Overview

Equal House is a family planning app for households coordinating calendars, chores, meals, money and childcare. It suits families who want to share the mental load as well as the tasks, with a live Fairness Score and automatic chore balancing. Its free plan is useful for a short look ahead, but planning beyond three days requires a subscription.

Key features

The Fairness Engine assigns effort weights to tasks and turns them into a household score from 0 to 100. Auto-Balance uses that system to redistribute upcoming chores, giving households a concrete way to review how work is shared. It can help with fairness, though families still need to decide what tasks belong in the system and whether the suggested balance works for them.

Planning tools cover meals and shopping, children’s parties, school runs and exercise. Magic Add can read pasted or photographed newsletters and propose events and chores for review before they are saved, which can reduce the effort of turning school communications into plans without handing over control of changes.

Pro adds calendar subscriptions for Google, Outlook, Apple or school calendars, bringing those entries alongside the family week. Its school-run feature includes a directory of more than 30,000 schools across the UK. Pro also supports connecting Claude and other AI assistants with read-only or read-write access; changes require confirmation. That confirmation is a useful safeguard for households wary of automated edits.

Children use adult-managed profiles, without their own email addresses, passwords or independent accounts. The app has shared tasks, reminders, meal planning and shared shopping lists, but no location sharing. Privacy provisions include no ads, a stated policy against selling personal information or using family data for third-party advertising, encrypted connections and household-scoped access controls. Wellbeing journal entries remain on the device where they were written; conversations with the in-app Bric assistant are deleted after 14 days.

Pricing

The Free plan costs £0.00 per free, billed forever. It includes planning up to three days ahead, the Fairness Engine and Auto-Balance, and shared calendar, meal and party planning within that short horizon. It also includes Kid Zone, pocket money, money jars, routines, family documents, Magic Add, wellbeing, gratitude, pets and house notes. This is a substantial set of household tools, but the three-day cap makes it a poor fit for families who need to coordinate further ahead.

Equal House Pro costs £2.99 per month, billed per household each month. It adds unlimited planning, school run, Safe Space, the Bric assistant, email forwarding, Google or Outlook calendar linking, relatives sharing, the Claude connector and Speak it dictation. Choose monthly Pro for a lower-commitment route to the longer planning horizon and expanded tools.

Pro — Annual costs £29.90 per year, billed per household each year. It includes everything in Equal House Pro, with unlimited planning, and is described as two months free versus monthly. One subscription covers the whole household. Equal House has no free trial, so the free plan is the way to start without paying.

Platforms

Equal House is available on Android and iOS. The service also offers email support at hello@equal.house, with replies usually within one to two working days, Monday to Friday.

Who it's for

Equal House is best for households that want a shared planning hub and an explicit method for distributing chores, especially where childcare and the less visible work of running a home need to be coordinated. It is less suitable for anyone who needs location sharing, or for families unwilling to pay for planning more than three days ahead.

Pros and cons

Pro: Effort-weighted tasks and Auto-Balance make workload distribution a central part of planning, rather than an afterthought.
Pro: Magic Add can turn newsletter text or photos into proposed events and chores, with review before saving.
Pro: Adult-managed child profiles avoid requiring children to maintain independent accounts.
Con: The free plan's three-day planning horizon is restrictive for families planning school and household commitments further out.
Con: No location sharing means it cannot serve as a family location-tracking tool.
Con: There is no free trial of Pro; families must judge whether its additional planning and tools are worth the subscription.

Alternatives

For more options, browse Family Calendar Apps.

Choose OpenFamily if self-hosting and a free plan matter more than Equal House’s paid planning tools; its self-hosted plan costs 0.00 EUR per free.

Cozi is a free option for shared calendars, automatic notifications, grocery and to-do lists, and a recipe library.

FamilyWall may suit households looking for a free shared calendar, shopping and to-do lists, messenger and contact book.

Fami is another free-plan option, with a shared calendar, chores, shopping list, budget and family places in its core features.

Famnest offers free shared to-dos, a family calendar, chores and routines, meal planning basics and recipes.

Choose TimeTree for a free shared-calendar focus, including multiple calendars, comments and photos.

Skylight Calendar is an alternative with a 10-inch HD touchscreen calendar and tasks manager.

Our Life is another alternative.

Verdict

Equal House is a strong choice for families who want chore fairness and shared household planning in the same app. Its effort-weighted score, automatic balancing and practical planning tools address both visible schedules and the work behind them. The main reason to look elsewhere is the free plan’s three-day limit: families needing a longer view will have to subscribe, while those wanting location sharing need another tool.

	Equal House	FamilyHQ
Free plan	Yes	No
Free trial	No	No
Paid from	£2.49/mo	—
Open source	No	No
Platforms	Android, iOS	Web, iOS, Android
Free plan	Yes	Yes
Shared tasks	Yes	No
Reminders	Yes	—
Meal planning	Yes	—
Shared shopping lists	Yes	No
Location sharing	No	—
Paid from	—	4.99 /mo

Equal House vs FamilyHQ

Equal House

FamilyHQ