Best Free Student Planner Apps for College (2026)

Every "best free student planner" list ranks the same apps — and almost all of them make you type in every assignment, exam, and due date by hand. I'm Riley, a student and one of the people building DormWay, so I'm biased. But I went through the actual apps students keep recommending and wrote down the honest version: which ones are genuinely free, which ones actually sync with Canvas, which ones can read your syllabus for you, and which one I'd pick for which kind of student — including where the paid options beat us.

The short version

If you want a free planner and don't mind typing everything in yourself, MyStudyLife is the long-standing pick. myHomework is the simplest familiar free tracker, and Power Planner is the one people reach for when grade and GPA tracking is the priority.

If your real problem isn't *knowing* what's due but whether you have the *hours* to do it, Shovel has the most developed time-budgeting tool out there — but it's a paid subscription after a 7-day trial.

DormWay is built for the middle of that gap. It's free for students, it auto-syncs Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle (read-only), and it uses AI to read your uploaded syllabus and pull assignments, exam dates, the grading breakdown, and the late policy into one Do Now / Up Next / Due Soon timeline. So it fills itself in instead of asking you to. The honest catch: Shovel is *also* automatic, and it has deeper time-budgeting, native Android, and broader LMS coverage than we do today.

One thing to know going in: "automatic" is not a DormWay-only trait. The real split is manual entry (MyStudyLife, myHomework, Power Planner) versus automatic (DormWay and Shovel) — not DormWay versus everyone.

Quick comparison: Canvas sync and pricing first

If you only read two columns, read Canvas / LMS sync and Pricing. Those two decide whether you'll actually keep using the app a month from now. Everything else is a nice-to-have.

A one-line read of that table: the genuinely free apps are mostly manual, and the automatic apps are DormWay (free for students) and Shovel (paid after a trial). And every LMS sync here is read-only — none of these write anything back into Canvas. They import your due dates; they don't touch your account.

The per-app sections below hold the nuance the table can't.

How we ranked these (and what "free" and "automatic" actually mean)

Two axes matter more than anything else, and most listicles blur them.

Is it actually free to use as a planner? "Free" gets stretched a lot. Some apps are free-with-ads (myHomework, MyStudyLife's free tier). Some are free-with-a-paid-upgrade for the features you'll actually want. And "free trial, then paid" (Shovel) is not the same as free — it's paid with a grace period. When I say DormWay is free for students, I mean the core planner is free to use; pro features are planned, so I'm not going to tell you it's "free forever."

Does it fill itself in, or do you type everything by hand? "Automatic" means the app pulls due dates from your LMS and/or reads your syllabus for you. "Manual" means you copy each assignment, exam, and deadline in yourself. That difference is the whole ballgame for a busy semester — but it separates MyStudyLife, myHomework, and Power Planner (manual) from DormWay and Shovel (automatic). It does not separate DormWay from everyone.

My bias is obvious — I help build DormWay. So the rule for this piece is simple: concede where the other apps genuinely win, because they do.

1. MyStudyLife — the default free pick (if you don't mind typing)

MyStudyLife tops nearly every "best free planner" list for good reasons: it's student-built, it's cross-platform (web, iPhone, iPad, Android), it has a huge install base, and it's genuinely good for recurring class schedules and rotating, block, or A/B-day timetables. If you're in high school or have a complicated class rotation, it's well-suited to that.

The honest limitation for college is automation. MyStudyLife is fundamentally a manual planner, and it does not read your syllabus. Its AI feature scans a photo of your class *timetable* (when your classes meet), not your coursework. So assignments, exams, and due dates largely get typed in by hand. Its premium tier, MSL+ ($4.99/mo or $29.99/yr), adds things like subtasks and advanced grade tracking. The free tier now also shows ads.

Best for: students who want a free, structured planner for their class schedule and are fine doing the data entry themselves.

A note on the "completely free" framing you'll see elsewhere: it's worth checking the current tiers yourself, because the free version now has ads, and the most useful extras sit behind the paid plan.

2. myHomework — the familiar, simple free tracker

myHomework has been around since 2009 with millions of users, it's teacher-recommended, and it's about as approachable as a planner gets. It runs almost everywhere — iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, Windows, Chromebook, and web — which is broader platform coverage than DormWay has.

It's free with ads, and a small yearly fee (around $4.99/year) removes the ads and unlocks import and external-calendar features. But it's a manual tracker at heart: there's no AI syllabus reading, and no deep Canvas API integration. The closest thing to sync is a one-way calendar feed you copy out of Canvas (or Google Classroom, Schoology, Blackboard, D2L) and paste in — and that feed only carries assignment titles and due dates, with the import/auto-refresh features gated behind the paid tier.

Best for: students who want something simple, proven, and cheap, and who don't need real automation.

This is also the category where the common critique bites hardest: the hours it takes to type an entire semester's syllabus in by hand. If that's your reality, automation is the thing to optimize for.

3. Power Planner — best for GPA and grade tracking

Power Planner shows up on college lists specifically for one thing: grades. It's the tool people recommend for tracking your grades across a term and running "what-if" GPA projections. It has a free tier, runs on iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, and web, and the upgrade is a low-cost one-time purchase.

Like the others in this manual tier, it has no native Canvas auto-sync and no syllabus parsing — you enter your classes and assignments yourself (it does offer Google Calendar integration).

Best for: students whose number-one need is tracking grades and projecting GPA.

If grades are your focus, it's also worth looking at DormWay's grade calculator, since DormWay pulls the grading breakdown straight off your syllabus.

4. Shovel — the most developed paid auto-planner (and where it beats us)

I want to be fair here, because Shovel is the competitor people most often get wrong. Shovel is also automatic. It has AI syllabus PDF upload (it creates tasks and events from your syllabus, and tells you to double-check the output), plus auto-sync with Canvas, Brightspace, Moodle, and Google Classroom — read-only, refreshing roughly every 24 hours. So the "manual vs automatic" contrast does not apply to Shovel. It fills itself in too.

Where Shovel genuinely wins is its signature feature, The Cushion (Time Cushion). It estimates how long each task will take, subtracts that from the real hours you have available, and gives you a single read on whether you're ahead or behind. That's a capacity model, and it's deeper than a due-date timeline. If your bottleneck is "I know what's due, I just keep running out of time," nothing else on this list does that as well.

Shovel also wins on a few concrete things DormWay can't match today: native Android, Google Classroom and Brightspace coverage, weighted-grade tracking, and a longer track record.

The catch is price. Shovel is paid — a 7-day trial, then $9.79/month or $35/year (the App Store also lists lifetime tiers). It is not free to use as a planner.

So the honest DormWay-vs-Shovel contrast is price, our never-sell-data stance, and the single self-filling Do Now / Up Next / Due Soon timeline — *not* "we're automatic and they're not." That last claim would be false, and I'm not going to make it.

5. DormWay — the planner that fills itself in, free for students

Here's the wedge, said plainly: most free planners are manual, and the most automatic one (Shovel) is paid. DormWay is built to be both automatic and free for students.

What "fills itself in" means concretely:

• Auto-syncs Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle (read-only — it imports your due dates, it never writes back to your LMS).
• AI reads your uploaded syllabus and pulls out assignments, exam dates, the grading breakdown, and the late policy — the stuff that usually lives in the syllabus and *not* in the Canvas calendar feed.

Both of those land in one timeline: Do Now / Up Next / Due Soon, so you never wonder what's due. Our AI boundary is deliberately narrow — we use AI for dates, not essays. And we never sell student data.

DormWay runs on web, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Now the trade-offs, because you should hear them from me. There's no Android app — if you're on Android, MyStudyLife, myHomework, or Shovel are your options, not us. We don't do course registration (that's Coursicle's thing). We don't have Shovel's deep time-budgeting — if your problem is running out of hours rather than missing deadlines, Shovel's Cushion is more developed. And our LMS list (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle) is narrower than Shovel's or Coursicle's today.

The honest dividing line: if your problem is "I have the due dates but I keep running out of time," Shovel probably fits better. If it's "I don't want to type my whole semester in, and I don't want to pay for that," that's us.

Honorable mentions and general tools students use

A few tools students lean on that aren't really head-to-head student planners:

• Google Calendar — free, already on your phone, and fine if you manually subscribe to your LMS's ICS feed. But it has no concept of a course, a grade weight, or a late policy, and it can't read a syllabus.
• Notion — extremely flexible (notes, wikis, databases, group projects) and available on more platforms than us, including Windows and Android. The cost is that *you* build and maintain the system; it won't sync your LMS or read your syllabus natively, and full Notion AI isn't included in its free student plan.
• Todoist, TickTick, Microsoft To Do — solid general task managers with free tiers, but not student-specific.
• Habitica, Study Bunny and other gamified apps — good for motivation, not for tracking a semester.

None of these combine LMS auto-sync, syllabus AI, and a student-built due-date timeline — which is why they're alternatives, not the pick.

More than a task list — it plans around your world

Every other app here is a place to *store* your deadlines. DormWay is the only one that knows the world they live in: it factors your campus’s academic calendar (finals, breaks), campus events, your city, and the day’s weather into the plan it builds for you — so "what should I do today" accounts for the exam next week, the event on campus tonight, and the storm rolling in, not a flat to-do list. It even knows the local language on hundreds of campuses — your school’s slang, acronyms, and building nicknames — so it talks about your campus the way you do, not generic “school.” A task tracker can’t do that — it doesn’t know your campus.

Who should use what

• MyStudyLife — if you want a free, structured planner and don't mind manually entering every assignment and exam.
• myHomework — if you want the simplest, most familiar free homework tracker.
• Power Planner — if grade and GPA tracking is your number-one priority.
• Shovel — if your real problem is running out of time (its Cushion is the most developed tool here) and you're willing to pay after the 7-day trial; it's also the pick if you need native Android or Google Classroom / Brightspace sync.
• DormWay — if you want a planner that fills itself in: auto-syncs Canvas/Blackboard/Moodle and reads your syllabus for assignments, exams, grading, and late policy — automatically, free for students, in one Do Now / Up Next / Due Soon timeline, with no data selling.

The right answer comes down to your actual bottleneck: data entry, money, grade tracking, or time management.

See how DormWay fills your planner in for you — connect Canvas and upload a syllabus, free for students, on web, iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Get started free