Cozi vs Equal House: an honest comparison for UK families

Cozi is the app most people find first, and there is a reason for that. It has been running since the 2000s, it had over 20 million registered users by the time it was acquired in 2022, and it does the core job — one calendar, one shopping list, one family — reliably and mostly free. If you are choosing between “some app” and “no app”, Cozi is a perfectly good answer.

We are not going to pretend otherwise. Here is where the two genuinely differ.

The core difference in one line

Cozi shows you the household’s work. Equal House shares it out.

Cozi’s calendar and lists are colour-coded by person, so everyone can see what is happening. What it does not do — because it has never claimed to — is have an opinion about whether the split is fair, or do anything to change it.

Equal House’s Fairness Engine weights every chore by effort, then shares work out by who a job suits and who is actually free, and puts a live 0–100 Fairness Score on the household. Auto-Balance redistributes the week in one tap.

That distinction matters or it does not, depending entirely on your house. If your problem is “we keep double-booking”, Cozi solves that. If your problem is “one of us is doing most of this and we can’t agree on how much”, a colour-coded calendar will not settle it, because you cannot argue with a feeling — only with a number.

Where Cozi is genuinely better

• The free tier goes much further. Cozi’s free version is a real product. Equal House’s free tier caps you at a rolling three-day planning horizon, which is deliberately restrictive.
• Scale and maturity. More years, more users, more edge cases already found. There is something to be said for that.
• Big-family logistics. If you have four or five people all with their own schedules and what you need is a wall calendar that lives on everyone’s phone, Cozi is squarely built for that.
• Recipes and meal planning are included on the free tier.

Where Equal House is different

• Effort-weighted splitting. Not a flat to-do count. Putting the kettle on and doing the weekly shop are not one item each.
• The Fairness Score. A single 0–100 number for the household, viewable by day, week, month or year.
• Auto-Balance and Fairer week ahead. The app proposes a better split; you accept or adjust it.
• Kid Mode with pocket money and money jars. Children get their own board and are never asked for an email address — they sign in with a picture code and a PIN, and only on a device the family has approved. Chores can credit pocket money automatically, and it can be split into Spend, Save, Give and Invest.
• Magic Add. Photograph a school newsletter and it suggests the events and jobs for you to confirm.
• UK-native detail. Bank holidays by nation, pounds, UK helplines in the wellbeing section, and a UK schools directory.
• One AI-assistant connector so a tool like Claude can check your week or add a chore, if that is something you would use.

Price

Cozi	Free tier; Gold $39/year on Cozi’s own site; Max £79.99/year
Equal House	Free tier (three-day horizon); Pro £2.99/month or £29.90/year

Check Cozi’s price yourself before you decide. Cozi publishes $39 a year for Gold, but the UK App Store currently shows several Gold price points side by side — we have seen £29.00, £29.99, £39.00, £49.99 and £59.99 listed at the same time, which usually means legacy plans still being honoured. What a new UK subscriber actually pays today is not something we can tell you reliably, and we would rather say that than quote you a number that turns out to be someone else’s.

At Cozi’s published $39, Equal House Pro at £29.90 is meaningfully cheaper. At the £29.00 legacy SKU, they are level. Either way the gap is small enough that price should not decide this — choose on what the app does.

Both are household subscriptions rather than per-person, so neither gets more expensive as the family grows.

One thing Cozi users have found frustrating

In 2024 Cozi narrowed what the free tier could see on the calendar, which did not go down well with long-standing users who had built years of family life inside it. If you are reading this because of that change, it is worth knowing that Equal House’s free tier is more restrictive still, not less — three days rather than thirty. We would rather tell you that up front than have you find out after you have migrated.

Who should pick which

Pick Cozi if: you want the most generous free family calendar available, you have a big family with complicated schedules, and the problem you are solving is coordination rather than fairness.

Pick Equal House if: the actual argument in your house is about who does what, you want the split measured rather than assumed, and you want the children in the system with pocket money attached.

Honestly? Try both. They are both free to start and they take about the same evening to set up. A week of real use will tell you more than any comparison page — including this one.