this library is the documentation for developing in React, Vue, and Angular.

Tui calendar

GitHub stars: 8.2k

Price and License: MIT

Website/Demo: http://ui.toast.com/tui-calendar

Github: https://github.com/nhn/tui.calendar

Type of installation: Via package managers or CDN

Frameworks: React, Vue, Angular wrappers

Tui is a part of a TUI library. It is built on top or jquery with options of using React, Angular and Vue wrappers. The calendar supports various view types: daily, weekly, monthly(6 weeks, 2 weeks, 3 weeks) and efficient management of milestone and task schedules. You can change the first day of the week, customize the date and schedule information UI(including a header and a footer of grid cell).

The product has full documentation and can be installed via package managers of Content Delivery Network.

CLNDR

GitHub stars: 2.8k

Price and License: MIT

Website/Demo: http://kylestetz.github.io/CLNDR/

Github: https://github.com/kylestetz/CLNDR

Type of installation: Via package managers or CDN

Frameworks: React, Vue, Angular wrappers

CLNDR.js is a jQuery calendar plugin that, unlike most calendar plugins, doesn’t generate markup. Instead, you provide an Underscore.js HTML template, and in return, CLNDR gives you a wealth of data to use within it. HTML templates are well-suited to this task because they allow us the flexibility to specify where we want the data to go in our markup.

CLNDR takes your template and injects some data into it. The data contains everything you need to create a calendar.

Kendo UI Scheduler

GitHub stars: –

Price and License: Apache License, $999 – $2199

Website/Demo: https://demos.telerik.com/kendo-ui/scheduler/index

Github: –

Type of installation: package managers

Frameworks: React, Angular, Vue, jQuery

Kendo UI is a big and advanced JavaScript framework. It contains tons of widgets and tools. Maybe it’s not a good idea to use its Scheduler Widget if you’re not interested in other components. The Kendo UI documentation is well written, and you can check out a bunch of Scheduler demos supplemented with code examples. Regarding the coding, it won’t take much time to build a basic scheduler and add some features to it. The default view is a little bit plain, but it’s easy to change that.

React big calendar

GitHub stars: 4k

Price and License: MIT

Website/Demo: http://jquense.github.io/react-big-calendar/examples/index.html

Github: https://github.com/intljusticemission/react-big-calendar

Type of installation: package managers

Frameworks: React

React big calendar is an event calendar component built for React. It is made for modern browsers (read: IE10+) and uses flexbox over the classic tables-ception approach.

React big calendar includes two options for handling the date formatting and culture localization, depending on your preference of DateTime libraries. You can use either the Moment.js or Globalize.js localizers.

Out of the box, you can include the compiled CSS files and be up and running. But, sometimes, you may want to style Big Calendar to match your application styling. For this reason, SASS files are included with Big Calendar. SASS implementation provides a file containing color and sizing variables that you can update to fit your application.

Mobiscroll responsive calendar

GitHub stars: –

Price and License: $225, $595, $1255

Website/Demo: https://mobiscroll.com/responsive-calendar

Github: –

Type of installation: copy and paste script

Frameworks: Angular, Ionic, React, jQuery, plain JS

Mobiscroll calendar is a multiframework responsive calendar, which can work in mobile, web and tablet devices.

Together with Single and Multiple selection types, users are able to select not just days one by one, but full weeks as well. It also enables users to easily change years and months without consecutive swiping.

Mobiscroll helps users visualize two to three months in a row by displaying multiple months. It can provide helpful information in the form of text in day cells.

With Mobiscroll you can highlight dates that have a specific meaning to the users. Additionally, you might use icons and text to give it meaning.

The product supports localization and multilingual apps. It provides a UI with the correct culture settings. RTL availability also included.

Syncfusion react calendar

GitHub stars: –

Price and License: $2495 – $4995 for all components

Website/Demo: https://www.syncfusion.com/react-ui-components/react-calendar

Github: –

Type of installation: copy and paste script

Frameworks: Angular, Blazor, plain JS, Vue, React

The Syncfusion calendar is a component to display the date and days of the week. It provides the month, year, and decade view options to quickly navigate to the desired date. It supports minimum dates, maximum dates and disabled dates to restrict the date selection. The product is lightweight and easily configurable.

You can choose across four different themes, including Material design. Apart from the standard, built-in theme, the Calendar component provides complete control over its appearance, allowing you to customize the style to suit your application.

Angular calendar

GitHub stars: 2k

Price and License: MIT

Website/Demo: https://mattlewis92.github.io/angular-calendar/#/kitchen-sink

Github: https://github.com/mattlewis92/angular-calendar

Type of installation: package manager

Frameworks: Angular

The product is a calendar component for Angular 6.0+ that can display events on a month, week or day view. The template is highly customizable. You can build your own components instead of those not meeting your project specs.

Please note that this library is not optimized for mobile. You will need to do it yourself.

Bootstrap calendar

GitHub stars: 2.9k

Price and License: MIT

Website/Demo: http://bootstrap-calendar.eivissapp.com/

Github: https://github.com/Serhioromano/bootstrap-calendar

Type of installation: package manager

Frameworks: Bootstrap

Full feature calendar based on the most popular HTML framework Twitter Bootstrap. This product is reusable. It means that there is no UI in this calendar. All buttons to switch view or load events are done separately. You will end up with your own unique calendar design. It is also template based – all views including year, month, week or day are based on templates. You can easily change the looks or style, even add a new custom view. If you use this product, it will be easy to adjust and style your calendar with LESS variables file.

It uses AJAX to feed calendar with events. You provide URL and just return by this URL JSON list of events. Language files are connected separately with i18n. You can easily translate the calendar into your language. Holidays are also displayed on the calendar according to your language.

Vcalendar

GitHub stars: 2.1k

Price and License: MIT

Website/Demo: https://vcalendar.io/

Github: https://github.com/nathanreyes/v-calendar

Type of installation: package manager

Frameworks: Vue

V-Calendar is a clean and lightweight plugin for displaying simple, attributed calendars in Vue.js. It uses attributes to decorate the calendar with various visual indicators including highlighted date regions, dots, bars, content styles and popovers for simple tooltips and even custom slot content.

Any single attribute may contain one object of each type and can be displayed for single dates, date ranges and even complex date patterns like every other Friday, the 15th of every month or the last Friday of every other month.

Dhtmlx calendar

GitHub stars: –

Price and License: from $599

Website/Demo: https://dhtmlx.com/docs/products/dhtmlxCalendar/

Github: –

Type of installation: package manager

Frameworks: Vue, Angular, React

This is quite a good choice if a calendar is all you want. There is an example of integration with Google maps, so you can extend the basic functionality if needed. The documentation page contains a set of guides that may be useful for beginners. The bunch of <div> containers needed to make this scheduler work may confuse you from the start, but the overall coding process is quite obvious.

The product has the following features:

Cross-browser compatibility

IE11+ support

Full control with JavaScript API

Ability to set inactive dates

Configurable first day of the week

Built-in multilingual support

12-hour and 24-hour time format

3 views: calendar, month, year

This is quite a good choice if you want to build an enterprise product. The company has good support and flexibility in prices.

Recap and conclusion

We had a look at both basic and more advanced calendars. If you want a simple solution without support, but still easily customizable, then choose one of the free options. Considering more complex products, we presented paid solutions with good support quality.

About flatlogic

At Flatlogic we develop admin dashboard templates and React Native templates. We are listed among Top 20 Web Development companies from Belarus and Lithuania. During the last 6 years, we have successfully completed more than 30 big projects for small startups and large enterprises. As a team, we always have a deep desire to help our clients.

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