The best AI family organiser apps in 2026
They all have AI now, so that tells you nothing. What separates them is which of your jobs it is bolted to, and how much of your household falls outside it.
8 September 2026
Every AI family organiser app now says the same sentence. It reads your emails, drafts your week, and takes the load off you.
They are not lying. The gap between them is not whether the AI exists, because by September 2026 all of them have it. It is which of your jobs the AI is bolted to, and how much of your household falls outside that.
We make one of these, so read the numbers rather than the enthusiasm. The prices below all came off the companies’ own sites today.
What an AI family organiser app actually does
Under the marketing there are four jobs, and every app in this piece is selling some subset of them.
- Capture. A photo, a forwarded email or a spoken sentence turning into a proper record with the fields filled in.
- Extract. Pulling the amount off a receipt, the dates out of a school newsletter, the expiry off a certificate.
- Draft. Producing a week of dinners, a shopping list, a rota, so you are editing rather than starting.
- Warn. Noticing a date is coming while there is still time to do something about it.
Nothing here decides anything for you and nothing takes the bins out. That is fine. Capture and warn are the two phases of a household job that stick to one person’s brain, which is why handing them over feels so much bigger than the feature list suggests.
The question is what the AI is attached to
Look at the grid again and read it left to right. The left three columns are crowded. The right three are almost empty.
There is a reason for that, and it is not laziness. Calendars and meal plans are the easy end: everything is short, everything is text, and a wrong guess costs you one tap. Money and documents are harder to build and much less forgiving, so the young apps in this category do the easy end first and get to the rest later, if they last that long.
Nobody in your house is drowning in dinner ideas. They are drowning in the renewal that arrived while everyone was busy.
So the useful question when you are comparing these is dull and specific. Where does the pile in your head actually sit? If it is Tuesday afternoons and what to cook, half this list will do. If it is the car service, the insurance, the passport and what you spent on the boiler, most of this list has nothing for you at all.
The five worth looking at, and who each is for
Cozi Max, $79 a year: the safe one
Cozi has been running family calendars for years and it shows. The free plan carries the shared calendar, the grocery and to-do lists and the recipes, which is more than most paid apps managed a decade ago.
The AI sits on Max, and Cozi names three tools on its own compare-plans page: AI Event Import, which turns an email into a calendar entry, an AI Recipe Creator and an AI Meal Planner. Gold at $39 has none of them, so do not buy Gold expecting AI.
Buy it if you want a calendar the whole family will actually open and you can live without money, documents and renewals. Rival roundups keep saying Cozi has no AI. It does.
Ohai, free tier and premium from $9.99 a month: the delegator
Ohai is the one you text. Send a message, forward an email, point it at a school PDF, and it turns the thing into calendar entries and reminders. Its own site lists calendar sync with Google, Outlook and Apple, plus document and email scanning for dates.
It is the widest reach here after ours, because that email scanning genuinely touches paperwork. What you keep is the habit: you have to remember to go and tell it. That sounds trivial until you are standing in the kitchen at seven with a receipt in your hand.
Nori, free with 10 AI uses, Plus $7.99 a month: the free start
Nori gives the calendar, tasks, recipes, shopping and meal planning away free forever, and meters the AI instead. Ten free uses, then $7.99 a month or $59.90 a year for the household.
Voice is the good bit. Say the thing and it lands. It is a young app and it stops where the others do, at the meal plan.
Hearth, $699 plus membership from $86.40 a year: the wall
Hearth is a touchscreen for the kitchen wall with Hearth Helper, its AI, drafting meal plans and grocery lists. The membership is required and sold separately from the display, which is easy to miss on the product page: $9 a month, or $86.40 billed yearly, down to $207.36 over three years.
A screen in a shared room solves a real problem, which is the family member who will never install anything. We went through what that costs against an app in our comparison with Skylight’s wall calendar, and the hardware is the half you notice while the membership is the half that keeps going.
Chirpy, free, Plus $59 a year: the wide one
Ours. Thirteen tools, with the AI inside each of them rather than in a chat window you have to visit. Photograph a receipt in Money and it becomes a spend with the merchant, amount, date and category already on it. Type dentist Tuesday half four into the Calendar and it lands at 16:30 on the shared week. Photograph the insurance certificate into the Vault and the policy number and renewal date come off it, with the warnings appearing on their own.
Free covers every core tool with 20 AI credits a month. Plus is $7.99 a month or $59 a year for the whole household, Pro is $12.99 or $89.
Where we are worse: Cozi has years of family-calendar polish on us, and Ohai will go and ring the plumber. If your problem is entirely the calendar, buy Cozi.
The sixth one, and what it should teach you
Maple was on every list like this one a year ago. It was built around the mental load, it was good, and it is closing.
Its own site now says Maple sunsets on 31 December 2026, that annual subscriptions will no longer renew, and that after that date all data will be deleted with no way to recover it. The team was acqui-hired by Wander, a travel company. The product was not what got bought.
This is worth a paragraph in a roundup because the whole category is about three years old. Several of the apps above raised money in the last eighteen months. One of them will be gone by 2028, and the feature list will not tell you which.
Read the AI limit, not the sticker price
The number on the pricing page is rarely the number that decides whether you keep the app.
Nori gives 10 free AI uses. Chirpy gives 20 AI credits a month free, 200 on Plus. Cozi does not publish a limit on its AI tools. Ohai’s free tier covers reminders, meal planning and lists, with the household coordination on premium.
Work out roughly what your house would run through in a week. Receipts, school emails, a meal plan, three appointments. If that is twenty operations and the free tier gives you ten a month, the free tier is a demo, and you should judge the app on its paid price from the start.
| App | Free tier | Paid | Where the AI reaches |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cozi | Calendar, lists, recipes. No AI. | Gold $39/yr, Max $79/yr | Calendar, meals |
| Ohai | Reminders, meal planning, lists | From $9.99/mo | Calendar, meals, lists, email and documents |
| Nori | All core tools, 10 AI uses | $7.99/mo or $59.90/yr | Calendar, meals, lists |
| Hearth | None. Membership required. | $699 screen + from $86.40/yr | Meals, lists |
| Chirpy | All thirteen tools, 20 credits/mo | Plus $59/yr, Pro $89/yr | All of it, including money and renewals |
How to test one in a fortnight
Setup weekends prove nothing. Everyone is organised on a Sunday. Run this instead, on whichever free tier you picked.
- Capture the next five real things as they happen. A receipt, an email from school, an appointment somebody says out loud. Standing up, hands full. Count the taps each time.
- Have the other adult add three without being asked. This is where most of these fail, and it fails in week two rather than week one.
- Give it one thing from the right of the grid. A car service date, an insurance renewal, a passport expiry. See whether the app has anywhere to put it.
- Break it on purpose. Photograph a crumpled receipt. Every one of these misreads sometimes, and what matters is whether you can fix the wrong field with a tap or have to start again.
- Export, on day fourteen. Download everything and open the file. If you cannot, you have learned the most useful thing available in this category.
If step two is where it collapses, the problem is upstream of the app and no amount of AI touches it. Our guide to getting a family onto a shared app sets out the four seats in a household and why only one of them ever opens anything on purpose.
And if you are still working out which of the three shapes of AI assistant you were shopping for in the first place, the guide to what an AI household assistant can and cannot do separates the smart speakers from the chat concierges from the apps with AI inside them.