Sunsama Review: Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

Sunsama fits into the day planner app category, acting as a digital planner helping with task management and time blocking. Sunsama is one of the best planner apps for those who want to mindfully and manually plan their day.

Sunsama can help with planning your daily work, time blocking and scheduling your important tasks each day. It takes a zen-like approach to helping you intentionally plan your day, allowing you participate in the planning process of your day all while giving you a calendar view of your tasks. Many people that struggle with focusing claim that it helps them better schedule their day, allowing them to get more work done.

Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.

Who is Sunsama For?

If your organization uses a full project management tool like Asana, ClickUp, or Trello and you want another tool to help you schedule tasks onto your calendar view and plan when you'll do each specific task, then Sunsama can be a great addition to your productivity tools.

If you don't have a need for a full project management tool and are more so looking for a task management app to get your daily work done, then Sunsama is a great choice with a ton of useful features to help you go through your workload. Just keep in mind that Sunsama only allows you to plan your schedule a few weeks in advance so if you have larger projects at hand, it might be a bit frustrating since you'll need to backlog most of your tasks until the time to actually work on them gets closer.

If you like to take an intentional, zen-like approach to planning your day, and can see yourself carving out 15-20 minutes a day for planning, then Sunsama could be the best day planner app for you.

Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.

Who Shouldn't Use Sunsama?

Sunsama is not a project management tool, it's very much a task management software. It allows you to only plan only up to two weeks in advance. So if you are looking for a way to manage larger projects or collaborate with team members then you might find yourself looking for 2 tools to accomplish what one tool should be able to do (e.g. Motion vs Sunsama). So re-iternating again, if you are in the market for a new project management tool, and are considering Sunsama, you will be disappointed as this is not what it was made to do.

You should also not use Sunsama if you don't think you'd be good at keeping up with the planning process of your tasks. Sunsama doesn't automatically schedule or prioritize your tasks for you, YOU need to do that each day, so if you forget or it falls to the wayside, you might end up paying for a tool that is sitting dormant. There are other productivity tools (Motion) that use AI to schedule your day that might be better for you in this case.

Let's dive in deeper ⤵

Features & Differentiation

Rating: _B

Sunsama has invested a lot of time into their key features such as their daily review, weekly review, and weekly objective functionality. All features that try to get you to plan daily, what tasks need to get done, and how they tie to the actual goals and objectives of the week.

That said, people have complained that they wish there was more of a monthly and quarterly objectives, since weekly is often too short of a time to plan for larger goals.

Sunsama is also a calendar app that integrates deeply with tools like Asana, allowing you to pull tasks from Asana and put them onto your calendar for daily planning. It's a clever idea, especially if you're already using and loving Asana, but just frustrated by the lack of integration with a calendar. Something that Motion actually does out of the box as it's an all-in-one task and time management tool.

Key Features: Mindful Planning

Sunsama has no interest in building AI scheduling capabilities into the tool. Sunsama very much wants users to take an intentional approach to daily planning.

For example, one of their useful features is the ability to set the planned time it will take to work on a task. You can update the task with the actual time it took to complete it, helping you better understand your work patterns (underestimating or overestimating how long it will take to get work done). Sunsama also has a time tracking feature for tasks that can help you track your actual time (by starting and stopping the timer).

Sunsama also asks that you configure your desired workload for each day, aka set the amount of hours you plan to work. If the planned time of your tasks approaches the workload threshold then Sunsama will warn you that you're approaching your maximum for the day. If your planned time exceeds your workload threshold, Sunsama will warn you that you've overcommitted.

With key features like this, Sunsama aims to help life balance more possible, making it one of the best planner apps for those who like to thoughtfully plan their day.

Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.

User Interface (UI)

Rating: _A-

This is one of the areas that Sunsama totally excels. They have a super minimalist design and intuitive interface. The friendly interface has a kanban board where you can drag and drop tasks to plan your week. Your calendar app pops open on the side where you see your daily tasks and calendar events in a time blocking view.

They also have calming features like focus mode and daily shutdown, which allow you to take a deep breath, removing all other distractions, allowing you to focus your attention.

User Experience (UX)

Rating: _B-

With such a stellar UI, you'd expect the UX to be fantastic. And it is, in many areas. For example, things function the way you'd expect them to, and they have keyboard shortcuts for most things.

That said, it does feel like there's many missed opportunities to automate some of the things you need to do during your daily review (and yes, you need to review your Sunsama daily so that it doesn't fall behind). Why not have an option to automatically reschedule your day for you, why is it such a manual process? The same frustration that we have with a tool like Asana.

That said, Sunsama has made it clear they don't plan on leveraging AI to help users with daily planning. They would rather be the best planner app for those who want to plan manually (and they've done a good job with that).

Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.

Mobile App

Rating: _C-

Sunsama has an iOS and Android app that is relatively basic, and they refer to it as a "companion to the web app". So this means you can add basic tasks to Sunsama while on-the-go, and see what's on your calendar/schedule for the day, but you're not going to actually be planning any work while on-the-go.

You're also not going to have any actual calendar scheduling functionality while on-the-go. The truth of the matter is that it feels a bit rushed. We also experienced a pretty buggy mobile app experience with the app randomly crashing. There's only day view for the calendar for example, and the back gestures on Android don't even seem to work when backing out of tasks.

Let's just say that it's fair in that they are referring to it as a companion (for expectation setting), and you're not going to be replacing your calendar of choice or your primary project management app on mobile anytime soon.

With all of that said, you're going to want to use their desktop app or web app for planning your day and getting actual work done.

Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.

API & Integrations

Rating: _C-

Sunsama does not currently have an API. As it's more focused on native integrations with tools like that of with Asana, ClickUp, or Trello. So with that, you can see that their focus isn't actually on extending Sunsama into a flexible tool outside of what they've decided to integrate deeply with.

If you're using one of the main tools they integrate with, this might be a good thing, but for now, with no API, you cannot integrate it with your team's CRM for example, which leads us to feel they are more focused on being an individual daily planner application instead of a team project manager.

Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.

Final Thoughts

Is Sunsama worth it? If you need a daily planner application or task management software and are willing to intentionally take the 15-20 minutes to plan your daily work, then we think it's worth giving a shot. Their daily review and weekly review features are meant to help you reflect and better help you with managing your time overall and we think Sunsama is one of the best planner apps for those who want to plan their day manually.

Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.

If you're a small team and not already using (and loving) another project management software like Asana, we'd recommend simply using Motion, as when you compare Motion vs Sunsama, you really need Sunsama and Asana together (2 separate tools) to get what Motion gives you out of the box.