Need to call across time zones? See and hear happy faces: a world clock converter helps you pick the perfect time. Find the best time zone difference calculators for desktop and mobile reviewed here.
First, If Airlines Get It Wrong, What Can I Do?
I changed a flight recently. My new plan—according to the airline’s website—was to leave Minneapolis at 7:50 pm on Sunday, August 6 to arrive in Paris at 11:15 am on Monday, August 7. So far, so good. Around 8½ hours of flight plus 7 hours of time difference.
Then, I would spend 25 hours and 10 minutes waiting in Paris, though, to catch the 12:25 pm flight on Sunday, August 7 (sic!) so I could be in Vienna at 2:15 pm on Monday, August 7.
Ah, time zones… If major airlines get them wrong, what can you do? Use a time zone difference calculator or converter, of course. I picked the best ones for you. Let’s go!
The present, the past and the future for all the world coming together on one page. How’s that for world time, buddy?
World Time Buddy packs a lot of information in little space. All is useful, and the page does not feel crammed. It is fantastic.
Make World Time Buddy your first stop for time zone calculations, and chances are you will need no other. On a single table, you get to see the current time at all your locations, office hours, the date, time zone names, time differences, whether locals use 24 hours or AM/PM and your Google calendar.
Selecting a time range instantly creates an event, which you can export to Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple Calendar or emails in Gmail. You can also set up a World Time Buddy page for the event, which will automatically display the time of the viewer—perfect to share with additional attendees.
Search for locations and time zones works just as you would expect, and you can sort your table quickly by time zone offset or manually. Speaking of manually, World Time Buddy lets you rename locations and will remember your choices.
While world Time Buddy offers to group locations, it’d be good if it could save multiple setups—and learn about local holidays. Either way, World Time Buddy is the best time zone converter on the net.
World Time Buddy works in desktop browsers and offers apps both for iOS and for Android.
Time is not what the clock says; it is what the world does—or, of course, what it does not do at any moment.
This is why Timeanddate.com’s world clock converter is so useful. It does not blindly assume working hours are from 9 to 5 (except for Sundays maybe); it takes into account local holidays.
So, if you get the green light from Timeanddate.com for a conference call uniting Tokyo, Abidjan, and Paris, you can schedule it with the confidence that banks will be open for business. To share the time, you get plain text as well as iCal files, or you can link to the very page you see on Timeanddate.com.
On that page, you can change the time rapidly with a handy slider. Picking a different date requires a bit more effort. Other than that, everything is arranged thoughtfully and practically: you can add as many locations as you like (searching for time zones as well as places), sort them intelligently, and see details such as time differences and time zone abbreviations.
A nice addition would be visualization, perhaps, of those locations on a map, and their relative times in a table. Being able to pick locations from a map would be helpful, too, as would be ways to save configurations and places.
Overall, holiday awareness makes Timeanddate.com’s time zone calculator an incredibly useful tool.
Timeandddate.com works in desktop and mobile browsers; a meeting planner across time zones is available for iOS and Android.
When you want to know the time at another place fast, The Time Zone Converter is an excellent place to find out.
The Time Zone Converter lets you enter time by just typing it, then enter the target location—by just typing it. That is it: without hesitation, page load, waiting or interstitials, The Time Zone Converter shows you the time at that other location, indicating if the date is different.
This perfect simplicity is, at the same time, the site’s weakness, depending on your current needs. The Time Zone Converter will always only show two locations, you cannot save them or pick from a map, results cannot be exported, and The Time Zone Converter does not help much with scheduling meetings—other than showing the time at another place as fast as you can type.
The Time Zone Converter works in desktop and mobile browsers and is available as an iOS app.
If you plan a meeting, do you have to meet?
Let us hope not. For Timezone.me’s “meeting planner” is far too useful to be used only for planning meetings. You pick multiple locations (and people) as well as a time and date, and Timezone.me instantly shows the corresponding local times. A slider makes it easy to find the perfect time, and sun and moon icons effectively indicate day and night.
What’s more and better, the Timezone.me meeting planner displays all the locations on a daylight map—clearly one of the most visually straight-forward ways to pick suitable meeting times.
Timezone.me lets you export the time to an .ics file (and import that into many a calendar), though a bit oddly for a meeting planner, it does not let you specify a length for the event. You can also send an email that lists all the participants and times right from Timezone.me.
We all want to see green, happy faces for conference calls, do we not?
With GreenwichMeanTime.com, your chances for the happy faces increase across time zones. Its Plan tab shows you the local day with clear green, yellow and red labels for picking times compatible with office (or at least working) hours. Unfortunately, GreenWichMeanTime.com does not take weekends or holidays into respect.
In addition to the meeting time planner, you get the option to see all local times as pretty wall clocks and, of course, a basic time zone converter. Here, you get to pick as many locations as necessary with fantastic location search (with does not include time zone names and abbreviations, though). Picking dates is easy with a calendar, and changing the time is even easier with a slider. The faces return as subtle, colored underlines to indicate compatible times. Saving locations or just re-arranging them is, alas, not possible.
GreenWichMeanTime.com also offers a conversion table to keep for reference. Neither the table nor any meeting times you have set up can easily be exported, though. This is really unfortunate on so useful a site.
GreewichMeanTime.com works in desktop and mobile browsers.
Tables: who knew they could be so useful with numbers?
Seeing a day’s hours for different locations side by side is most efficient a manner of checking time differences and finding a time that works for everybody.
The tabular overview is Savvy Time Converter’s best part, but it is not all, of course: You also get to see a specific date and time converted and, maybe a bit superfluously, lots of time zone minutia for each location.
Speaking of those places, Savvy Time Converter returns countries, cities and time zones quickly with a preview of the current time.
Unfortunately, other than sharing a link to the page you see at Savvy Time, there is no straightforward way to export data—not even the handy tables. Sorting locations is not possible, and the date can only be picked using a calendar.
Savvy Time Converter works in desktop and mobile browsers.
The good thing? You do not have to enter anything. The bad thing? You cannot enter anything.
Every Time Zone does not display every time zone; it does give a crisp overview of times around the world, however. You get a solid idea quickly—if you know which time zone you need. Each is represented by its code and one city; without recognizing either, you are out of luck.
For a swift glance, Every Time Zone may still be all you need—and you do not have to enter anything!
Every Time Zone works in desktop and mobile browsers.
If the world was flat, it were not quite so easy to spin it.
The world inside the FUZO Time Zone Converter is as flat as a screen and, well, it is not quite so easy to spin it. But spin it you must!
To learn the time zone difference between two points on the earth, you pick them from a big spinning globe at FUZO Time Zone Converter. To see the local times converted, you slide up and down (or northwards and to the south) on the globe. Both are quite entertaining and reasonably quick, but not entirely practical or always precise enough.
What’s more, FUZO lacks search. If you do not know where your two locations are found on a globe, you will not be able to convert between their time zones, spin the globe as you might.
If you like to look at long lists of time zones sorted by continent and city (with a few time zone codes thrown in), then Time Zone Converter is a handy tool. Pick a date and time, two time zones to convert between, and you get the result.
That’s it. Unfortunately, this clear focus does not mean the result of your conversion is immediately obvious on Time Zone Converter; it means you will not get a calendar, though, hints of working hours and holidays or the option to see more than two locations.
Time Zone Converter works in desktop and mobile browsers.
<Location> time: returns the current time at the location. For example, Tokyo time shows the current time in Tokyo.
time difference <Location 1> <Location 2>: returns the current time zone difference between the two locations as well as the current time at both places. For example, time difference Boston Tokyo counts up the 13 hours of difference.
time <Location>: returns the current time as well as the difference to your time zone. Example: time Tokyo.
time zone <Location 1>, <Location 2>, <Location 3>,…: shows the current time, time zone and time offset for all the locations. Example: time zone Tokyo, Boston, Paris.
Wolfram|Alpha works in desktop and mobile browsers; it is also available as an app both for iOS and for Android (including Amazon Apps).