Top Seven JavaScript Event Calendars for Improving Your Time Management Apps

With the growing complexity and pace of business processes, it may be very challenging for companies of any size to keep everything running smoothly and on schedule. That is why it has become common to make use of event calendar apps that help to ensure effectiveness in time management and planning of various activities. Delivering applications with such functionality gets easier and faster with special JavaScript event calendar libraries.

If you want to create a similar instrument to get things in order in your business, this article can help you to choose the right JavaScript component for achieving this goal.

DHTMLX Event Calendar

This JavaScript Event Calendar is a more lightweight and developer-friendly version of the company's advanced Scheduler component. This product provides numerous benefits for both web developers and end-users.

For end-users, it won’t be a problem to get started with calendars based on DHTMLX since it has an intuitive UI structure for adding any number of events, managing them with drag and drop, and introducing changes on the fly. It will be hard to miss any scheduled appointment with six easily navigable views - Day, Week, Month, Year, Agenda,and Timeline.

Apart from common one-time activities, this Event Calendar allows depicting recurring events with various time intervals, multiday events, overlay events, and dimming past events. In the Timeline view, end-users can specify resources for events (e.g. employees), add files to events, and store unassigned events. Other noteworthy features are dynamic loading, localization, date picker in the sidebar, auto-scrolling, autosaving of the appointment data, and a current time marker.

To make event management in the calendar even more convenient, end-users can create any number of calendars and allocate all added events among them i.e. categorize them and use the datepicker in the sidebar for faster navigation.

From the programming perspective, you will certainly appreciate modern and easy-to-use API complemented with detailed documentation and numerous samples. It will give you extensive configuration and customization opportunities for building a JS event calendar that fully complies with any requirements. For instance, you can apply custom templates to change the behavior of certain calendar parts (events, popups, timescale header) or create a custom set of view modes.

One more strong side of this JavaScript library lies in its strong styling capabilities. There are three built-in themes (Material, Willow, Dark) designed for specifying the visual appearance of your calendar.

In addition, you can easily modify the look of any calendar element using the collection of CSS variables. The development process is facilitated with TypeScript support and instruments for ensuring the calendar work on the server.

Resources for developers: documentation, samples, community forum
Integrations with JS frameworks: React, Angular, Vue
Trial version: DHTMLX Event Calendar
Price: from $419

Bryntum Calendar

Bryntum Calendar is a JavaScript-based UI calendar component designed using ES6+ and SASS without any 3-rd party libraries. This tool comes with a set of features that are commonly expected from daily planning software.

If you take a demo provided by Bryntum, you try in action the main capabilities of this calendar such as adding events, editing settings (changing time frames, enabling repetition option, etc.), navigating via the toolbar, and more. Bryntum Calendar supports five views (Day, Week, Month, Year, and Agenda) for reviewing scheduled events. Moreover, end-users can also take advantage of such features as tasks filtering, undo/redo, resource filter panel, read-only mode, and time zone conversions.

Using the Bryntum Calendar API, you will be able to override almost any part of the codebase. The component allows adding custom data fields to any of the provided Data Model classes. You can customize view modes, context menus in cells and column headers, event editor, sidebar, and tooltips. If necessary, you have the ability to apply validation for any editing actions programmatically. The Calendar manages the project's data with the Bryntum Scheduling Engine. Bryntum also has something to offer when talking about calendar styling options. The component includes five customizable themes and allows using CSS/SASS for more selective changes in the calendar appearance. Interestingly, Bryntum’s Scheduler can be used as a custom mode of the Calendar component, but you’ll need to buy the Scheduler license to do that.

This calendar component can be a good option if you already have some experience with Bryntum or plan to use other products of this vendor in your project. This product is built upon the Bryntum infrastructure Widget class, meaning you can create and configure a Calendar similarly to any other Bryntum Widgets. It also shares the same data model with other Bryntum components (Scheduler, Gantt), thus they can use a single data set when integrated together into a web app.
Resources for developers: documentation, samples
Integrations with: Vue, React, Angular, Salesforce
Trial version: Bryntum Calendar
Price: from $680

DayPilot Event Calendar

DayPilot PRO for JavaScript is a client-side library consisting of several UI components for adding various useful business-oriented functionalities to web apps. DayPilot Calendar is one of these components that allows depicting daily or weekly accomplishment sheets via an Outlook-like calendar.

Standard manipulations with events are performed via drag-and-drop and CRUD operations on PCs as well as on touch devices. This calendar component allows making overnight scheduling (e.g. from 7 pm to 3 am) and planning events that take several days. When working with big calendars, end-users can count on progressive rendering that ensures smooth scrolling through the calendar as well as sorting, filtering, and zooming features to find a specific task quickly.

Predefined Day, Work Week, and Week views can be manually extended with Days (any number of consecutive days) and Resource views. Using the active area control, you can add interactive elements, icons, symbols, texts to the calendar event box. Other UI controls such as Bubble, Context Menu, Tooltip also help to make the calendar more informative. The appearance and behavior of the calendar is fully customizable. For instance, you can customize cells by adding holidays or lunch breaks or even disabling them, setting custom cell duration, and specifying the desired column width and header. There are three modes for arranging events in the calendar: SidebySide, Cascade, and Full. As for the calendar styling, you can modify any calendar element with CSS (CssOnly mode) and create your own theme using the online DayPilot Theme Designer.

Moreover, DayPilot gives you an opportunity to create a prototype of your event calendar without any coding manipulations with Calendar UI Builder. Using this special tool, you can configure the appearance and properties of your calendar and get a downloadable project.

There is also the DayPilot Lite for JavaScript library that offers an open-source version of the Calendar component with a more limited functionality compared to the Pro option.

Resources for developers: documentation, samples
Integrations with: React, Angular, Vue
Trial version: DayPilot Event Calendar
Price: from $649 (sold only in a package with other components included in the DayPilot Pro for JavaScript library)

Mobiscroll Event Calendar

Mobiscroll is specialized in delivering UI components aimed at integrating fully responsive calendaring and scheduling solutions, including a JS event calendar, into web apps. If you take a look at the company’s website, you’ll see some remarks about the superiority of Mobiscroll Event Calendar over competitive products. Well, it will be even more interesting to delve into the peculiarities of this product.

The first thing that catches your eye when exploring Mobiscroll Event Calendar is four views for different objectives: Calendar, Scheduler with time grid, Timeline, and Agenda. All these view options have several sub-views that expand the possibilities of end-users in reviewing but at the same time may complicate things at the configuration level. Events in these views can be shown as labels or in a popover. Thanks to resource support, end-users can simultaneously plan activities for multiple persons or assets. The list of other key features in Mobiscroll Event Calendar includes single and multi-day events, recurring events, timezone support, disabled days&times, localization (+ 3 calendar systems), multiple selection and bulk operations, and more.

When it comes to customization, the Mobiscroll event calendar allows using templates for adjusting event labels, events in popover, tooltips, and calendar header to your liking. In addition, you can enrich the calendar with the popup event list, tools for custom add/edit/detail screens, extra form controls and fields. There are four ways to customize your calendar: three base themes, each base theme has a light or dark variant, custom themes created with the theme builder, CSS overrides.

And lastly, Mobiscroll Event Calendar comes with a special integration plugin that enables you to synchronize data with Google and Outlook calendars as well as load events from remote resources such as public Google calendars.

Resources for developers: documentation, samples
Integrations with: React, Angular, Vue
Trial version: Mobiscroll Event Calendar
Price: from $595

Syncfusion Event Calendar

Syncfusion Event Calendar (Scheduler) is a JavaScript UI component provided as part of the Essential JS 2 library for the implementation of event calendars into a web project. This tool includes many common event calendar features that can be expanded with additional capabilities.

Syncfusion Event Calendar has a responsive layout and an optimized design for working well on any device. The process of tracking arranged activities is simplified thanks to multiple view options with various configuration settings. If necessary, time intervals in views can be extended or blocked. There are four categories of events: normal, spanned, all-day, and recurring. The component also allows displaying resources for appointments and grouping them by different criteria. The product also offers many calendar-specific features such as first day of the week, working time, highlighted current time, hidden weekend days, time formats (12 and 24 hours).

This JavaScript component uses virtual scrolling for loading large sets of events and resources just at the moment when end-users scroll through them. In case of sudden changes to calendar requirements, you can customize its elements (cells, date header, pop-ups, timescale, etc.). To give personalized UI styling to the event calendar in your app, you can override the default CSS of the calendar or make use of customizable themes. Localization and accessibility features may also come in handy to address the corresponding needs of end-users.

You can use the Google Calendar API or Microsoft Outlook’s object library to synchronize events of your calendar with these popular online instruments. Bidirectional data communication ensures real-time data updates when multiple end-users simultaneously interact with the calendar.

Resources for developers: documentation, samples
Integrations with: React, Angular, Vue, Blazor
Trial version: Essential JS 2
Price: from $395/ per month (sold only in a package with other controls included in the Essential JS 2 library)

FullCalendar

FullCalendar is better known as an open-source JavaScript calendar used to cover the main event scheduling needs in a web app. It offers a lot of settings for fine-tuning the overall calendar visual display, views (Month, TimeGrid, ListView, DayGrid), date & time, and events. Touch support and accessibility features are at your service as well. FullCalendar's functionality is divided into plugins. So you can include in the package only plugins containing the required features and omit other plugins to reduce the bundle size of your project.

If calendar views provided in the open-source version are not enough for your project, FullCalendar also has a premium paid plugin (Scheduler) with two extra calendar views - Timeline and Vertical Resource views. They are suitable for displaying resources that are assigned to events.

The premium version also includes the capability to optimize the appearance of your event calendar for printing.

Resources for developers: documentation, samples, GitHub repository
Integrations with: Angular, React, Vue
Open source version: FullCalendar
Price: from $595 (premium plugin)

TOAST UI Calendar

If your project needs an event calendar with a basic feature set and you want to save money, you can pay attention to another free-to-use variant named TOAST UI Calendar. It is one of several enterprise-grade components included in the open-source TOAST UI library managed by the NHN Cloud library. The calendar component supports several standard views (monthly, weekly, multi-weekly, and daily) as well as the main event-handling operations and default information popups.

You may also find it useful to be able to narrow or hide weekends in the calendar, change the start day of the week, and adjust the schedule by mouse dragging. It is also possible to customize the date and schedule info and the overall UI appearance with a theme.

Resources for developers: documentation, samples, GitHub repository
License: MIT
Integrations with: Angular, React, and Vue

Conclusion

Each project is a unique undertaking with certain requirements and financial capabilities. Therefore, I’m not going to impose any specific product reviewed above and leave the choice to you. This article just highlights the main aspects of each calendar component, which are commonly taken into account when choosing such tools. Do not forget to test calendars that you like by description in your own scenarios before making the final decision. And good luck with your projects.