21 Best Productivity Software & Tools 2024

Link shorteners are something that most people don't even realize that they are interacting with on a daily basis. That said, most everyone has at some point used Bit.ly to create a short link at one time or another.

I've been using link shorteners for over a decade at this point (back when we were called "CyberBytes", I had even registered the short link cyberbyt.es by pretending I lived in Spain 😅).

Having used self-hosted (open-source) short link services like shlink, to paid solutions like Short.io, I've never actually had a good experience with what's out there.

Short was the most recent solution we used, but it just feels like it was built by an engineer with little front-end chops. The UI/UX is clunky, basic features like search are super convoluted and kludgy + rarely work.

Enter Dub. It's both open-source as well as a hosted solution, built by Steven Tey, a crazy talented open-source focused individual who has taken to the same frustrations as I've had in the space. Difference is, he's a full-stack developer with amazing product chops.

There's no actual enjoyable, or impressive link shortener on the market, until now. If anyone is familiar with the story of Fathom Analytics, I'm willing to bet that Steven does to the Link Shortener world with Dub what Fathom did to the Analytics space.

Tech Stack

Dub is built using the most modern software tooling, leveraging Vercel Edge Functions + Upstash Redis.

Motion (also often referred to as Use Motion and Motion App) is in a category of it's own that we've been referring to as time management…

Let me explain:

Motion's main goal is to take care of all of your team's needs revolving around time. If you're someone that wakes up in the morning and looks at their calendar app to see what you have on for the day, Motion App will fit in like a glove.

It connects in deeply with your Google Calendar, Microsoft Calendar, and even Apple Calendar, allowing you to build out project management and task management for yourself and team members. The best part is that all of these tasks automatically organize themselves based on priority right onto your calendar (and your team's) to ensure the most important (and blocking) tasks get done.

If you've heard of the productivity app terminology of "time blocking", well Motion does that automatically using AI, no manual time blocking needed.

It even goes to the degree of allowing you to share meeting scheduler links with others, all while respecting your existing events across all of your calendars (and even your team's calendars), along with automatically inviting team members into the appointment once booked.

With your entire team using Motion, it's like you have a full-time personal assistant shared across the company, ensuring that everyone is getting deep work done all while focusing on what is most important (at the most ideal time), all while making sure that no one is ever double-booked.

All of this makes for an incredibly powerful tool for individuals, but exponentially more valuable with every additional team member you add. No other project management or daily planner tool on the market seems to go to this degree.

Get Motion 7 Day Free Trial.

How Motion App Compares

Project Management

As compared to some of the best project management software on the market often mentioned like Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Motion has taken their sights on slightly smaller teams of between 1–50 people.

This team size target is based on their current feature-set, from what we've seen. For example, the larger teams that we work with who have many layers of management often require reporting capabilities over everything else. And with Motion, that's not something you're going to get, because they are currently focused on giving the only AI project management tool on the market focused on helping the individual and teams, over the needs of upper-management.

So if you and your team are used to spending a lot of time planning deadlines, and rearranging your "My Task" view in the existing tools on the market, Motion flips this on it's head with the use of AI. Something to consider if you're fed up with the manual work involved with traditional project management tools.

Daily Planner

Compared to the best daily planner apps on the market like Sunsama and Akiflow, Motion is the only daily planner we've seen that actually leverages AI to plan your day for you. With all of the other apps in the category, you need to manually drag in tasks to time block and plan each day. This is an incredibly time consuming process, that some justify as being "more mindful", but once you actually have AI schedule your day for you, you realize how much time is actually wasted "mindfully planning your day".

Calendar Scheduler

Compared to the best calendar schedulers on the market like Calendly and Chili Piper, Motion bakes in the core functionality of these tools, with the added visibility of team tasks and urgent deadlines, actually booking off availability for you and your team if high priority work needs to get done by a quickly approaching deadline.

Get Motion 7 Day Free Trial.

Motion App Limitations

Custom Integration Required for Large Teams

Large teams (100–500) with other enterprise software implemented will find integrating Motion more involved than other enterprise tools. When using an enterprise software stack like that of Salesforce, it's common for other project management tools to have native integrations.

With Motion, it will require a custom integration approach (something that we actually help teams do). But while it's possible, one might ask if it's worth making the large investment in a custom integration when you might be able to get something more native out of the box with the other tools focused on larger teams.

(This of course depends on the actual integration needs of your team, as native doesn't always do exactly what you'd like it to do).

Reporting & Dashboards

Motion currently lacks advanced reporting and dashboard functionality. So while you can see at a top-level the status of projects and tasks in Kanban and Listviews, even a team workload view, that's about where reporting dashboards end, making it less suitable for large teams requiring extensive project analytics.

Motion App Pricing

• Individual (1 User)—$19/user/mo Billed Annual ($34/user/mo Billed Monthly)
• Team (2+ Users)—$12/user/mo Billed Annual ($20/user/mo Billed Monthly)
• ‍View full Motion pricing tiers & features on their site

If all of that connects with you and you think it might fit your needs, they have a 7 day free trial that you can use along with your team to see what it's like having a personalized AI assistant.

Get Motion 7 Day Free Trial.

Arc is a web browser. In simple terms, it's a replacement to Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, but oh, also so much more... A big part of what makes Arc great is actually the fluidity and experience when using it. It feels more core to the operating system than any other browser on the market.

If you try it out, you'll know what I mean.

Your browser has mainly just been in the background, right? You don't think that much about it, it's more just a tool to access the internet. Yeah, that's where Arc changes that—what if a browser could give you moments of micro-delight in the day-to-day usage? In fact, why don't other browsers?

Who is Arc Browser For?

If you're like most people and have just been using Chrome or Safari and not thinking much about your browser experience, Arc by The Browser Company is probably for you—let me explain...

There's no shortage of productivity-focused browsers out there like SigmaOS, Sidekick, Shift, amongst many others, and I'm willing to bet that if you're reading this, you probably haven't even checked them out or have heard of them. But you're here because you've heard of Arc. Great! That's because Arc is trying to just be a better browser, one that people don't even realize they need or want.

Whether you've tried a new browser in the past (e.g. Firefox, Vivaldi, Opera) or feel like switching is too much work. We're here to tell you that it's worth it to try out Arc. It's not like other web browsers on the market.

The best way to describe it is it's as if Apple re-thought web browsers from the ground up, and built it natively as if it was something more, like an internet browser, or rather an internet machine. What if your browser could actually feel as native and fluid as your operating system? Yeah, that's Arc browser. It was built for everyone, by people that really care. In a space that most people stopped "caring" about 6+ years ago.

Best of all, it's built with the Chromium engine as the backbone, so all your favorite browser extensions will work right out of the box!

If you're someone that uses the best productivity tools like Motion, Superhuman, or Notion then Arc is the perfect addition to your stack.

Who Shouldn't Use Arc Browser?

For starters, it's currently only available for MacOS, Windows (in Beta), and iOS, so if you're not using any of those operating systems, then Arc won't work for you.

I, for example, use Android (Chrome on mobile), and Arc Browser on desktop, and I'm totally fine with that—you don't need both together to benefit from Arc. But if you're someone that wants the exact same browser as their mobile app as well, Arc might not be for you.

At the end of the day, Arc is not just for the productivity-minded or the early adopters. It was built for everyone, whether you're a student, a stay-at-home parent, a CEO, or retired, there's something in Arc for you, that will make your day-to-day browsing experience just that much better.

Features

Rating: _A-

Arc's team have totally rethought the bookmarks and the "tab experience" with a powerful vertical tab bar (don't worry, it can be hidden if you prefer that), along with an incredibly powerful profile workspace feature called "Spaces".

Spaces

Spaces allow you to stay focused and easily segment your work while easily organizing tabs are important to you in folders.

For example, set up a personal space, favorite your YouTube, Spotify, WhatsApp, and Gmail tabs—from there, they function like mini apps. Now, with the swipe of 2 fingers, you're in your work space. All of your favorite apps are swapped out with your work apps, and you're logged into all of your work accounts:

No other browser lets you segment work to this degree. It's so powerful, yet such a simple implementation. Tough to truly explain without experiencing it yourself.

What clicked for me, is when someone explained the following to me (when I was at the time an avid user of Chrome): With Chrome, Google is in the business of ads, so they are actually incentivized to give you a crummy tab management experience. Why? Because what happens if finding the tab you're looking for is difficult? You open up a new tab and search Google again (and you're shown more ads).

So it's more that the UI/UX in many ways by the industry leader is built in such a way to optimize for displaying ads. Arc on the other hand is building features that give you a better experience, first-and-foremost.

Split Screen

Are you like us and like to have your CRM open when you're going through your email inbox via Superhuman? Bookmark a split screen for that. Like to take notes in Notion while watching YouTube videos? Save a split screen for that too.

Imagine for a moment that a bookmark was more than just a bookmark—with Arc, it is. Is gives you powerful split view functionality to group together commonly used websites together, making it so that it's only a click away.

Little Arc

While it sounds like a cute name, it's quite the powerful feature. How many times have you wanted to quickly peek into a web page from Slack or other programs, only to be thrown into another tab in a sea of tabs within your main browser? Little Arc is where clicking on links from other programs starts, with the quick option to open it into the full browser experience. Might seem small, but it makes for a super enjoyable and light experience.

Competition

Every single person that uses a computer, uses a browser. It's probably the most competitive software market in the world, and Google pays Apple some $20bn per year just to have Google set as the default search engine in Apple products.

Because of that, this can't be covered in just a single section in a post. Here's a full write-up on how Arc compares to the top browsers on the market.

If you're curious as to Arc vs Chrome or Arc vs Brave, you can see our thoughts there.

Availability

Arc is currently available on MacOS, Windows, iOS, and Android. That said, if you're using Linux, ChromeOS, or something else, you'll probably be hard-pressed bo give this new browser a try because they haven't announced Linux and other OS focus/release.

Windows

Arc is officially on Windows and you can get it here. They even have a fun website where they answer the question: isarconwindowsyet.com (spoiler alert, it is and they've onboarded over 200K users already).

Mobile App

Arc Search is available now on both iOS and Android. Both Andra and myself use it as our default browser on mobile, though when using a tablet, Chrome does still give a better tablet experience (for now).

Learn More

If you're intrigued, want to know more, and see more of the features/benefits in GIF format, go check out this article where we've done a deep dive on why we think Arc is the future of the internet.

Is Arc Worth It?

Well, there's no more waiting list, so you can go ahead and give it a shot today if you're on MacOS, Windows, iOS, or Android, so we'd say yes, Arc is worth it.

Get Arc for free here.

Andra: For years, I used the native Mac screenshot tool (which saves your screenshots to your desktop, and then you need to drag the image into your email or wherever you're trying to get it). I didn't think there was a better option out there.

Then I met Alex and he introduced me to CleanShot X that auto-copies the screenshot you take so you can paste it directly where you want. Whaaat? Let me tell you, this saves me so.much.time on a daily basis.

Want to screenshot a few images? No problem. All the images will auto-appear on the side of your screen and you can pick and choose which ones you want.

It's also super easy to annotate and draw on each image if you want to point something out, or blur out important information.

In summary, if you screenshot often this will make you MUCH more productive. Try it for a week and you won't be able to go back, I promise you!

I'll preface this by saying that I've used LastPass, 1Password, Bitwarden, and even—only IT companies would recognize—IT Glue & MyGlue (a premium solution starting at $150/mo).

I first started using LastPass over a decade ago, got most of my family/friends on it, and eventually even customers as well (as a way to securely share passwords between companies).

The thing is, LastPass got acquired by LogMeIn and started becoming stagnant. It also went through what felt like a never-ending series of major data breaches over the years to follow.

This was when I started seriously evaluating alternatives (like Dashlane), as I knew it was going to be a heavy lift to switch—consisting of migrating myself (personal + work), family, friends, and even some customers all over to it from LastPass and MyGlue respectivel

For those more technical (or running an IT company) and considering IT Glue/MyGlue—it's great, but as a password manager, it's overkill. It's more of an IT infrastructure documentation tool, which they acquired a password manager, and rolled it into the mix. So you're paying a huge premium if you're planning on only using it as a password manager (as I was during the later years of pivoting away from the MSP side of the business).

Differentiation

Dashlane started as a password manager for consumers (B2C)—as at the end of the day, people need to manage passwords their many passwords across personal/work—and in the past few years, they've been focusing their efforts in building out the B2B (team management) component of Dashlane.

This is important because having used password managers built for companies, not people (e.g. IT Glue/MyGlue), you see first-hand that a powerful password manager is nothing if the end-user doesn't actually, well, use it... User-adoption is the most critical factor for a password manager to be successful.

That's where Dashlane stands out, because they were first-and-foremost a B2C company that built an exceptional end-user experience for everyday people, and have moved to the B2B market. This gives them a unique advantage in the space.

Take the mobile app (for iOS and Android), it's far and above the most modern and visually appealing of all the other password managers I've listed here.

That said, there is one area that lacking a bit with Dashlane (likely because they haven't been in B2B as long), and that's their API.

API

The clear winner in this category seems to be 1Password from what I've been seeing. For example, if you try using a tool like Raycast that has a 1Password app on their store, you'll see that it's a native integration (looks like Raycast). But then the same app made for Dashlane is really just a shortcut to open up the Dashlane app.

So that makes it pretty clear that 1Password has a proper API, while Dashlane hasn't quite gotten there yet. To be fair, it is a bit uneasy trusting a third-party developer with API access to your password manager, although I'm sure it's fine, especially in the Raycast example because all of the code is open-source and can be audited.

Security

Once you're using a password manager like Dashlane, you can also set up 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) from right within the existing password that you save for a site. So instead of using the insecure SMS 2FA (which won't work if you're without or in spotty cell connection, which also brings with it sending delays of up to 5 minutes. Not to mention being prone to spoofing, phishing, and social engineering attacks), you can instead set up a time-based code, which will even autofill when logging into a website while still adding a second layer of security (e.g. if your password leaks, someone still cannot login to your account without the additionally changing code). From over a decade in the IT space, I know all too well that never does higher security also mean higher convenience, but with Dashlane, it actually does:

Final Verdict

If a powerful API is important to you, 1Password is probably where it's at. If you care more about having the most modern UI/UX and a team that is constantly evolving the product, Dashlane is our top pick.

Most people use the native Spotlight search within MacOS, and most are totally happy with it. If that's you, you probably don't care much about this space, but I'm here to tell you that you should.

Search is the main way to navigate the OS, and imagine this search box with superpowers. Do you open up the calculator? Raycast has that built in. Have a separate window resizing/manager tool like Rectangles? Yeah, Raycast does that too.

Just about anything you can think of, Raycast can do, or they have an app/integration for it. I'm not kidding—I literally compressed the image to the Arc + Raycast integration using a Raycast plugin:

Never again do you need to navigate to a sketchy "image conversion" website again—you can now do it all through your favorite ⌘ + Space shortcut via Raycast.

Now for the more technical crowd... I'm here to tell you that it's better than Alfred in every way. It's beautiful, free, has deeper native integrations, and the developer community is next-level.

Skeptical? I hear you—so much in-fact that I've debated (for hours) with just about every single one of my power-user friends about why Raycast is far-and-above better than Alfred. They didn't believe me, fought me tooth-and-nail on it.

And guess what? Every single one of them are now using Raycast (and Arc 😉). They just needed to download it and give it a genuine shot. It does everything better, and looks 10x as good (UI/UX).

It's free, just give it a shot yourself. If you're skeptical, come debate me on Twitter—happy to convince you as well 🦾

Superhuman is the best email client made for busy professionals who want to enhance their email experience. If checking your emails is often an overwhelming, dreadful feat and wish there was a way you could spend less time on email, then Superhuman will almost certainly make your day better.

‍We've been using Superhuman for over 5 years as our email app and couldn't see life without it! And trust me, I used to bet the person that said "would never pay for email" but after trying it for the first month...I couldn't imagine going back, and here I am now 5+ years later, still a paying customer and am happier for it, it's that good.

Superhuman has a beautiful, minimal design and will help you get through your email faster. If you get more than 10 emails a week, we recommend trying Superhuman for at least 30 days (it's free) before committing to another solution.

Sign up here for a free month of Superhuman.

How Superhuman Works

Superhuman is a layer atop of Gmail or Outlook. You no longer have to even log into Outlook or Gmail as when using Superhuman, you navigate your emails straight from the Superhuman web app, desktop app, or mobile app.

On the computer, you can use Superhuman without even touching your mouse, navigating email super fast through keyboard shortcuts alone (you can still use your mouse if you wish though!). If this sounds intimidating, don't let it! When you sign up for Superhuman, a specialist will take you through a 30-minute onboarding call, teaching you in the in's and out's of the tool.

With Superhuman you get through your emails super fast. Easily snooze emails for later, answer quickly using Superhuman's AI feature, and create Inbox Splits to help triage through specific types of emails in chunks. After using Superhuman for 2 weeks, our bet is you won't want to go back to life without it, it's a killer productivity app.

Get a free month of Superhuman.

Superhuman Key Features

Superhuman AI

Not only can you use AI to help you draft responses or write an email "in your tone" (it learns from your previous emails!), but their AI search is also fantastic.

AI search allows you to ask any question about your inbox in natural language, and Superhuman will return with an answer based on your inbox and provide the emails that it is referencing.

I can't tell you how much time I used to spend searching my inbox with "exact keywords". This is now totally elimintated with the AI search feature.

Superhuman For Teams

You can share email threads with others (whether they are on your team or not) so you can collaborate under email.

This has come super handy for us when we've had sales negotiations (very helpful to @mention each other and check-in if what is proposed makes sense), or to more thoughtfully respond to a customer. Read our entire Superhuman Team Comments review here.

If you share this link with your entire team, you will all get a free 30 days to test it out together.

Superhuman Pricing

• Monthly Subscription: $30/mo

There is no discount on annual pricing for Superhuman, although if you sign up using this link you will get your first-month free.

Using LinkedIn with any CRM has always been a completely disjointed mess. You're adding people, unsure if they will accept your requests, and then conversations are had there before knowing if they should even be in your CRM.

This is where Surfe comes into play—you can simply continue using LinkedIn to connect and build your lead list like you normally do, but with the added benefit of accessing all of the most important information from your CRM right there within LinkedIn.

What I really appreciate about what the team is doing here is that they are focusing specifically on LinkedIn, to give the best user-experience possible, whereas most integration companies will start narrow and then begin going broader over time (e.g. Zapier + Make + Outfunnel + Whalesync). While this is totally fine (we love those mentioned tools), it just means that there's only so deep they can go into the user-experience and integration depth that focus allows you to do.

So with that said, we're confident in saying that there's no better CRM + LinkedIn integration tool on the market. Surfe is the clear winner. We personally use and pay for them and love it.

In-fact, what I find myself doing is going to events and prioritizing adding people on LinkedIn, because I know if they are there, it's a single click to get them added to our CRM (along with all of our conversations).

One thing I wish they had though was a way to create the lead/person within the CRM when on mobile, because I'd love to do this step when meeting someone cool out at a networking event instead of waiting to get them added to the CRM until after I get back to a computer.

What we love most about tl;dv is that you can take all of your meeting notes directly from a floating pop-up right within the meeting you're in.

As you type the notes, tl;dv automatically timestamps your message and your entire team can also see the notes as they are being written.

No more do we need to find where to take collaborative call notes of which would otherwise not even be connected to the call recording itself.

All of the most important notes and timestamps are automatically sent to everyone on the call (or just your team), and they even have a nifty Slack integration as well.

We do wish it natively integrated with more CRMs though, but know the team is working on opening up the API to allow for it.

We use Cloudflare to manage our website DNS and domain names and also as a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to speed up our site. Some 60%+ of the internet relies on Cloudflare, and you get most of these great features for free.

Features & Differentiation

Rating: _A

DNS Management

You can essentially use Cloudflare for free, just to better manage your website DNS all in one place.

Domain Registrar

They also allow you to purchase domain names and manage them all in one place.

Website Security

Simply set up your Nameservers to go through Cloudflare, and they add a layer of protection and CDN (Content delivery network) to your website.

Serverless Functions

Cloudflare provides serverless compute services via Cloudflare Workers, a platform for building and deploying JavaScript functions that run on the Cloudflare edge network.

Email Routing

Want to set up complex email routing and even run emails through a Cloudflare Worker to format data before delivering it to the inbox you want it to go into? They do that too! Super powerful.

Okay, Cloudflare just does a lot, and most of it is totally free for quite high usage.

User Interface (UI)

Rating: _B

Show me one DNS provider that has an exceptional UI for managing DNS records and websites. They all suck. If there's a single company that's innovating in the design and layout of DNS settings and site management, it's for sure Cloudflare.

User Experience (UX)

Rating: _B

Mainly deducting points because they have so many services, that it's easy to get lost in the navigation when trying to do simple things. They also rename their services from time to time to make things a bit more confusing. Not a huge deal in the day-to-day usage though.

All other DNS providers are also super slow to propagate changes when they're made. Cloudflare on the other hand is usually instant which is fantastic.

Pricing

Rating: _A

We have gotten so much value from Cloudflare over the past decade, and we still have not paid Cloudflare for anything (aside for the domains we purchase through it, but they charge at cost, so you're paying less with them than any other domain registrar out there).

Final Thoughts

There's genuinely no reason to not give Cloudflare a shot. They are free and have an incredibly UI/UX and just make DNS management more enjoyable.

Inbox Zero (not to be confused with what Superhuman refers to getting through all your emails) is a layer atop your Gmail that helps you to easily unsubscribe from newsletters and automate label/forwarding flows all via AI.

The area that we use and love with Inbox Zero is where it helps us tame our email inbox, sort of like Mailman, but it focuses more on actually leveraging AI to automatically take action on your email (or unsubscribe if you're getting many newsletters but not reading any of them:

Inbox Zero Email Client

Inbox Zero has a relatively basic email client built in, it's marked as "beta" and feels quite beta, so be warned, it looks quite clean, the simplicity is appreciated.

We just think you might feel like quite a bit is missing if you were to consider even using Inbox Zero vs Gmail. It's clear that Inbox Zero is more built as an email tool, a layer in-between your email and your email client, and to that it does a good job.

Open-Source Email Client

One thing to keep in mind with Inbox Zero (and how it differentiates from its competitors) is that it is an open source email client with thousands of stars on GitHub, so go and check out the code yourself if you'd like:

Inbox Zero Pricing

• Basic: $6/month on annual tier + $1.50/month for each additional email account
• Business: $12/month on annual tier + $3/month for each additional email account

What if you could have your email delivered on a regular cadence (say once a day) similar to the way that your physical mail is delivered. You'd be able to focus more, not get distracted by that random newsletter, but you could still have priority emails come immediately through when necessary. That's Mailman.

If you're using Gmail, especially Gmail alongside Superhuman, then it's definitely one of the best productivity tools to check out, because what's more productive than having more control over your email?

Mailman Pricing

• $8/month on annual tier

Sunsama fits into the day planner app category, 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 is great daily planning tool if you especially like physical (pen and paper) note taking/to-do lists and are looking for a way to bring tasks into the digital world. Sunsama definitely knows their target customer well as the software reflects a zen-like philosophy and ethos incredibly well. It has a calming minimal design and is super easy to use.

Sunsama's philosophy is centered around creating a healthy relationship with work, intentionally planning tasks and avoiding burning out. Those seeking more focus, calm, and harmony should try Sunsama.

Get Sunsama Extended 30 Day Trial.

How Sunsama Works

When you open Sunsama each morning, the software asks "What do you want to get done today?". It shows your previously planned tasks and your calendar side-by-side, giving you an overview of your schedule. From there, you can either add or remove tasks from your day, and drag tasks onto your calendar for time blocking.

At the end of the day, you also participate in a daily shut down routine which shows you all the tasks you completed that day and how you spent your time.

‍

How Sunsama Compares

While Sunsama is a daily planner, it is not a project manager. Users typically connect in other tools such as Monday, ClickUp, and Asana to pull in tasks from their project management software. Sunsama then takes care of the daily planning piece with your weekly view and calendar view.

When you compare Sunsama vs Akiflow, they are very similar. The differences more so lie within their marketing/philosophy. For instance, Sunsama has a stronger philosophy around taking a zen-like approach work, while Akiflow is more for those who just want a tool to triage through tasks. If "zen-like" approach doesn't sound like you, then check out Akiflow.

When comparing Sunsama vs Motion, you're going to get two very different experiences. Motion uses AI to intelligently plan your tasks onto your calendar, taking into account meetings and appointments, task priority and deadlines. Motion also is a full-fledged project management tool that teams can use.

Sunsama, on the other hand, has been very clear they don't intend to build AI auto-scheduling tools as they want to encourage their users to take the 10-15 minutes per day to plan their schedule (while Motion, for example, does this automatically).

If you've read to this point and phrases like "zen-like approach", "mindful planning" and "intentional scheduling" resonate, Sunsama is probably the right daily planner for you.

Make sure you use the link below for an extended 30 day trial (normally only 14 days, but with the link below you get a full month—and no credit card is required).

Get Sunsama Extended 30 Day Trial.

Sunsama Limitations

‍No Auto-scheduling

Sunsama's philosophy is built around taking the time each day to manually plan your tasks. With that, Sunsama doesn't plan on building any auto-scheduling features, like Motion for example, that uses AI to intelligently plan your day.

For some people, Motion's AI is overwhelming and they prefer having dedicated task planning sessions. For others, Sunsama feels a bit too manual therefore gets left by the wayside, wishing the app would help more with proactive planning.

Not For Project Management

Sunsama aggregates all of your tasks from the different tools that you use, like Monday, ClickUp, Asana, Trello, Gmail, and Slack. Using the native integrations available, you can drag tasks from the above tools into time blocks onto your calendar, and within a weekly planning view.

If you're a part of a team that is using any of the tools above and you're seeking a daily planner, Sunsama is a happy medium.

However, Sunsama does lack in task management functionality for multiple people and it also leaves much to be desired when it comes to planning and managing larger projects. With that, you'd need to use a project manager (e.g. Monday, Asana or ClickUp) to manage projects, and use Sunsama solely for daily planning.

Sunsama won't be building a project manager (likely ever) as they're clear they prefer you to integrate with third party tools to aggregate your tasks. If you're looking for a tool that can help with daily planning and project management and team collaboration, then we recommend checking out Motion.

Sunsama Pricing

Get Sunsama Extended 30 Day Trial. No Credit Card Required.

• [BEST🥇] Yearly Subscription: $16/mo (Save 20% when you pay up front)
• Monthly Subscription: $20/mo

Is Sunsama worth it? If you are someone that thrives on daily task planning and enjoys the process of planning your day, give Sunsama a shot.

It might be the key to keeping you more organized, all while bringing you a bit more enjoyment in the day-to-day and with that, it's definitely worth it.

Workona is somewhere between a browser, tab manager, and team workspace, tying in all of your cloud apps together. It tries to solve the open tabs problem by essentially leveraging the existing tab management functionality of your browser (along with tab groups), but upgrading the functionality massively.

What if you were to click on a workspace, and magically all of your open tabs archived themselves, and only the relevant tabs of the workspace opened themselves up. That's Workona in a nutshell:

With that, you've probably seen (especially within the past couple years), a myriad of "productivity browsers" popping up (here you can see a list of the best productivity browser software that I'm referencing). Well Workona tried solving this space not with a new browser, but a browser extension instead—super creative.

Who is Workona For?

If you're someone that is wearing multiple hats at a company and jumping in and out of many open tabs, Workona is aiming to solve that exact pain-point.

If you're like most people who are using Chrome or Safari and have no interest whatsoever to change browsers, then Workona is for you as all that's involved is installing a Chromium extension.

Who Shouldn't Use Workona?

Now while Workona is great for those who are set in their browser ways, we do feel like some other tools do handle actual tab management better (e.g. Arc), that said, you'd need to be open to installing an entirely new browser.

If that sounds like you (oh, and alternative browsers like Arc do still allow for extensions), then we might recommend giving on of our best browser software recommendations a shot first.

Oddly enough, you could in theory install Workona on Arc (because Arc is Chromium-based), just not sure exactly what would happen, might be a bit odd is all 😅

The Workona Vision

Here's an excerpt from a larger write-up here that goes more into the over-encompassing browser & tab management evolution, posting a snippet as it gets some of this across:

In my never-ending search to find my “portal to the internet Chrome experience”, I stumbled upon a totally re-imagined Chrome extension and tab management experience called Workona.

It was ChromeOS + Workona that enabled me to finally experience a glimpse into what I had always hoped for the “portal” vision to be, it mostly checked the boxes:

1. A better way to build out workspaces and processes for personal and business usage
2. Deeper integration with the existing web apps we love and use today
3. Sharable workspaces, build out your sales process and share the created workspace with your sales team
4. Accessible from any system (if you logged into a Chromebook, it would auto-install the extension and just like that, you’re where you left off)

Read the rest of the article to see how this early obsession in Workona turned into a job offer to move to Silicon Valley and help them build out the over-encompassing vision.

Features & Differentiation

Rating: _B+

Workona does a lot, though their main bread and butter is tab management and shared team workspaces to share important links. The beautiful thing about links are that most things are links now-a-days, from assets (Google Drive & Figma) to projects and tasks in tools like Asana or Motion.

There's a layer where them getting into task management and note taking build right within, I started feeling a bit conflicted with whether I should be using those native features, or our actual project management tool (Motion) and team documentation tool (Slite).

There's no hiding that we're quite fans of the best tool for the job, so that's where we start running into some conflict when apps start going the all-in-one software path, building out sometimes basic functionality to check some boxes. Don't get me wrong, Workona definitely isn't an all-in-one tool, they aren't trying to be that, I think it's just a result of what comes with building more of a shared workspace management tool.

Akiflow is one of the best daily planning apps that helps you consolidate your tasks from many different apps in one central inbox. The Akiflow team built the app as a responsive to the frustration of using multiple tools to manage calendars, tasks, and plans. With Akiflow, you have one app that allows you to time block tasks and manage all your to-dos without having to switch between tabs and windows.

Akiflow has a relatively simple UI/UX with a powerful command bar that helps you complete, plan or snooze tasks straight from your keyboard.

How Akiflow Works

Say you're using Trello, Slack, Google Calendar, Notion, and Todoist for work. Akiflow integrates with all of these tools to pull your tasks from each app into one central inbox. The idea is that having all of your tasks in one place will mean less forgetfulness when it comes to your to-dos and staying on top of what you need to action.

From your central inbox, you can drag tasks onto a calendar for time blocking or you can triage through your tasks with keyboard shorts such as "P" to plan for later or "S" for snoozing. Akiflow keyboard shortcuts are similar to those of Superhuman, so the tools compliment each other quite well. You can also use Akiflow's shortcuts anywhere on your desktop. Say there is a webpage you want to read later? Add it to Akiflow within seconds by opening up your command bar.

Akiflow also allows you to quickly share your availability and create bookable links for others to schedule meetings onto your calendar.

Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.

How Akiflow Compares

Normally folks compare Akiflow vs Sunsama or Akiflow vs Motion. Akiflow is most useful for someone whose main problem is the lack of task consolidation from third party apps.

Akiflow vs Sunsama

Compared to Sunsama, Akiflow has a basic API so you can pull in tasks from any app that has a Zapier connector (e.g. Monday, Salesforce, or Copper to name a few).

Sunsama also takes a more "zen-like" approach to daily planning and is marketed to folks who want to "intentionally plan their day". If you like the idea of daily planning, but the words "mindful planning" don't resonate, Akiflow is better suited for you.

Akiflow vs Motion

When comparing Akiflow vs Motion, the tools are very different. Motion is a full-fledged project manager and uses AI to automatically plan your tasks on your calendar. If you're looking for an assistant when it comes to planning, Motion would be a better bet.

If leveraging AI to plan your day sounds overwhelming or "too much", and if you're main pain point is just "getting all tasks from different apps in one place" then Akiflow could be the best app for you.

Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.

Akiflow Limitations

Overloaded With Tasks

You can easily add too many tasks to Akiflow so some self-discipline is a good idea. For instance, if you're adding a bunch of website links, Slack messages, email messages and task + project management tasks, you can end up with a very flooded central inbox leading to feeling overwhelmed.

To get the most out of Akiflow, we recommend only adding in medium to high priority tasks that you need to action, and being careful to not add every task under the sun.

Manual Task Planning

If you're overwhelmed with tasks from different apps, and want a central inbox to consolidate all of your tasks, then Akiflow can help. However, once the tasks are in your central inbox, you still need to manually plan your day and time block, which means you need to stay on top of triaging your tasks.

For some folks that enjoy manual task planning and can allocate 10-20 minutes per day to daily planning, this won't be a limitation but rather a benefit. For others, the manual task planning means that Akiflow can become cluttered and you can "fall behind" on using it to help you manage time effectively. You really need to use Akiflow daily as a part of your workflow to get the most of it.

Akiflow Pricing

• [BEST🥇] Yearly Subscription: $19/mo (Save 44% when you pay up front)
• Monthly Subscription: $34/mo
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Is Akiflow worth it? Well, if you are struggling to stay on top of your tasks from different apps and want a tool to help you consolidate all of your tasks in one place, then it might be worth giving it a shot. If you have other more robust needs (e.g. project management + daily planning), there are other tools to consider like Motion who are priced similarly and offer more features to help you manage your time and schedule.

Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.

Fireflies was actually one of the first meeting recorder solutions on the market. They managed to build remote tooling that would actually join in existing meetings, like in Google Meet or Zoom, act like a guest, and record the audio.

This was super impressive, back when online video conferencing software was more restrictive, and Google Meet for example didn't even have native video meeting recorder functionality.

We actually used Fireflies almost exclusively for years, super early days back in 2017, and it has come a long way since, moving more into that of a AI meeting assistant.

Features & Differentiation

Rating: _B

This is an area where Fireflies really excels, although is the core piece that we think also bites them a bit. Fireflies has a lot of features. Especially with the launch of AI (OpenAI) being integrated with everything, came a whole myriad of features.

When every meeting recorder on the market is flocking to AI, Fireflies is like:

"How can we add that and many different spins on it to differentiate?"

While we appreciate that in theory, it does come at a point of overwhelm. What we find actually missing from Fireflies is actually simplicity. Do more with less. So while we are rating them high in this category, we don't necessarily mean it in a good way per-say.

Soundbites & Playlists

They've built out a unique feature-set around being able to create snippets of calls, and tag them to a specific playlist, to then reference later or share with your team or others:

It's a really cool idea, it's just in practice, how often will you really be using it? I could see this being more useful for very specific industry verticals or teams, but not most, and not in the way we use a meeting recorder tool in our day-to-day.

All-in-all, they give you a lot of tools to organize your online meetings. But that's where I sorta wish I could just do less. I'm already organizing so many other facets to my life, from file storage in Google Drive, to channels and notes in Slite. I really just want to record meetings, have them log to my CRM, and forget about them unless I need to reference them.

Thing is, if you aren't staying on-top of organizing your calls though, it almost feels like you're just not taking full advantage of what Fireflies has built, which honestly stresses me out. 😅

User Interface

Rating: _B-

Fireflies is pretty clean overall—it looks decently nice, it's just that there's a lot vying for your attention even just on the call review page:

Do you view the AI summary? Create Soundbites? Maybe AskFred? Or a Smart Search? Maybe you just want to make a comment? 🤷

It's just a bit overwhelming until you get used to the interface, but overall design-wise, it is clean.

User Experience

Rating: _C-

This is actually what frustrates us most about Fireflies. There's a lot going on. With all of their features, they have a lot vying for your attention, and with many features, also comes miscellaneous bugs.

Even in just trying to create a soundbite clip, I couldn't for the life of me get it to actually play the sound when selecting a small 2 minute clip in the middle of a 2 hour call:

Will they fix this? Of course, although point being—build some stability into your core features before introducing new ones.

This is the recurring theme that we've experienced with Fireflies over the years. I'm saying 5–6 years now. So it's not just a one-off thing, it's pretty core, meaning there's likely a bit of tech debt and feature rushing which is affecting their end-user UX. They just keep adding more, but when simply trying to do the basic things, we find ourselves fighting with the software to make things happen.

API & Integrations

Rating: _B

This is an area that we really have to hand it to Fireflies—they have focused on integrations quite deeply out of the gate. For example, they integrate with most of the best CRM tools on the market.

They integrated with the usual suspects out of the gate back in the day, from HubSpot to Salesforce, and when reaching out and asking about integrating with Copper, they said "sure!" and a week later, it was built 🤯

So while we counted earlier in the UX area, feature bulk as a negative, this is the area that the speed at which the team does release features is appreciated. They aren't afraid to push a feature or integration live, even if it's only 70% there, which sometimes is okay. 🤷

Pricing

Rating: _C-

Their pricing tiers are pretty standard when compared to the best meeting recorder software on the market. If you're looking for free meeting recording software, Fireflies does have that, although what you'll get is incredibly limited at just 3 transcription credits, and 800 total minutes of storage per seat, and audio only at that.

Want any integrations at all, and you'll have to move to the paid Pro tier at $18/user/mo, for which has a pre-set 8,000 minutes of storage, and still no video recording functionality.

So if you do the math and are recording about 30 calls per month (assuming that some days are 0 while others are 3–4), the middle tier will get you about 4–5 months of storage before you're forced to move to the highest tier without losing historical recordings.

This is where they really ultimately force you to move to the highest tier with any meaningful usage. Not to mention, if you, like us, need video recording (which genuinely feels table-stakes when it comes to software that can record online meetings), well, you're going to be immediately on the highest tier right out of the gate. A bit steep with a lot of pressure to upgrade to the annual tier due to the discount on that.

When comparing Fireflies vs tl;dv for example, you'll see that you actually get full video recording and storage for free, you're just giving up some of the summarization features unless you pay. Fireflies, gate keeps not only the AI features, but also video recording features, allowing you to only get basic audio recording on the free tier, and super limited at that.

This is just where we feel like Fireflies has one of the more strict usage models as it relates to pricing. If you use Fireflies over time, you're going to be on their highest tier, guaranteed.

Competition

While Fireflies was quick on the scene when it came to recording the audio to meetings, they were laggards when it came to actually recording the video as well. This is actually the main reason that we left Fireflies and moved to tl;dv ourselves a couple years back.

tl;dv on the other hand started out of the gate focusing on being video recording software out of the gate. And for a company like ours, where we're often screensharing important information over video calls with customers and others, and needing to reference the screen recordings at a later time, that's where other tools excelled over Fireflies.

Final Thoughts

You genuinely can't go wrong here—the only wrong solution is probably not using a video meeting recorder tool. You have your pick from tl;dv, Fireflies, Grain, and others.

The only other thought is to probably select a recording option that allows you to record Google Meet and Zoom calls. Other online meeting recording software like Dialpad Meetings for example have similar functionality, although it actually requires that you fully switch all of your internal and external meetings to that of Dialpad Meetings. This is a complete operational change that may introduce a bit too much friction for your team or clients, so just be forewarned.

If you want video conference recording software that goes to the depths of sentiment analysis, allows for deep organization of snippets, and has focused most of their resources on the audio side of things, Fireflies definitely wouldn't be a bad option.

This is the most impressive "auto-time tracking" tool we've seen—all you really need to do is install the app and then... Well, forget about it 🤯

If you're like most people though, you'll probably spending most of your time in the browser (like Arc), most time tracking tools will just mark this time as "browsing", but if you install the Rize browser extension, it'll actually further categorize your time based on the sites you're actually visiting.

Early on, you might spend a bit of time categorizing some sites and apps (e.g. how would it really know what you want to categorize your time in your CRM as? "Sales", "Business Development", "Relationship Building" maybe? Or something super general like "Work").

The true strengths of Rize are its beautiful reports (also automatically sent over via email on a weekly/monthly basis, to let you know how focused you've been and how to improve some of your habits):

Issues start arising pretty quickly though when you get to the granular levels. Like right now, I'm in Webflow writing content, so that's "Content Creation", right? Nope—I already have a rule that assigns Webflow time as "Web Development", because most of the time that's true. You can probably see where the inaccuracies start arising from this though, and I'd ask you how that can really ever be solved? It's such an obscure complexity that doesn't even seem like a place that OpenAI can help alleviate.

Now while you can go deeper and track your time against "Clients" and "Projects", things are made abundantly clear that this area is just an "add-on" as it isn't very powerful, intuitive, and is totally lacking team features. For this reason, I would not rely on Rize for any critical client time reporting.

All-in-all, Rize is very much an individual productivity-focused time tracking tool, and it does a phenomenal job at that. If you're looking for something more for your team and actual deep reporting on budgetary usage and team capacity planning, you'll definitely want to pick out a team-focused time tracking tool like Harvest or Toggl.

One major thing to note, Rize is a desktop-only app—there's no web app—so if that's important to you, you'll have to skip it for now.

Dispatch was one of those apps that I didn't even think to look for because I never thought I needed it. Until I used it...

Let's be real, Slack is an overwhelming mess. You get mentioned all the time, have tons of DMs, while channels are just popping off left and right at all hours of the day.

So what do you do? You start muting all of the channels, and then you start missing everything. What if you could set simple filters which split your inbox to "Important" and "Other", all while all useless messages got auto-read (archived)?

That's Dispatch. It allows you to work through your Slack environment like email: [e] to archive messages, [h] to snooze them for later. Within the first minute of using it, you'll be wondering why Slack wasn't just built like this from the get-go.

It's like Superhuman for Slack (genuinely, if you're using Superhuman and not Dispatch—go and give it a whirl right now, you'll never be able to go back):

It also has super powerful team collaboration features. Have a shared Slack channel? Cool, @mention your team members and have private side comment threads without the external team members ever knowing.

If you're in any way trying to use Slack for internal or external support (inviting customers/clients), then you must be using Dispatch. Slack wasn't built for that. Dispatch was. Few apps have I actually bought the annual subscription so quickly (within 3 days). It's just magical.