Top 6 Jira Calendar Plugins to Plan Work Consistently in 2023

Calendar is the best way to visualize your projects as they let you easily spot critical tasks and important deadlines, which is vital to complete work on time. Calendar helps to check what is coming up and when the deadline is, prioritize and plan accordingly. Jira calendar plugin is a popular add-on among teams worldwide.

But how to choose the best calendar plugin for your work? In this guide, we will clarify what a Jira calendar is, how to choose a calendar for teamwork from a huge variety of Atlassian marketplace, and how to use a calendar to improve planning within Jira. Find out how to create your team calendar in Jira and track workflow with ease.

What is a Jira calendar plugin?

A jira calendar plugin is a single source of truth for everyone in your team. It’s a visual representation of all work that has to be done, accessible for each team member at any moment. Jira calendars are a great way to bring transparency into your workflow that helps alleviate the problems of collaboration.

What is a Jira calendar view?

The view approach allows teams to see projects due dates and adjust processes to meet deadlines easier. Jira calendar view also helps to track your projects, epics and issues on monthly, weekly, and daily periods. This works like a detailed breakdown of all your team work within Jira Workload management, or your calendar app. For instance, here is a project calendar view by the Planyway plugin.

Why do project managers need a Jira calendar?

Project managers often meet the challenge of distributing workload among teammates. This is where a Jira team calendar comes in handy so that managers can get better foresight on what their teams are occupied within upcoming weeks.

How to choose the best Jira calendar?

Let’s set at least our top 5-point criteria for evaluating a quality calendar for team workload management and time allocation.

• Customization: Any software, and calendars are not an exception, should be maintained, kept updated and be customizable to user’ needs.
• User interfaces: Work planning should be a seamless process without extra efforts and, let’s say, hassle-free. The main point is how your add-on functions and addresses your customer's problem. Is your app flexible and easy to set up?
• Price: It is essential to stay on budget, and that’s why even tools such as team calendars should be reasonably priced, and offer a good quality/price ratio
• App compatibility: Who wants to use an app or an extension that works in the recent versions of Chrome? Many business apps still work in legacy browsers.
• App store rating/feedback: A rating is a biased criterion to evaluate your Jira calendar plugin. The thing is, every user has their own view on what is beneficial as an add-on. In most cases, this works like an average measure for giving a brief and a clear value for any plugin.

Top 6 Jira calendar plugins to try in 2023

The market of calendar software is more than saturated, though the clients' wants also vary. Let’s make a quick overview of our top calendar apps which help to tune the process of planning in Jira for small, mid-sized businesses, and large enterprises.

Here are 6 popular Jira planners plugins for your calendar sync and better project planning:

1. Planyway

If you’re looking for a fast way to represent Jira data in the calendar format, the Planyway app comes up first. It provides you with two different tools for visualization — monthly calendar or timeline view.

Now, let’s look at how you can make use of it in more detail:

Visualize teamwork

Planyway allows you to get a clear picture of what everyone in your team is working on and when. Simply drag Jira issues to the right people and time from the task list in order to schedule work.

Apart from Jira issues, you may schedule subtasks the same way to make them visible for all the team.

When working with the timeline, you may prefer to see your schedule in other views rather than just in the daily one. If so, make use of scales to transform the timeline into the weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly views.

This view will kill two birds with one stone. First, you, as a manager, can keep track of the work of your entire team and easily spot potential bottlenecks. On the other hand, it’s also a win-win tool for teammates as it brings more clarity into the workflow so that everyone can see the plan of work, project goals and check with milestones.

However, if you’re looking for a traditional calendar, there’s an option of a monthly Jira calendar view as well.

Manage work across projects

One of the biggest values of Planyway is the multiboard view. It lets you connect multiple Jira projects and view them all on the same page. This option becomes really useful in case your team works on several projects at a time, as it enables you to see full availability in a single place.

Optimize workload

Except for getting an overview of tasks that your team is working on and all deadlines, the team calendar is a perfect instrument to balance workload so that no one is overwhelmed or underloaded.

We implemented workload management in a very straightforward manner. All you need to do is just stretch cards to the right or left and choose the optimal balance between task duration and the number of working hours.

The indicators are calculated based on your task estimation added inside Jira cards and daily capacity set in the settings.

Customize the view

It’s for you to decide how detailed you want issues to be visualized on the calendar. You can adjust the issue view by adding different fields to see more information straight away: dates, status, project, estimation, and logged time.

In order to view only specific information, make use of filters. With their help, you can filter issues by member, label, status, issue type, and completion status.

Rating: 3.6/4

2. Calendar for Jira

With a pretty straightforward name, Calendar for Jira is firstly known as issues calendar, and it is one of the best Jira Cloud Calendar add-ons on the market with the options of Export to ICS and sync with Outlook and Apple Calendars.

Rating: 3.6/4

3. Microsoft 365 — Outlook Email, Teams, Calendar

Microsoft 365 for Jira is a multifunctional power-up for team work that has seamless integrations with Outlook, and Microsoft Teams. With Microsoft 365, you can add Outlook calendars to Jira, chat inside, work with issue-related emails and create support tickets resolving workplace issues faster.

Rating: 3.5/4

4. Teamlead: Calendar for Jira — Timeline Roadmaps

Teamlead positions itself like a Jira calendar for team management. Team lead offers flexible planning opportunities, through a timeline, highlights, customizable issue preview, and more for setting work processes smoothly.

Rating: 2.8/4

5. TeamBoard Time planner: Time Tracking, Timesheet, Resource Planning, Cost & Invoice

This calendar by TeamBoard is a fully featured calendar app for planning and reporting and resource utilization in Jira. The free version of this add-on has the basic options like task scheduler, timesheets, and time tracking. The premium version has team scheduler and team dashboard, public holiday calendar and vacation approval workflow option, billing rate tabs and cost reports, and even invoicing.

Rating: 3.9/4

6. Activity Timeline: Capacity Planning & Timesheet Reports

Activity timeline add-on is a powerful tool for team resource management and resource allocation. Among its main features, it has capacity planning option and capacity reports, resource forecasting reports, time tracking, plan vs actual reports, workload management and surely MS Outlook & Google Calendar integration.

Rating: 3.9/4

Final thoughts

A calendar is an important tool for scheduling and improving workflow, that enhances the way you plan and collaborate across teams. By using the Planyway Jira calendar plugin, you can pull your team together, bring more clarity into what they do and improve collaboration.

Test more, weigh all the pros and cons before setting up an instrument for the planning process in Jira, and find the best Jira calendar for your business needs.