Moving from FamilyWall to Equal House, step by step

Moving a family from one organiser to another takes an evening. Keep FamilyWall running while you do it, and for a week or two afterwards, so nobody misses anything while the rest of the family catches up.

Families moving from another family app can have a month of Equal House Pro on us with code SWITCH, which unlocks the calendar link in step 2. It is 31 days of Pro for the whole household, with no card and nothing to cancel, and it never turns into a subscription. It works once per household, once per person and once per email address, is limited to the first 10,000 households, and closes at 23:59 UK time on 31 March 2027. Every condition is on the switch page.

First, what Equal House doesn’t replace

FamilyWall does some things Equal House doesn’t do at all: location sharing, a family chat, photo albums and a budget. If your family relies on any of those, keep FamilyWall (or another app) for them. Equal House takes over the calendar, lists, meals, the children’s jobs and documents.

1. Set up your household

Install the Equal House app, sign in and give your household a name. Bric can ask a few quick questions and set it up with you, or you can do it yourself: see set up your household.

If you are claiming the free month, leave your email on the claim page first and sign in to the app with the same address. The month starts when you sign in.

2. Bring your FamilyWall calendar across

FamilyWall can make an iCal link for a calendar, which other calendars subscribe to. Equal House’s Calendar Sync, part of Pro, reads that link, so your FamilyWall events appear in the family calendar and keep themselves up to date.

In the FamilyWall app:

1. Open the Calendar, and tap the gear icon at the top right.
2. Choose the calendar, then Generate iCal URL.
3. Tap the link to copy it.

On FamilyWall’s website: open the Calendar, open the calendars panel at the top right, tap the arrow next to the calendar’s name, then Generate iCal URL and Copy. If the button isn’t there, the link has already been made: look for it in the same place.

FamilyWall’s help doesn’t say whether this needs Premium. If you can’t find it, check in FamilyWall’s calendar settings for an iCal or sharing link.

In Equal House:

1. More → Calendar Sync.
2. Paste the link, give it a name, and choose whose events these are.

What to expect:

• It is read-only and one-way. You change those events in FamilyWall, not in Equal House, and nothing is written back.
• It refreshes through the day, not instantly, so a change can take a few hours to appear.

On the free plan, or once you stop using FamilyWall, add the events that matter as ordinary Equal House events instead: birthdays and anniversaries repeat every year by themselves. See add an event. When everything is in, unlink the FamilyWall calendar in More → Calendar Sync so nothing appears twice.

3. Move your lists

We could not find a list export in FamilyWall’s help, so copy them across by hand:

• shopping items go on Equal House’s shopping list, which sorts them into UK supermarket aisle order — see the shopping list;
• to-dos and children’s chores become tasks, and the ones that come round again become repeating tasks. Ready-made tasks cover most household chores in a couple of taps.

4. Recipes and documents

• Recipes: copy the ones you cook most, or look for them among the 6,031 recipes on equal.house/recipes. The meal planner picks from those, fills the shopping list and shares the cooking out. On the free plan a meal plan covers three days; a full week needs Pro. See plan a week of meals.
• Documents: check in FamilyWall’s Documents for a download option on each file, save the ones you need, and add them to Family Documents in Equal House, in shared or private folders, on every plan.

5. Invite the family

• Grown-ups get an invite: More → Your Account → Add a family member, then share the invite however you usually talk to them. See invite another adult.
• Children need no email address or password. Add them as children, and they sign in with the family’s six-picture code and an optional PIN, on a device a grown-up has approved. Their chores can pay stars and pocket money. See add a child and pocket money.

6. Give it a week

Tick things off as you do them for a week, then open the Fairness Score on the Tasks tab. It shows how the grown-ups are sharing the household work, by effort rather than by count, and Auto-Balance can move jobs to whoever has room. See what the Fairness Score means.

What doesn’t come across

• FamilyWall events arrive read-only through the link; they are not copied in as Equal House events.
• Lists, recipes and documents don’t move automatically.
• Location sharing, chat, photos and the budget stay with FamilyWall, and Equal House has no web app.

If you paid for FamilyWall Premium, cancel it where you bought it once you have finished moving. For a side-by-side of the two apps, see FamilyWall vs Equal House.