PlanJour vs Google Calendar: Which One Actually Fits How You Plan?

Google Calendar is probably the most-used calendar app in the world, and for good reason. It is free, it syncs across every device, it plugs into Gmail and Google Meet, and almost everyone you schedule with already has one. If all you need is a place to put appointments, it does that job well.

PlanJour is not trying to be a bigger, better Google Calendar. It is a different kind of tool built around a different question: what if your calendar and your journal lived in the same place, styled like an actual notebook instead of a spreadsheet?

Where Google Calendar wins

Be honest about this part first. Google Calendar is free for personal use, with no subscription tier at all. It syncs instantly across every device you own, integrates deeply with Gmail, Google Meet and dozens of third-party tools, and supports team/shared calendars at a scale PlanJour was never built for. If your main need is coordinating meetings across an organisation, Google Calendar (or its Workspace tier) is the right tool.

It also has zero learning curve for most people, since almost everyone has already used it.

Where PlanJour is a different tool entirely

Google Calendar has no journal. That is not a missing feature so much as a different premise: it was built to schedule time, not to reflect on it. If you want to note how a day actually felt, what you were grateful for, or track a mood alongside your mood, you need a second app, and that second app rarely talks to your calendar.

PlanJour puts a full daily journal on the same page as the day's events: mood and weather stickers, a gratitude prompt, a free-write space, and a habit checklist, all one tap away from whatever you had scheduled that day. The idea is that reflection happens more often when it is not a separate app you have to remember to open.

The calendar side is also deliberately warmer than a grid of boxes. Events get stickers, colour categories and doodle shapes instead of plain rectangles, and you can design your own journal cover the way you would pick out a physical notebook.

Sync and sharing

Google Calendar's cross-device sync is close to instant and works across any platform. PlanJour syncs across your own devices too, and if you want your Google or Apple calendar events to show up alongside your PlanJour ones, calendar sync pulls them in as read-only so you are not maintaining two calendars by hand. Whole-calendar sharing lets a partner or family member see your schedule without needing their own Google account tied to it.

Price

Google Calendar is free, full stop, for personal use. PlanJour's core calendar and 7-day journal history are also free to start. PlanJour Plus is £4.99 a month or £34.99 a year and adds recurring events, reminders, calendar sync, unlimited journal history and PDF export, see the full comparison.

Which one is right for you

If you only need to schedule meetings and never think about journaling, Google Calendar remains the simplest, most universal choice, and PlanJour is not trying to win that fight. If you have ever kept a calendar in one app and a journal in another and noticed the journal is always the one you forget to open, that is specifically the gap PlanJour was built to close.

Start free with PlanJour and see whether having both in one notebook changes anything, or keep using Google Calendar for scheduling and add PlanJour's journal side alongside it. Plenty of people do both.