I build content plans for a living, so I know a strong editorial calendar is more than a list of dates. It’s your team’s shared roadmap — bringing structure, visibility, and momentum to every project.
From one-off campaigns to full content pipelines, the right template makes that magic happen. These three editorial calendar templates can help you plan smarter and get work done more efficiently, saving you the hassle of building things from scratch.
Read on to see our list of editorial calendar templates you can use to start creating and publishing content with confidence.
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monday work management — The do-it-all project management system that transforms massive story lists to cohesive content calendars.
No surprises here — monday is the project management juggernaut that delivers project planning and tracking in as many different formats as there are project types (which is to say, a lot). The platform uses its familiar Table layout as an easy-to-navigate starting point for your most complex editorial calendars. Then everything from traditional calendars to Gantt charts and kanban boards are just a click away.
Why I like monday’s template
I’ve used monday in several different jobs in the past, and it’s a consistent approach to the user experience, combined with easy creation of different views, meaning everyone on the team can customize their monday workspace to work the way they need it to.
Additionally, because views are personalized, you can adjust the sometimes-overwhelming amount of info you store in monday to the level of simplicity or complexity that works best for you.
I especially like how the tool allows users to add colors to labels and even set conditional coloring; it makes it easier to differentiate data and highlight the pieces of information most relevant to the task at hand.
Wrike — Editorial calendar building powered by AI
Editorial calendar building sometimes feels like weeks of intense creativity and strategy followed by months of monotonous repetition. Updates, status changes, and hourly/daily/weekly publishing cadences can all make the execution of your perfectly put-together content plan feel like a drag.
Why I like Wrike’s template
Wrike’s Work Intelligence makes building the editorial calendar really straightforward, even if you’re new to the editorial calendar game.
Smartsheet — When planning needs become more complex than your spreadsheet can handle
We all started with spreadsheets. Back before we knew the top of the funnel from the bottom or understood what terms like lead gen and thought leadership meant, we were just coming up with story ideas, assigning a writer and due date, and adding those to a spreadsheet.
For teams who “think in spreadsheets” — and I’ve worked with a few — Smartsheet can help them over the threshold and evolve from seeing everything as a nail to be driven with the Excel hammer.
Why I like Smartsheet’s template
If you’ve inherited content calendars from other people, getting them loaded into a new system can be a pain. Smartsheet’s spreadsheet-based architecture means that importing Google Sheets, Excel files, and even the long-trusted .csv file is quick. Once you’ve mapped Smartsheet’s template to your doc’s fields, you’re good to go.
What to look for in an editorial calendar template
When choosing an editorial calendar template, pay attention to the following core features:
- Super-powered filtering and sorting: Even the simplest editorial calendar represents a Tetris-like idea of what you plan to write and publish when. You need to be able to sort and order by any of a dozen dates, by content type, by contributor, by channel. Sure, DIY spreadsheets can do this, but using software and templates that are custom-built to let you look at your plans from every possible angle will save you at least an hour per day—if not more.
- Automatic updates and notifications: Constantly asking “You get that thing I sent ya?” Peter Potamus style is not why I got into the content business.
- One of the easiest ways to avoid the thankless daily time suck of “Hey, just checking in” is by using the integrated team collaboration tools these and other planning platforms offer. Whether built into the system itself or integrated into an existing collab platform like Slack or Teams, easily configured auto notifications are a non-negotiable for me.
- Intuitive assignment and scheduling: To get from content ideation to publication and tracking with a minimum of tears, every member of your team needs to be clear on what they’re expected to do and by when they’re expected to do it. Building your content calendar is much quicker when it easily allows you to assign deliverables to individuals and teams.
- More than just calendars: Yes, you’re building a plan that visually shows what content goes live when, and that the way most of us visualize “when” is with a clock or a calendar. But looking at 30 days stacked in boxes isn’t always the easiest way to see your editorial plan’s bigger picture. So look for a template or calendar system that can organize your plans in other ways, including Gantt charts and kanban boards.
