You have had the Hearth tab open for three days. The 27-inch screen looks lovely in the photos, the kitchen in the photos is very tidy, and the total at checkout is more than your first car.

So you are looking for a Hearth Display alternative. Usually that means one of two things: a cheaper screen, or a way to get the organised family without the screen at all.

Most of what ranks for this is a list of other screens. We think the better question comes first: which part of Hearth were you actually buying?

What Hearth costs, from Hearth’s own pages

Comparison sites quote Hearth at three different prices, so we went to hearthdisplay.com on 9 October 2026 and wrote down what it said. The product page and the membership page agree on these numbers.

Like with like, then. Hearth has no free way in: the membership page says a Family Membership is required to set the display up, though you can cancel it afterwards and keep the calendar view. At the top end, three years of Hearth on its three-year plan is $906.36 with the screen.

Chirpy Basic is free for the whole household, no card, and it never asks for hardware. That gap is the price of a 27-inch screen. Whether the screen is worth it is the rest of this guide.

The Hearth Display alternative starts with Sunday night

Strip away the frame and a wall calendar does one job: everybody knows what is happening this week. So test any alternative against a real Sunday.

Here is ours. You sit down with Chirpy on your phone and add the four things you already know: swimming Tuesday at five, the dentist Thursday at half four, Grandma’s visit Saturday, bins every Wednesday on a weekly repeat. Each one is on your partner’s phone and your eldest’s the moment you save it, with a reminder for each.

Then the calendar fills in the parts nobody typed. The car insurance renewal from Car, the water bill on the first from Money, Ben’s birthday from Family, Wednesday’s planned dinner from Kitchen. They are all on the one timeline because they all have a date, and the calendar reads the dates of everything else in the app.

A wall screen shows what somebody typed into it. A household calendar should also show what nobody remembered to.

That last part is what most screens miss. Our guide to the digital family command center goes through the six things worth having on one screen, and only two of them are appointments.

Hearth Helper sits behind the membership

Hearth Helper is Hearth’s assistant. Its features page says you text it an event or a meal plan and it turns that into the shared schedule, and that it can read a paper school calendar or a handwritten meal plan.

It is a membership feature, on Hearth’s own membership page, alongside lists, routines and the companion phone app. Without the membership you can view the calendar, profiles and settings.

On Chirpy’s free plan the assistant works the other way round. Open Ask and type what’s on for us this week? It reads the household calendar, the bills due, the birthdays in Family and the open to-dos, and answers with the week in one list. Ask is on every plan, Basic included. Typing a sentence straight onto the calendar is a Chirpy Pro feature, and Pro is published but not on sale yet, so nothing in this guide depends on it.

What the wall gives you, and the cheaper way to get it

The argument for any wall calendar is about behaviour. A phone calendar is checked by the person who installed it, and a lit screen in the kitchen is seen by everyone on the way to the kettle. We made the long version of that case in family calendar nobody uses it.

If someone in your house will never look at a phone for the family plan, Hearth’s big always-on screen reaches them and an app on a phone will not. Chirpy reaches everyone else where they already are: the person driving to swimming gets the reminder on their own phone, not a fact they had to read off the kitchen wall that morning.

And you can still have the wall. An old iPad or Android tablet on a stand, Chirpy open in the browser and added to the home screen, auto-lock set to never while it charges. It is not 27 inches and it does not come in light wood. It is also not $699.

The fortnight test

Run the tablet for two weeks. Then ask someone who is not you what is on Thursday. If they know, the glance was what you needed, and you got it for the price of a stand. If they shrug, a bigger screen would not have changed that.

The jobs a wall screen never sees

Hearth is a calendar first, with lists and routines added in the membership. A household week is wider than that, and the parts that go wrong are rarely the swimming lesson.

• The job with no owner. In Chirpy a to-do takes one name and a date, and only that person is reminded. “Book the car in” stops being something you both half-remember.
• The note that would have been a fridge magnet. Post Out of milk, back by 6 on the Notes board and the household is told on their phones.
• The yearly bill. Add the car insurance once as a yearly repeat in Money and it turns up on the calendar every year without anyone typing it again.
• The birthday. Put it in Family once and it is on the calendar every year after.

None of that needs a screen on the wall. All of it needs one place the whole household shares, which is what a best shared calendar app comparison should really be measuring.

Hearth or Chirpy: which one

Hearth if the problem in your house is that nobody looks, the kitchen wall is where everyone passes, and $785.40 for year one is money you are happy to spend on fixing it. Budget the membership as part of the price, because Hearth needs it to set the screen up.

Chirpy if what you actually wanted was the organised week: one calendar on every phone, the bills and birthdays already on it, jobs with names on them. Chirpy Basic does that free for up to six people, and an old tablet gives you the wall if you still want one.

Weighing up the other big screen too? Our Skylight calendar alternative guide does the same sums for Skylight.

Common questions