Skylight Calendar vs Equal House: a wall display or a fairer split?
Skylight is a touchscreen calendar for the kitchen wall, and it's very good at being that. Here's the honest comparison with a phone app built to share the household load — including what the hardware costs in the UK.
Updated 29 September 2026
The short version
- Skylight Calendar
- Around £290 for the 15in display in the UK, plus Skylight Plus at about $79/year
- Equal House Pro
- £2.99/month or £29.90/year
Our honest verdict: Skylight is the better choice if the problem is that nobody looks at the calendar — a screen on the kitchen wall solves that in a way no phone app can. Equal House is the better choice if everyone can already see the plan and the problem is who is doing the work in it. They are not really competing for the same job.
Prices are as published at the time of writing — check both before you subscribe. Our pricing in full.
Try the Equal House app yourself — a shared calendar, meals, kids' chores and pocket money, with the work shared fairly. Free to start.
Get the appThis is the least like-for-like comparison on this site, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. Skylight is a physical touchscreen you hang in the kitchen. Equal House is an app on the phones you already own. They overlap, but they are answering different questions.
What Skylight is very good at
Ambient visibility. This is the whole thesis and it is a good one. A calendar app is only consulted by someone who chooses to open it. A screen on the wall is seen by everyone, every morning, without anyone deciding to look. For a lot of households that single difference is worth more than any feature.
It is also a proper company with real momentum — it reported around 9.3 million users and 99% year-on-year revenue growth in April 2025, which is the most recent figure it has published — and it is available in the UK through Currys and Amazon rather than needing importing.
If your family’s failure mode is “it was on the calendar, nobody looked at the calendar”, buy the screen. Genuinely.
What it costs
This is the part worth doing carefully, because it is the biggest practical difference.
- The 15in Skylight Calendar is around £290 in the UK. Larger sizes cost more.
- Skylight Plus, the subscription that unlocks the fuller feature set, is about $79 a year.
So year one is roughly £290 plus a subscription, against Equal House at £0 to start and £29.90 a year for Pro.
That is not an argument that Skylight is overpriced — a good screen costs what a good screen costs. It is an argument that they are different kinds of purchase, and you should know which one you are making.
What Equal House does that a wall display does not
Skylight shows the household’s plan beautifully. It does not have a view on whether the plan is fair.
- Chores weighted by effort, not counted flat.
- A live 0–100 Fairness Score, by day, week, month or year.
- Auto-Balance to share the week out in one tap, and Fairer Week Ahead proposing a fairer split of the days ahead.
- Kid Zone — a child’s own board, reached with a picture and a PIN rather than an email address, pocket money crediting automatically once a grown-up confirms a chore, and money jars.
- Magic Add — photograph a school newsletter, confirm the events and jobs it finds.
- UK-native detail: bank holidays by nation, pounds and pence, UK helplines, a UK schools directory.
Notably, Skylight publishes its own research on the mental load, so the company clearly understands the problem. The device just is not the shape that solves it — a display can make invisible work visible, which is genuinely half the battle, but it cannot pick up the other half and hand it to somebody else.
Equal House has a wall view too
Worth saying, because it narrows the gap for some households: Equal House includes a Family Wall — a full-screen “today” display designed for a spare tablet propped up in the kitchen.
It is not a Skylight. There is no purpose-built hardware, no wall mount, no always-on screen tuned for the job. But if you have an old iPad in a drawer, it gets you a decent share of the ambient-visibility benefit for nothing, and it is worth trying that before spending £290 to find out whether your family will actually look at a screen.
Who should pick which
Buy Skylight if: the plan exists and nobody reads it; you want a physical object in the kitchen; the budget is there; and you are happy to keep dividing the work yourselves.
Use Equal House if: everyone can already see the plan, and the problem is the distribution of what is in it — or you want the split measured before you spend anything.
Do both if you like. They genuinely do not conflict, and a household running Equal House on the phones with a tablet showing the Family Wall in the kitchen is a reasonable approximation of both for the price of neither.
Try the free thing first
Equal House is free to start, with a rolling three-day planning horizon. Set it up, get the other adult in, add your real chores and look at the Fairness Score after a week. If the number surprises you, that is the problem Skylight will not fix. If it does not, buy the screen with a clear conscience.
Skylight Calendar is a trade mark of its owner, which is not affiliated with Equal House and has not endorsed this comparison. Spotted something out of date? Email hello@equal.house and we will correct it.
