Cozi has been the default family organiser for more than a decade, and not by accident. It is free, it runs on everything, and it covers shopping lists and meal planning as well as dates.

Nuet does one thing Cozi does not do at all: it fills the calendar in for you.

Which of those matters more depends on what is actually going wrong in your house.

Key Takeaway: Cozi is a free family organiser with a shared colour-coded calendar, shopping and to-do lists and a meal planner, available on iOS, Android and the web. Nuet is an iOS-only assistant that reads your Gmail or Outlook inbox, photos, PDFs and voice notes and creates calendar events for you, writing them into the calendar you already use. Choose Cozi if you want one free app covering lists and meals as well as dates. Choose Nuet if the calendar is the problem and nobody has time to fill it in.

Breadth or Depth: The Actual Question

Most comparisons of these two spend their time deciding which app is better. That is the wrong question, and it produces answers nobody can act on.

Cozi is broad. One free app covering the calendar, the shopping list, the to-do list and what everyone is eating on Thursday, on every device your family owns.

Nuet is narrow and deep. It does one job, automatically, and does not attempt the others.

So the useful question is not which is better. It is whether your bottleneck is coverage or data entry. If your family needs a shared shopping list, Nuet will not help you and Cozi will. That is worth knowing before you read another word.

Quadrant chart placing Cozi as a broad manual family organiser and Nuet as automatic calendar capture, with no product yet covering both

What Cozi Covers

Cozi gives you a shared calendar where colour codes show who is involved at a glance, alongside shopping lists, family to-do lists, a meal planner and a recipe box [1].

It sends notifications and agenda emails, so the week ahead arrives without anyone opening the app. It runs on iOS and Android and works from a computer [1]. The core product is free, with a paid Cozi Gold tier available.

That is a genuinely wide surface for no money, and it explains the longevity better than any review does.

What Nuet Automates

Nuet starts a step earlier than any of that.

It connects to your Gmail or Outlook inbox and creates events from what arrives there: the school's term-date letter, a booking confirmation, an appointment reminder. It also reads photos of posters and letters, PDFs, voice notes and messages you forward in.

Those events go into the Google or Outlook calendar you already use. You choose which senders it reads, and no emails are stored on external servers.

Where Cozi Wins

Worth putting first, because for a lot of households this section ends the decision.

Free and on Every Platform

Cozi is free and runs on iOS, Android and the web [1].

Nuet is iOS only. No Android app, no web app, no desktop version. It also costs money after a seven-day trial [3].

If one parent is on Android, Cozi wins and nothing further down this page changes that. Same if the honest budget for family admin software is zero.

Lists, Meals and the Things That Are Not Dates

Nuet does not do shopping lists. It does not do to-do lists, meal planning or recipes.

Cozi does all four [1]. If the thing driving you to search was a shared shopping list that both parents can add to from the supermarket, you already have your answer.

Where Nuet Wins

Comparison table of Nuet and Cozi showing Cozi covers lists and meal planning free on every platform while Nuet adds calendar events automatically from email

The Calendar Fills Itself

Here is the failure mode Cozi cannot fix, because no shared calendar can.

You set it up properly. Both parents installed it. Three weeks later the calendar holds a handful of events, all added by the same person, and the trip consent form is still sitting unread in an inbox.

A shared calendar solves who can see the dates. It does nothing about who reads the email, spots the date and types it in. That work is invisible and it is not evenly split. The Office for National Statistics puts women at 26 hours of unpaid work a week against 16 hours for men [5].

Nuet removes the typing rather than relocating it. The school email becomes an event without anyone transcribing it. So does the PDF newsletter, the photo of a letter and the voice note recorded in the car.

It Writes Into the Calendar You Already Have

This difference is architectural and it matters more than it sounds.

Cozi is a destination. Events live in Cozi, and looking at them means opening Cozi.

Nuet organises into your existing Google or Outlook calendar. The events show up wherever you already look, which for most people is the calendar app on their phone, and they stay there whatever you decide about Nuet later.

That also means trying it is close to risk-free. There is nothing to migrate back out of.

Switching, or Running Both

Neither of these is a heavy commitment, and the two are not mutually exclusive.

Getting Your Data Out of Cozi

If you do want to move, Cozi's calendar can be exported and brought across. We wrote that up separately rather than repeating it here.

While you are looking, it is worth knowing that Cozi sync failures are common enough to have their own fix.

Using Cozi for Lists and Nuet for Dates

For plenty of households the honest answer is both, and it is not a fudge.

Cozi keeps the shopping list, the meal plan and the chores, where manual entry is the point because somebody has to decide what is for dinner. Nuet handles the dates arriving by email, where manual entry is pure overhead.

They do not fight. Nuet writes to Google or Outlook, and Cozi keeps its own lists.

Nuet won Gold at the MadeForMums Tech Awards 2026 [4], which is worth what any award is worth: a reason to look, not a reason to switch.

FAQ

Q: Is Cozi free? Yes. Cozi offers a free family organiser covering a shared calendar, shopping and to-do lists and a meal planner, with a paid Cozi Gold tier available [1].

Q: Does Cozi work on Android? Yes. Cozi runs on iOS and Android and works from a computer too [1]. Nuet is iOS only, which is the main reason a mixed-device household should stay with Cozi.

Q: Does Cozi add events from my email automatically? No. Cozi is a shared organiser that family members fill in themselves [1]. Automatic capture from email, photos, PDFs and voice notes is what Nuet does differently.

Q: Can I use Cozi and Nuet together? Yes. Some families keep Cozi for shopping lists and meal planning and use Nuet for the school and household dates arriving by email. Nuet writes into Google or Outlook, so it does not compete for ownership of your calendar.

Q: What does Nuet do that Cozi cannot? It reads the places family information actually arrives. A school email, a PDF newsletter, a photo of a letter or a voice note becomes a calendar entry without anyone typing it. Cozi requires manual entry for everything.