OurTab vs Cozi
The family's calendar, or the family's money?
Cozi is a time app
Cozi is a well-established family organiser: a shared colour-coded calendar, to-do and shopping lists, meal planning and a recipe box, with a Gold tier that removes ads and adds a shopping mode.
What it doesn't do is money. There's no expense tracking and no budget side, so the question "we've spent how much on food this month, and are we square?" isn't one Cozi can answer.
OurTab connects the list to the ledger
The same shopping list that tells you what to buy becomes the inventory that tells you what you have, the meal plan that tells you what to cook, and the expense that tells you who's owed what. It's one loop rather than four features that happen to sit in the same app.
Where it matters day to day
- Your shop becomes an expense. Paste your supermarket order and OurTab reads every line, including the price actually paid after offers — then splits it.
- Cooking knows your cupboards. Meal suggestions come from what you actually have in tonight, not from a generic recipe list.
- No ads on the free tier, and no limit on how far back you can look. Cozi narrowed its free calendar to a rolling 30-day window in 2024, which is the change its longest-standing users are still annoyed about.
What happens when someone deletes the wrong thing
The complaint that comes up most often about shared family apps isn't about features. It's that anybody in the household can delete anything, and there's no way back. Cozi's own support has confirmed that's by design: no roles, no locked entries, and anyone can remove anyone's event.
OurTab doesn't prevent that either, and we'd rather say so than imply otherwise. Either of you can still remove a task, a meal, a standing chore or a planned dinner — a shared home doesn't work if you have to ask permission to tidy up. What we changed is what happens next:
- It's recoverable. Anything deleted is kept for 90 days and can be put back exactly as it was, from Settings or from the Undo on the message that appears when you delete it.
- It says who. The list names the person who removed each thing, so "where did that go?" has an answer instead of becoming a conversation about whether you imagined it.
- The money is a different matter. An expense needs the other person to confirm it, neither of you can approve your own, and once it's confirmed the amount and the split are frozen — deleting one takes both of you agreeing.
Roles would have been the obvious answer, and we decided against them. Two adults sharing a home aren't a hierarchy, and making one of you the owner who can overrule the other is a worse problem than the one it solves. There is a household admin, but it does one thing: remove someone who has moved out.
Where Cozi is the better pick
Cozi is built for a busy family calendar — several children, clubs, appointments, colour-coded across everyone. If shared scheduling is the problem you're solving, Cozi does that properly and OurTab has no calendar to compete with it. OurTab is aimed at the shopping-cooking-money loop between the adults who run the house.
Details as at August 2026 — check Cozi's current plans.