Comparison
Awning vs Dato
Dato is the broad one: world clocks, reminders, fifty video services. Awning is the fast one: your month, today’s meetings, searchable and editable where you are looking. This page is about which of those you actually want.
Checked against sindresorhus.com and the Mac App Store, 20 October 2026
Buy Dato if
You work across time zones, need Reminders in the same panel, or enjoy tuning an app until it fits you exactly. On time zones it is not a contest: world clocks, time travel, 15,000 cities offline. Awning does none of that, and buying Dato for it is the right call.
Buy Awning if
You want your month and today’s meetings one click away, with nothing to set up — and you want to find an event by name and change it without leaving the panel, which Dato sends you to Calendar for. One gesture, sensible defaults, finished the moment you install it.
Awning
$0.99
once, no subscription
Dato
$18.00
once, on the Mac App Store
Side by side
| Feature | Awning | Dato |
|---|---|---|
| Requires | macOS 26+ | macOS 26+ |
| Month grid and agenda | ✓ | ✓ |
| Resize by dragging | Week ↔ month | A setting |
| Join a video meeting | ✓ | 50+ services |
| Finds links buried in notes | ✓ | ✓ |
| Create events by typing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Search your events | ✓ | — |
| Change an event in place | ✓ | — |
| World clocks and time zones | — | ✓ |
| Reminders | — | ✓ |
| Fullscreen meeting alerts | Optional | ✓ |
| Next meeting in the menu bar | A countdown ring | Event text |
| Date calculator, chime | — | ✓ |
| Settings to learn | Two screens | Many, by design |
Two deliberate positions
MacStories described Dato as “a simple app, but it includes a wide variety of settings that make it more flexible than you might imagine.” Dato’s own site leads with fully customizable and lots of in-app keyboard shortcuts for power users. That is a deliberate, well-executed position, and for a lot of people it is the right one.
Every setting is a decision handed to you. Dato hands you many because it is trying to fit everybody. Awning hands you almost none because it is trying to be finished when you open it.
What Awning is actually better at
Changing how much calendar you can see
This is the one real interaction difference. In Awning the month and the agenda are divided by a handle you drag: pull it up for a single week with a long agenda, push it down for the full month. It is continuous, it animates, and how much room you gave it is remembered per display, because a laptop screen and a 6K monitor do not want the same one.
In Dato, how much calendar you see is a preference you set. Which is fine, until you want two months for ten seconds and then want your agenda back.
A countdown that doesn’t move your menu bar
Both apps tell you a meeting is coming. Dato can put the event’s text up in the menu bar, which is more information, and it costs you a strip of width that grows and shrinks as titles change. Every icon to its left shifts with it.
Awning drains a ring around its own icon for the ten minutes before a joinable meeting. Less information, inside the same 18×18 canvas, so nothing in your menu bar ever moves. Which of those you want is genuinely a preference; it is not an absence on either side.
Being finished when you open it
Awning starts with your writable calendars on, holiday feeds and meeting rooms off, and the panel at a readable size. There is no configuration phase. If you never open Settings, nothing is missing.
The price, said plainly
Dato is $18.00. Awning is $0.99. That is not a claim that Awning is eighteen times better. It very clearly is not, and Dato is fairly priced for what it does. It is a claim that most people who want a calendar in their menu bar want a calendar in their menu bar, and are paying the other seventeen dollars for world clocks they will never open.
If you will open them, buy Dato. We mean that.
Click the date. That’s the whole thing.
$0.99, once. No subscription, no account. Requires macOS 26 or later.
Awning is a Mac app. Open this page on your Mac to install.