Planby: the EPG component that corners a weird little niche

Most React scheduling libraries want to be Google Calendar. Planby wants to be the TV guide your cable box had in 2009, and that turns out to be a genuinely underserved hole. If your app needs a horizontal resource timeline - channels against hours, rooms against a day, staff against shifts - Planby is one of the only React components built specifically for that layout rather than retrofitted into it.

The origin story checks out. Maintainer Karol Kozer built it after years in the TV/VOD industry, where every streaming company apparently rolls its own electronic program guide from scratch. The component reflects that background: the core API is a useEpg hook fed with channels (your resource rows) and programs (time-ranged events with since/till timestamps), rendered through Epg and Layout wrappers. It is EPG-shaped thinking all the way down, which is either exactly what you need or a vocabulary you'll fight against.

The license is the real pricing page

Here's the part the marketing soft-pedals. The free version on GitHub (brella/planby-free, around 1.7k stars) ships under a custom license that explicitly excludes commercial use. Read that again before you npm install for a client project: the free tier is for open source and personal projects only. Commercial work means the PRO license, a one-time $400 per developer seat with no annual renewal, which adds drag-and-drop, event resizing, advanced grid modes, and priority support.

That pricing is actually reasonable compared to FullCalendar's per-developer premium tiers or Syncfusion's four-figure subscriptions. One-time, no renewal, done. The problem is finding it: as of this writing, planby.app/pricing returns a 404, and the $400 figure only appears buried in the "Why Planby" explainer page. A component library that can't keep its own pricing page online is a small but real trust signal, especially when the same site runs urgency banners and fire emojis at the top of every page.

What it does well

Performance is the headline claim and it holds up to scrutiny. Planby virtualizes in both directions - the horizontal time axis and the vertical resource rows - so it only renders visible cells and claims constant 60fps scrolling with 10,000+ events. A talk at React Advanced 2023 walked through the internals, and independent write-ups comparing it to FullCalendar's resource timeline back up the speed advantage on large datasets. FullCalendar wasn't designed for 500-channel EPGs; Planby was.

Theming goes deep. You pass a theme schema with granular color tokens plus custom JSX renderers for events and rows, so the result doesn't have to look like a TV guide at all. Conference agendas, shift planners, booking grids, even Gantt-ish views are all documented use cases. React Native support (via Expo modules) is in beta with free access, and there's a Framer plugin for no-code designers - both signs the project is actively moving, not coasting.

Where it gets thin

• It's basically a one-person operation. The About page names Kozer as the maintainer, with community contributions around the edges. PRO customers get priority fixes, which partly mitigates the bus factor, but a solo-maintained dependency in your rendering path is a risk you should price in.
• The free tier's non-commercial license trips people up. One developer who built an alternative component ("Planner") cited exactly this - needed features locked behind the commercial license - as the reason for walking away. If your team has a no-paid-dependencies policy, Planby is a non-starter.
• Narrow by design. If you need month views, agenda lists, or calendar-style navigation, this isn't it. Developers comparing options typically end up choosing between Planby and Bitnoise's React Scheduler precisely because both only do the resource-timeline thing.
• The marketing undersells the engineering. Emoji banners, "1M+ Users Served" counters, a broken pricing link. The component itself is more credible than the site selling it.

Should you use it

Pick Planby if you're building a TV guide, live-streaming schedule, or any dense resource-against-time grid in React and you'd otherwise be writing virtualization math yourself. At $400 one-time per dev, it pays for itself inside a week of avoided work. Skip it if you need a general-purpose calendar (get FullCalendar or react-big-calendar), if your budget requires pure MIT code, or if betting a production feature on a solo maintainer makes you nervous. The React Native beta is promising but it is a beta - ship the web version first and treat mobile as a follow-up, not a launch dependency.