5 Apps to Help You Plan for the Holiday Season

It’s the most wonderful time of the year… and also the most stressful. Shopping for gifts, prepping meals, and entertaining family members are just a few of the tasks that can pile up around the holidays. Good news: we’re here to help.

We’ve compiled the best apps to help you plan for the holiday season, allowing you to turn your phone into an all-in-one problem solver. Need a recipe for your Christmas dinner? An easy way to manage a family-wide Secret Santa? Something to keep the little ones entertained on New Years? You’ve come to the right place.

Below you’ll find a list of the best apps to help you manage this holiday season, along with advice on navigating the app stores and how to make sure you’ve got the best cell phone plan for your brand new apps.

Best app for
holiday shopping

Caddle

• Price: Free
• Devices: iOS, Android

Whether you’re shopping for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, or Boxing Day, it doesn’t take long for the expenses to pile up. You might as well earn some money back in the process. That’s the concept behind Caddle, an app that rewards you every time you make a purchase.

The app allows you earn cash back for your regular purchases on groceries, gas, and shopping–all you need to do is scan your receipts. Sure, the real reward for buying holiday gifts for loved ones is the look of joy on their faces…but wouldn’t it be nice to also score some money back in the process?

The popular U.S. rewards app Fetch isn’t available in Canada, but we think Caddle is just as good. And, even better, you can earn additional rewards on Caddle if you want to answer surveys and watch ads, though those tasks aren’t required. All you have to do is keep track of your shopping and watch the money pile up.

Best Christmas
wishlist app

Giftster

• Price: Free
• Devices: iOS, Android

Shopping for the perfect gift can be an excruciating task and one that only grows more difficult with age. We recommend moving away from letters to Santa and towards a wishlist app, which simplifies gifting and assures everyone involved walks away happy.

The best among them is Giftster, which allows users to post wishlists that other users (designated within their family or friend groups) can view. Users can control the specificity of their lists’ items, all the way down to URLs where those items can be purchased. Once a gift has been bought for a user, it’ll be marked as purchased to avoid the same gift being bought twice. Don’t worry, though: that info won’t ever be visible to the recipient. What would be the fun in that?

Giftster is a fairly straightforward app, which is why we like it so much: it seamlessly integrates links from Amazon and other online retailers, though it’s not riddled with ads or in-app purchases. It simply automates a process that would otherwise be a headache.

Best recipe apps

Cookpad

• Price: Free
• Devices: iOS, Android

There’s no shortage of free online recipes, but if you’ve ever Googled instructions for a meal then you know that the results are littered with pop-up adds, misleading articles, and lukewarm recommendations. Cooking itself is already hectic enough. Moving your recipe search from the web to an app helps streamline the whole process.

We like what the relatively new recipe app Cookpad offers: no sign-up fee, a wealth of user-submitted recipes, and a clean, easy-to-read interface. You can search by the dish you’re looking to make or the ingredients you’re looking to use, allowing you to whip up your next dish based on grand plans or what you have lying around. (Seriously, what am I supposed to do with these shallots?)

You can save other users’ recipes or add your own, turning the app into a rolodex of instructions for your holiday gathering. Whether you’re aiming for a classic Christmas meal or looking to find a way to make dairy-free cookies for your vegan cousin, Cookpad provides more than enough quick-and-simple recipes to get you started.

The app is free, though it also offers a Premium subscription for $3.99/month, which includes some perks, like the ability to save an unlimited number of recipes. We think the free version is more than fine, but if you find yourself using it on a nightly basis, we like that the subscription is reasonably priced.

Plan to Eat

• Price: Free 14-day trial, $75.31/year
• Devices: iOS, Android

If you’re looking for the premium cooking experience, we recommend Plan to Eat. In many ways, it’s similar to Cookpad, allowing you to organize your recipes in an easy-to-navigate app. Plan to Eat, though, is a bit fancier, giving you the ability to import recipes from across the web, build out a calendar of meals (and their corresponding recipes), and even arrange for the ingredients to be delivered from your local grocery store.

A premium experience, of course, comes at a premium: Plan to Eat users pay an annual fee and a relatively pricey one at that. If you’re looking for an all-in-one meal planning app, this is one of the best you can find. If you’re looking for a simple and clean way to find some culinary inspiration, though, we recommend Cookpad’s free version.

Best holiday
entertainment app

Heads Up!

• Price: $2.99
• Devices: iOS, Android

Gifts have been exchanged, dishes have been cleaned, and now you’re left wondering one thing: what am I supposed to do with all of these people? Having an all-ages, interactive game at the ready is a crucial part of any holiday gathering. We recommend Heads Up!, an app-based game of charades.

The game play is simple: you select a deck (including celebrities, movies, animals, as well as themed options like Harry Potter and Marvel) and then hold your smartphone on your forehead, so the others in the room can see the phrase on the screen and provide enough hints until you guess it.

Heads Up! isn’t free, but it isn’t expensive. For just $2.99, you get access to dozens of decks, ensuring hours and hours of gameplay. If you want to keep going, you can purchase additional decks if you get tired of the ones included at purchase.

How much data do apps use?

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Every time you use an app, you’re using some of your cell phone plan’s monthly data. Most apps, though, don’t use much data–browsing Facebook only uses approximately 80MB per hour, while listening to podcasts uses approximately 60MB per hour.

If you’re looking planning putting your new holiday planning apps to use this winter, you might want to consider a cell phone plan with unlimited data. Although unlimited plans aren’t truly unlimited in Canada, they do offer unlimited access to your data, ensuring you’ll be able to use your apps, even if you’ve exceeded your monthly allowance.

With that being said, we don’t think most people need unlimited data plans. The average Canadian uses less than 6GB of data per month, including app usage. We like plans that offer a good amount of data for an affordable monthly price, like Virgin Plus’ $39 plan, which gives you unlimited talk and text plus 10GB of 5G data on the nationwide Bell network.

If you’re looking for a little more monthly data, we recommend Public Mobile’s Unlimited Canada-Wide Talk + Text + 30GB plan. Public Mobile is a prepaid 5G carrier, offering access to the nationwide Telus network at more affordable rates than its parent company. We also like that Public Mobile plans don’t lock you into a contract, so you can move onto a better carrier if one comes along.