HomeHQ vs Google Calendar

HomeHQ vs Google Calendar.

Google Calendar is free and it works. For a lot of families it is the right starting point, and it stays underneath HomeHQ either way. Here is the honest comparison, including the part where free is genuinely enough.

Coming soon

iPad · iPhone · Built on Google Calendar · 30-day free trial

Our verdict

Choose Google Calendar if $0 is the constraint and you are willing to set up the shared family calendars yourself. We wrote a guide for it.

Choose HomeHQ if you want chores, kid views, an assistant you can talk to and an always-on kitchen display sitting on top of that same Google calendar.

Tej Tandon · Founder, HomeHQ

Building HomeHQ from Vancouver — bootstrapped, no investors. I write these guides from running my own family on the same tools.

Verified September 2026

Side by side

HomeHQ vs Google Calendar: the rows that decide it.

The honest comparison — including where Google Calendar wins. Prices and features verified September 2026.

Feature	HomeHQ	Google Calendar (shared family setup)
Cost	$12/mo (annual)	Free
3-year total	$432	$0
Chores	Fixed, rotating, or up for grabs
Assistant you type or talk to	Casa, included
Scan a paper flyer into the calendar	Included	Manual entry
Always-on kitchen display	Wall mode and ambient mode on iPad
Free forever		✓

See the full comparison (13 more rows)

Type	Family hub app	General-purpose calendar
Colour per family member	Assigned when someone joins	You set it up by hand
Per-member kid views	Kids see their own chores
Push-to-talk voice	Hold the button and speak
Chores: points, streaks, leaderboard	✓
Home Screen widgets	Four, iPhone and iPad	Google's own widgets
Reminders	Morning brief, chore deadlines, week recap	Event notifications
Google Calendar	Two-way on one shared calendar	Native, this is Google's
Setup time	~5 minutes	~30 minutes for family setup
Native Android app	Coming soon	✓
No subscription		✓
Nothing to install	iPhone & iPad app	✓
No Apple device required		✓

The yearly math

What you actually pay over 3 years.

HomeHQ

Hardware$0

Year 1$144

Year 2$144

Year 3$144

3-year total$432

Google Calendar

Hardware$0

Year 1$0

Year 2$0

Year 3$0

3-year total$0

Decide quickly

When Google Calendar wins, when HomeHQ wins.

Choose Google Calendar if…

→You are cost-conscious and even $12/month billed annually is a stretch. Free is a real feature.
→You only need a shared calendar. No chores, no kid views, no display.
→Your family is happy adding events on phones and does not mind colour-coding by hand.
→You are mixed-platform, Android and Apple, and need something everyone can open today.

Choose HomeHQ if…

→You have tried Google Calendar for family life and it got cluttered fast.
→You want chores tracked next to the schedule rather than in a separate app.
→You have kids and want them looking at their own slice rather than the whole household.
→You want an iPad on the wall showing the day, and the same information on everyone's Home Screen.

Keep the calendar you have

One calendar. Everyone sees it.

HomeHQ runs on the Google Calendar your family already uses. Connect it once and every change shows up everywhere — the kitchen iPad and every iPhone show the same plan. Nothing to migrate, nobody to convince.

✓Change it on any phone — it's right everywhere, including Google Calendar itself.
✓Color-coded per person, automatically.
✓Add an event on your phone; the kitchen display picks it up within a minute.
✓Or snap a paper flyer — HomeHQ reads it and proposes the events; you tick the ones to add.
✓It's your real Google calendar — your data stays in your own account.

The HomeHQ app runs on iPhone and iPad, with a native Android app coming soon. The calendar itself lives in your own Google account.

One source of truth

Add "Lina — judo, Wed 3:30" once. It's on every iPhone in the house.

Synced via Google Calendar

Kitchen iPad · Mom's iPhone · Dad's iPhone — the same plan on all three

Try HomeHQ free for 30 days — without buying Google Calendar.

$12/month billed annually after the trial, or $14.99 monthly. Cancel anytime through Apple.

HomeHQ vs Google Calendar

What people ask before they pick.

Yes, and it is a fine starting point. Create a shared family calendar, give each family member's Google account edit access, subscribe everyone on their phones, and colour-code per person by hand. We wrote a step-by-step guide for it.

You don't have to. Google Calendar handles the schedule perfectly well. What HomeHQ adds on top: chores with points, streaks and a leaderboard; per-member kid views; Casa, an assistant you type to or hold a button and talk to, which creates and edits events and chores for you; a flyer scanner that reads a photographed school handout and proposes events for you to approve; an always-on iPad display for the kitchen; Home Screen widgets; and a morning brief. All of it reading and writing the Google calendar you already have. $12/month billed annually is what that costs.

No, it sits on top. You pick one Google calendar to be the family one and HomeHQ reads and writes that both ways: add an event in HomeHQ and it turns up in Google, add it in Google and HomeHQ picks it up on its next refresh, which happens about once a minute. Everyone in the house reads and writes that same calendar. Your work calendar stays separate, and HomeHQ never reads it.

It works, but it was not built for families. Colour-coding per person is manual. There is no chore rotation, and an iPad running Google Calendar is just Google Calendar on an iPad, with none of the kitchen-display behaviour. For some households that is enough. For others it stops being enough around the time the second kid starts after-school activities.

Google gives you 24 preset colours everywhere, plus custom hex colours on the web and through the API. HomeHQ works differently: each person gets a colour from a ten-colour palette when they join the family, assigned automatically, and every event and chore inherits the colour of whoever it belongs to. You don't pick it, and that is deliberate.

We wrote a guide on exactly this: one shared family calendar plus per-person calendars, shared with edit permissions, subscribed on everyone's phone, colour-coded. It takes about 30 minutes the first time. After that it is free forever.

Researching Google Calendar? Visit their official site →

Keep reading

Related guides and comparisons.

Best family calendar app

The app options that sit on top of Google Calendar.

Use Google Calendar for scheduling

Appointments, sharing, and booking pages, step by step.

Shared family Google Calendar setup

The 5-minute setup that survives a school year.

Ready when you are

Bring the calm home.

30 days free. Your whole household, on the iPad and iPhone you already own.