Best Digital Wall Calendars

The Skylight can be mounted either horizontally or vertically. I elected for the more traditional horizontal. You can view the calendar in daily, weekly, monthly, or “schedule” (which shows the next four days) mode. Events show up immediately on your Skylight, whether you’ve added them directly to your Skylight display or to the Skylight app or your calendar app. The device’s Magic Import feature is a nifty tool that imports events grabbed from your email, a PDF, or screenshot directly to your Skylight so you don’t need to do so manually. It has a parental lock feature, too, that prevents your kiddo from adding, deleting, or modifying events or chores.

I also loved the Skylight meal-planning tool, which employs a separate, meals-only calendar where you can upload recipes or meal ideas to your week ahead. And with Skylight’s Sidekick tool, you can take a photo of a handwritten grocery list or recipe and the app will automatically turn it into a digital format or a grocery list that you can view on your display. 

Of all the displays I tried, the Skylight has the best features without deviating from its primary designation as a calendar. It’s quite powerful, and it’s easy to figure out how to use many of the features, which is critical if you’re a kid or an exhausted parent struggling to access the remaining brain cells not obliterated by lack of sleep and overstimulation. The Sidekick feature is brilliant—I could take a grocery list scribbled on a notepad, or a recipe on a cooking blog, and seamlessly upload it to my Skylight app and device for easy access for multiple users. I also found the meal-planning feature extremely helpful: It allows my husband and me to stay aligned on what we’ll be cooking and eating on which days, and plan accordingly. The meal-planning feature integrates with Sidekick, so you can effortlessly access the recipe for the dish you have planned for tonight. 

Bonus: A custom screen saver using photos you’ve uploaded to the device means images of your pet, baby, or favorite artworks fill your screen after no one has interacted with the display for up to 10 minutes. Both the Sidekick tool and the custom screen saver are available only through a premium subscription, which costs $79 a year. 

Buy the Skylight at Amazon.

Hearth Display has a feature similar to Skylight’s Sidekick. Called Hearth Helper, you can text a photo of a calendar or invitation to Hearth, and it will turn it into a digital calendar or event. You can also send texts such as “add doctor’s appt for baby, Wednesday, January 15 at 4 pm” and Hearth Helper will add it for you. However, while the Skylight’s Magic Import and Sidekick work nearly immediately, the Hearth Helper can take up to 24 hours before it adds your request to your calendar. I sent a very simple request, about a doctor’s appointment, to Hearth Helper and it didn’t upload to my calendar for 3 hours. This is, according to the brand’s FAQ’s, because Hearth Helper has “a human behind the scenes double-checking that the information is correct before it goes into your calendar.”

The Hearth Display looks great on my wall, and in general wins in the aesthetics department. The calendar colors are muted but pretty, and the frame is light wood, like a real picture frame (it also comes in matte white and black). It’s a bonus that you can upload avatars, or assign different colors, to user profiles, which makes it easier to see whose calendar is whose at a glance. You can assign colors to specific events on your Hearth calendar, too. The Skylight Calendar Max, on the other hand, relies solely on colors to distinguish between different users of the calendar. 

But its limited features prevent it from being my No. 1 pick. Routines, its primary method of helping users manage their time, requires some practice to get down; flighty, distractible children may lack the patience necessary to master it (though those who can dedicate a few minutes to it may well benefit). 

I like that the Hearth has shared to-do and grocery lists, though I find this to be a pretty elementary functionality, especially given that the device costs $699 (though as of writing this article, it’s on sale for $599) and a membership that costs $9 a month for access to many of the product’s features, including Hearth Helper, lists, the smartphone app, and Routines.

Buy the Hearth Display at Amazon and Hearth.

And it’s not great at doing that. While the Skylight calendar offers every productivity feature you could want, the Echo provides that plus about a million (I counted) other features, including multiple streaming apps (such as Amazon Prime, naturally, and Netflix), video calling, home surveillance (in the form of using the Echo Show as both a security camera and a security video feed for your connected cameras), and a plethora of games apps. It is basically a gigantic tablet you mount on your wall.

The trouble with tablets, and of course this varies depending on your ability to focus, is that there are so many ways to be distracted. With what is, in effect, a TV screen or game device mounted on the wall, it’s much harder to stay laser-focused on keeping my life organized. For kids? That sounds like a daily battle. Why would a 12-year-old want to discuss his upcoming week of extracurriculars when he can play Stinky Pinky?  (To its credit, you can set parental controls on the Echo Show 21.)

The Echo, being that it isn’t primarily a calendar, does not prioritize the calendar in its product setup. You can’t change the color of the calendar or individual events, at least that I could find. You can change the size of widgets, and make your calendar one of the larger widgets, but the entire left half of the screen is dedicated to rotating widget displays or Alexa reminders (mine currently says “there are six items on your shopping list” but it doesn’t show the shopping list itself; 30 seconds later it’s showing an air quality alert; then the weather; and so on). This layout is not editable, at least not in any way I can figure out. 

That half of the screen is quite pushy, as well, and kept arbitrarily reminding me to order more toilet paper (after writing the toilet paper article, I’m set on TP for a long time) or watch “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” (reality television isn’t my vibe). I went into settings and turned these things off before it could tell me to buy or watch anything else, but it added several minutes to setup that, if what you’re really in the market for is strictly a productivity tool, felt like a waste of time. 

That said, if you want a product that can do just about everything and then some, features like these might not grind your gears the way they did mine. At 21 inches, it’s a more manageable size than the hefty Hearth (27 inches tall) and Skylight (27 inches tall—though the brand offers two smaller displays, at 10 and 15 inches). Because it’s an Amazon product, it uses Alexa, so you can rely on voice commands to put items on your grocery list, ask what’s on your schedule for the day, or tell you the weather forecast for the week. And it’s the cheapest option, by far, costing about $400 compared to the next least expensive, the winning Skylight Calendar Max that goes for $570. It also comes with a 6-inch remote (that I couldn’t get to work). If desired, you can purchase a stand if you don’t want to mount the screen on the wall.

So if you want something more full-fledged—that operates as, essentially, a wall-mounted tablet—the Echo Show 21 is the option for you. 

Buy the Echo Show at Amazon.

While Hearth and Skylight offer minimal but more carefully curated features, the Cozyla, like the Echo, has a robust app store that includes streaming giants like Netflix and Hulu, news apps, and even TikTok and YouTube. It is simplest to put it this way: iPhone users may prefer the Skylight or Hearth. Diehard Android users will likely love the Cozyla (though to be clear, you don’t need an Android phone to use the Cozyla). 

Thus the Cozyla can be whatever you make of it. You can keep it simple or download a trillion apps to distract you (or educate you, or entertain you) to your heart’s content. It took me some time to get it set up, as I did not find it intuitive as a longtime Apple user, but once I was in, it felt simple enough. The Cozyla is unique in that apps can be easily rearranged by dragging and dropping, so I was able to make the three features I most often use—weather, calendar, and grocery list—prominent on the screen while minimizing the others. 

Perhaps my favorite feature on the Cozyla is the unique ability to make the calendar the screen saver, ensuring that your week or month ahead is always visible; if you’d prefer a photo screen saver, you can configure that instead. Like the Hearth and Skylight, it has an easy-to-use meal-planning functionality as well as a chore chart with associated rewards that you create (I assigned my toddler the reward of a “big hug” if he doesn’t throw his food on the floor during a meal). And it has parental controls that allow users to restrict certain apps by assigning a PIN.

Cozyla offers two-way calendar sync, so when you edit an event on the Cozyla, it’ll show up wherever you use your calendar app. This is initially a convoluted process that involves using another app on your Cozyla that allows the calendar to sync. After you’ve set up your external calendar through the Cozyla app, the calendar will sync automatically every 20 to 30 minutes.

For users who want ultimate customization—at the cost of a bit of software finagling—and don’t want to pay a subscription fee, Cozyla is their best bet. 

Buy the Cozyla at Amazon.