Change calendar and event colors
Documentation last reviewed: 2026-06-10 · 2 min read
How colors work in manyCalendars
Every calendar you add gets its own color, and that color follows the calendar everywhere. Each event shows a soft tinted background, a solid strip of the color along its left edge, and a matching dot in month view. The sidebar swatch, the event blocks, and the month dots always agree, so you can tell clients apart at a glance without reading a single event title.
When you add a new calendar, it is assigned a color automatically from a rotating set of ten presets. Your first ten calendars never share a color. You can override any of them whenever you like. Here is how.
Step 1: Open the calendar list
Open the unified view and look at the sidebar. Every calendar you have added is listed there, one row per calendar. At the start of each row is a small round color dot. That dot shows the calendar's current color.
Step 2: Click the color dot
Click the dot next to the calendar you want to change. A color picker opens right where you clicked, labeled with the calendar's name so you always know which calendar you are editing.
Tip: the color dot is not the sync status indicator. Some rows also show a smaller freshness light (green, yellow, or red) next to the name. The color dot is the swatch at the very start of the row. Hover it and the tooltip reads "Click to change color".
Step 3: Pick from the palette, or go custom
The picker shows 33 preset swatches arranged as eleven color families, each in three shades from light to dark: indigo, green, orange, pink, blue, violet, amber, teal, red, lime, and a neutral gray.
The three-shade layout is deliberate. If one client has several calendars, say a meetings calendar, a deadlines feed, and a shared team calendar, give them three shades of the same family. The calendars stay visually grouped but remain easy to tell apart.
Need something outside the presets? Use the Custom control at the bottom of the picker. It opens your browser's native color selector, so any color is fair game. Click Apply to set it.
Step 4: Watch everything update
The change applies instantly. Every event from that calendar recolors at once, in every view: day, week, and month. The new color is saved locally in your browser along with the rest of your manyCalendars data, so it persists across restarts. Nothing syncs anywhere and no account is involved.
Color schemes that scale
A few patterns that hold up well in practice:
- One family per client. Client A is blue, client B is orange. Related calendars for the same client use neighboring shades.
- Reserve red. Keep red for a single high-stakes calendar, like deadlines, so it always means the same thing when it catches your eye.
- Gray for noise. Low-priority feeds, like a public holidays calendar, recede nicely in the neutral gray shades.
The free plan lets you add unlimited calendars, each with its own color. When you need the calendars IT will not let you export, Pro adds Tab Sync. You can compare plans here.