What makes Skylight great is its software. It’s easy to use, and it quickly imported my Google Calendar and the wide variety of calendars shared to it, so I could immediately add all of my family’s schedules to the device. The left-side menu bar shows all the pages you can toggle between. Calendar, Lists, Tasks, Rewards, Meals, and Recipes are the main areas you’ll use; you can also access the Photos, Sleep, and Settings pages from the same menu.
The app and device interface are clean and intuitive compared with other models, many of which feel like Android tablets with a fancy calendar mode added. I was able to easily assign calendars I created on the device to family members. For example, I assigned my husband’s calendar to him without needing him to log in or import it, and I could have assigned any calendar I created to my son as well. I also liked that shared events only appear once on the Skylight, but with both of our designated colors added to show the event in question applied to both of us.
Lists and Tasks sound similar, but Tasks are meant to function as a chore chart, connecting back to the Rewards page to build habits and earn the reward you set after hitting a certain goal. The main audience for this is children who are old enough to check the calendar. Lists are for things like your groceries. If you add recipes to the Recipe tab and then add those to your meal plan for that week, Skylight will offer to put the corresponding ingredients on your shopping list.
The downside of Skylight is the paywall. To access some of the best features—meal planning, rewards, photo screensaver, and the in-app AI assistant tool Sidekick—you’ll need to be a Plus subscriber for either $79 a year or $8 a month. Having this device double as a digital photo frame makes it worth the cost to me. I love getting to have my two favorite things nearby: photos of my family and instant access to our shared calendars.
Best Without a Subscription
The Everblog HomeCal has an operating system that feels pleasantly similar to the Skylight. It has a bit of an Android undertone to it, but it doesn’t feel like a giant tablet as much as the Apolosign or Cozyla calendars (both below). Setup was pretty seamless, but there was a delay for the device to update with my calendar invites. It would also take a while for the Everblog to reflect changes I made to my Google Calendar on another device. While it worked well for the most part during testing, I occasionally noticed events missing from my Everblog. It also turned each calendar email account I connected to the device into a separate profile, which was annoying. I could toggle off the extra emails when I was on pages outside of the calendar, though, so I didn’t have three profiles for myself on my Chores page, for example.