Comparison
Awning vs MeetingBar
These two overlap on one feature and differ on everything else. MeetingBar gets you into meetings. Awning shows you your month. If joining is all you needed, MeetingBar is free and you should stop reading here.
Checked against the Mac App Store, 20 September 2026
MeetingBar if
Your day is back-to-back calls and you already know what is in it. Free, open source, and it runs back to macOS 12, four major versions further than Awning. It names forty-plus meeting services explicitly.
Awning if
You want to look at a date rather than a meeting. Is the 24th a Friday? What does next week look like before I say yes to this? A list of upcoming events cannot answer those. A month grid answers them in one glance.
Awning
$0.99
once, on the Mac App Store
MeetingBar
Free
open source, on the Mac App Store
Side by side
| Feature | Awning | MeetingBar |
|---|---|---|
| Requires | macOS 26+ | macOS 12+ |
| Month grid | ✓ | — |
| Pick a future day, see it | ✓ | — |
| Events list | Under the month | The whole app |
| Join a video meeting | ✓ | 40+ services |
| Next meeting in the menu bar | A countdown ring | Event text |
| Create events | Plain English | ✓ |
| Search your events | ✓ | — |
| Change an event in place | ✓ | — |
| Alert before a meeting | Optional fullscreen | Fullscreen |
| Open source | — | ✓ |
| Collects data | — | — |
The structural difference
MeetingBar has no calendar grid. Click it and you get a list of your events with a way into each one. It is a meeting launcher that happens to read your calendar.
Awning leads with the month. Click it and you get a grid with the selected day’s events underneath: this week or this month, depending on where you leave the divider. Joining is a button on a row, not the reason the app exists.
The question is not which is better. It is whether the thing you keep needing is “what am I about to be late for?” or “what does the 24th look like?”
Where MeetingBar clearly wins
It is free, it is open source, and it runs on macOS 12, four major versions further back than Awning. That alone decides it for a lot of Macs. It names more than forty meeting services explicitly, against the handful Awning names plus whatever link it can find. And it can put your next meeting in the menu bar itself, counting down, which Awning does not do at all.
Finding the link when it is buried
One honest note in our favour, because it is the feature both apps claim. MeetingBar matches a long list of known services. Awning searches the event’s URL field, its location and its notes for any meeting link. That is where a lot of Teams and Webex invitations put it, several paragraphs down, often in a format a service list does not catch.
Different approaches. MeetingBar’s is better for obscure named services; ours is better for links in awkward places.
Could you run both?
Yes, and it is not unreasonable. They do not conflict, and they answer different questions. It costs you two menu bar slots. If your menu bar is already full, pick the question you ask more often.
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.