For many of us, our calendar is a centre point of our life. We are seeing fewer households with a wall calender or a paper day planner to organize their schedule. Instead, more households have moved over to managing their life with a digital calendar helping them to keep track of events, appointments and everyday tasks.
As with countless other tools, you don’t need a proprietary hosted solution for your calendar needs. There might just be an open source project that’s a perfect fit.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 13 high quality open source graphical-based calendar software. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to manage their daily activities.

Let’s explore the 13 calendar applications at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources. Some of the applications are personal organizers including calendar, tasks, address book and other functionality. It makes sense to integrate a number of different functions into a single application.
| GUI-Based Calendars | |
|---|---|
| Nextcloud | Personal cloud storage, text editor, photo gallery, file share, calendaring |
| Kontact | PIM with good calendar support |
| Evolution | Provides integrated mail, address book and calendaring functionality |
| Calindori | Touch friendly calendar application |
| Merkuro Calendar | Kirigami-based calendar and task management application |
| GNOME Calendar | Simple and attractive calendar |
| StarCalendar | Full-featured international calendar |
| Orage | Graphical calendar for the Xfce Desktop Environment |
| Karlender | Adaptive calendar app for GNOME and Phosh |
| AgenDAV | CalDAV web client which features an AJAX interface |
| gsimplecal | Simple and lightweight GTK calendar |
| Osmo | Personal organizer with calendar, task manager and address book |
| Pagume | Ethiopian calendar |
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Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |


Of all the calendars listed, Orage is the absolute best. It’s small, can sit on the desktop without taking up too much real estate, but is quite versatile. Osmo is a good second, but is too big for the desktop. The rest, I’ve tried but found too big and/or complicated.
Orage sits at the right on my desktop and I can easily glance over to check or verify a date, and set appointments. I would recommend it over the rest.