Sunsama

Sunsama very much wants users to take an intentional approach to daily planning.

For example, one of their 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.

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.

Sunsama calendar & task view dashboard

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 some 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?

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).

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 within a modern web browser for planning your day and getting actual work done.

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.