Review of nocal: A Calendar with a Built-in Note-Taking App

I use two calendars in my life: a personal one in Google Calendar and a work calendar in Exchange. But since I sync my work meetings with Google anyway, I comfortably stick with the solution from the company of chaotic good.
Still, I like testing third-party calendar apps from time to time to see what they offer — and that’s how I came across nocal.

What’s Interesting?

nocal is still in early development and currently supports only Google Calendar and desktop versions for Windows and macOS. A mobile version is already in the works, with plans to support Outlook and iCloud in the future.

What makes it stand out is the built-in note-taking feature with full formatting and offline access. And of course, AI is integrated — because why not?

But how well does it actually work?

Setup

Setting up nocal with your calendar is easy: just sign in with your Google account and you’re good to go.

Where I almost lost my patience, however, was during the onboarding process. It’s quite detailed — and completely unskippable.

You can only proceed to the next step after actually doing what’s asked.

Once you survive the tutorial, you’ll find yourself in an app with a navigation panel (Current Week, Inbox, Timeline, and Notes), a view of the selected section, and the calendar itself.

The calendar is tucked into the right side of the interface and defaults to showing the current week. But you only see the current day, and you can’t expand the calendar using the mouse — only with keyboard shortcuts.

Calendar Features

Since this is a calendar app, let’s start there.

I didn’t like the calendar navigation at all. First, because expanding the calendar view only works via keyboard — eventually, you'll want to browse other weeks.
But the same key that expands the calendar starts switching weeks once you've hit the maximum or minimum size of the view.

Also, when hiding the calendar, it always reverts to the current week instead of the one you were working with. That’s especially annoying when a new month starts midweek.

For example, today is Saturday, July 5th, but the preview shows Monday from June. It’s all very confusing, though you can jump to today.

I never figured out why it highlights both Monday and Tuesday either.

Clicking on an event or empty space opens the event editor. It includes all the standard options you’d expect from Google Calendar: title, dates, recurrence, location, and video call link.
There’s a dedicated button to create a note for the event — but more on notes later.
For now, know this: contact search doesn’t work with the Russian language.

Note-Taking

You can create notes linked to events, to other notes, or in a “This Week” planning block.

Every week you can outline your weekly plans here. You can copy last week’s plan or ask the AI to generate one. The AI takes into account your calendar and note style.

In my case, it ignored everything and just created a basic to-do list template.

If you decide to create a note manually, you get a fairly advanced editor — with headings, quotes, checklists, code blocks, and more.

It’s not a full-featured note-taking app, but as a calendar supplement, it’s solid.

You can use commands to quickly create an event right from a note and include all the necessary content.

That said, nocal doesn’t understand Russian at all, so you’ll need to write everything in English.

On the plus side, you can link one note to another.

Pricing

Using one calendar is free.
To connect multiple calendars, you’ll need to pay $6.67 per month.

Conclusion

In practice, I found nocal quite inconvenient — and unfortunately, the issues stem from its core calendar functionality.
Navigation behaves strangely, and the current day selection constantly resets.

The note-taking side of the app is excellent and has no major drawbacks — except for the lack of Russian language support.

It might be worth revisiting nocal in a year to see how it has evolved.
But for now, you’re probably better off exploring other alternatives.