Does Sutrah read my meetings?

On Google and Outlook, yes — that is how a prayer block can land in a gap instead of on top of a call. It reads busy times to find free space. It is never used for anything else, and the access brief for IT sets out the exact scopes and what each one permits.

Can I use Sutrah without connecting a calendar?

Yes. The printable monthly timetable and the city pages need no account, no email and no calendar connection, and there is no watermark or upsell on the PDF. You lose the placement feature, which is the whole point of connecting, but the times are the same times.

Does Pillars put prayer times in my calendar?

Calendar integration is not in the feature list Pillars publishes on its site or its App Store listing. Its published roadmap mentions local mosque prayer times and more widgets. If that changes, this page is wrong and we would like to be told.

Which is better if I work from home?

Probably Pillars. The case for a calendar tool rests on other people being able to take your time without asking. If nobody can, you are paying a privacy cost for a feature you will not use, and an ad-free tracker with notifications is the better fit.

Opposite trade-offs · Sutrah asks for more

Pillars and Sutrah: two opposite answers on privacy

Last updated 17 September 2026

No, and it cannot be. Pillars is built so your location never leaves your phone, and it carries no advertising. Sutrah's core feature requires granting a web service permission to write to your work calendar. That is a real cost, and anyone who chose Pillars for its privacy model should weigh it deliberately rather than by default.

How this was checked

Everything below about Pillars comes from material The Pillars Group Ltd publishes, read on 17 September 2026. Where this page says a capability is not listed, that means it does not appear in that material — not that the app cannot do it. Feature sets move; if something here is out of date, tell us at hello@sutrah.app and it gets corrected.

What Pillars does that Sutrah does not

Pillars asks for less than Sutrah does, by design and by a wide margin. It states that location data never leaves the device, it carries no ads, and its App Store privacy label reports nothing collected that is linked to your identity. Sutrah cannot match that and is not going to pretend otherwise: conflict-aware placement is impossible without reading your calendar.

Start with the trade, because it is the whole comparison

Pillars was built on a promise: your location data never leaves your phone. No ads, minimal collection, nothing tied to who you are. That is not marketing garnish on a prayer app — it is the reason a lot of people chose it, and it is stated plainly in the app’s own material.

Sutrah cannot make that promise, and the gap is not small. Placing a prayer in the free space between your meetings requires knowing where the free space is, which requires reading your calendar, which requires a server holding a token that can do so. There is no clever architecture that removes that. If you came to Pillars because you wanted an app that knows as little about you as possible, Sutrah is a step in the other direction and you should make that choice deliberately rather than by default.

What Sutrah actually asks for

Since the trade is the comparison, here is the specific version rather than a reassurance.

On Google, the scope is calendar.events.owned. It permits reading busy times and creating and editing events Sutrah itself created. It cannot modify or delete anything created by you or anyone else.
On Microsoft, the scope is Calendars.ReadWrite. Graph has no owned-events equivalent, so an Outlook account grants strictly more than a Google one. That is a real difference and it is stated on the Outlook page rather than smoothed over.
Neither grant includes email, contacts or files.

The full version — every scope, what is stored, how long, and which sub-processors touch it — is in the access brief written for security reviewers, with the user-facing summary on the privacy page. Read them before connecting anything. That is what they are for.

The route that keeps your calendar closed

Worth knowing if you are privacy-minded and still curious: the two most useful public parts of this site ask for nothing at all.

The printable monthly timetable takes coordinates, generates a one-page PDF with the calculation method, its angles and the qibla bearing printed on it, and never asks for an account or an email. The city pages are the same — today’s times, the full month, the qibla, no sign-in. Pin the PDF up next to your desk and you have most of the benefit of a visible prayer schedule with none of the access grant. It will not stop anyone booking over Asr, because a sheet of paper is not in the scheduling system, but it is an honest halfway house and it costs you nothing.

Where the two are close

On the times themselves there is not much between them. Both support the common calculation methods including Moonsighting Committee, ISNA and Muslim World League, and both let you pick the earlier or later Asr for your madhab — a difference between schools rather than a difference in accuracy, explained in the Asr guide. Both are free to use. Neither shows you an advertisement.

The trackers differ in temperament more than in function. Pillars has a prayer streak, a fasting tracker and a menstruation pause that protects the streak. Sutrah has a qada ledger with no streak at all, because a broken streak is poor feedback for someone already behind. Reasonable people prefer either.

How to decide

One question settles it: can other people put things in your day without asking?

If they cannot — you work for yourself, your calendar is private, your week is yours — then the calendar feature buys you nothing and you would be granting access for no return. Stay with Pillars. If they can, and you have watched a 4pm disappear before you looked at it, then the access is buying something specific and you can weigh it against what it costs. Either answer is a reasonable one; what would not be reasonable is switching on a vague sense that newer is better.

At a glance

Read the rows about Pillars as a summary of what its makers publish, not as a verdict on the app.

Dimension	Pillars	Sutrah
What it has to know about you	Your location, which Pillars states never leaves the phone. Its App Store privacy label declares identifiers, usage data and diagnostics collected but not linked to your identity.	Your calendar's busy times, and an OAuth grant to write events into it. Read the access brief for the exact scopes.
Advertising	None. Ad-free out of the box is the product's founding promise.	None, and no paid tier either.
Writing events into Google Calendar or Outlook	Not in the published feature list.	The entire product.
Prayer times and madhab	Multiple calculation methods including the Moonsighting Committee, ISNA and Muslim World League, with an early or late Asr setting for your madhab.	The same conventions, with both Asr positions and three high-latitude rules. Public pages default to Moonsighting Committee.
Tracking	A prayer tracker with streaks, a fasting tracker, and a menstruation pause that protects the streak.	A qada ledger. No streaks, on purpose — it is a ledger, not a guilt trip.
Price	Free with an optional Pillars Premium subscription, listed on the US App Store in September 2026 at $11.99 monthly and $49.99–$59.99 annually. Apple Watch support sits in Premium.	Free, no card, no paid tier.
Where it runs	iOS, iPadOS, Apple Watch and Android.	The web and your calendar. No mobile app, and no watch app.

Which one is for you

Use Pillars if

Minimising what any service knows about you is the point, not a preference.
You want an ad-free app with a tracker, and nothing else.
Your prayer times do not need to be visible to anybody but you.

Use Sutrah if

You have already decided your employer's calendar is where your day is decided.
You would rather a colleague saw a busy block than have to decline the invite later.
You have read what the calendar grant covers and are comfortable with it.

These are not exclusive. Plenty of people run a prayer app for the adhan and a calendar tool for the meetings, because the two fix different failures.

What Sutrah does not do

There is no Sutrah mobile app. It is a web app plus the calendar you already use, and a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.
It does not play the adhan, and has no Quran, no dhikr counter and no lessons.
Conflict-aware placement needs a Google or Microsoft account. Apple Calendar is a read-only subscription feed, so on Apple the blocks cannot move around your meetings.
Public city pages cover 212 cities. The printable timetable works for any coordinates, but there is no 6-million-location database behind it.

Frequently asked questions

Does Sutrah read my meetings?: On Google and Outlook, yes — that is how a prayer block can land in a gap instead of on top of a call. It reads busy times to find free space. It is never used for anything else, and the access brief for IT sets out the exact scopes and what each one permits.
Can I use Sutrah without connecting a calendar?: Yes. The printable monthly timetable and the city pages need no account, no email and no calendar connection, and there is no watermark or upsell on the PDF. You lose the placement feature, which is the whole point of connecting, but the times are the same times.
Does Pillars put prayer times in my calendar?: Calendar integration is not in the feature list Pillars publishes on its site or its App Store listing. Its published roadmap mentions local mosque prayer times and more widgets. If that changes, this page is wrong and we would like to be told.
Which is better if I work from home?: Probably Pillars. The case for a calendar tool rests on other people being able to take your time without asking. If nobody can, you are paying a privacy cost for a feature you will not use, and an ad-free tracker with notifications is the better fit.

Other comparisons

Or start from the whole comparison index, which includes the option most people should try first: doing nothing new at all.