Akiflow vs Fantastical

Akiflow is a tool that has copied a bit from its competitors. It has a "daily shutdown" feature borrowed from Sunsama and an identical pricing structure to Motion. With that said, the pieces they've brought together are great for individuals who are drowning in tasks across too many apps (with a caveat, explained below).

If you're a busy professional whose company has tied you down to tools like Slack, Trello, Google Calendar, or Monday or other project management tools, and you want one place to centralize all your tasks in one big todo list, that's what Akiflow was created for.

We used Akiflow for a month while evaluating it for our team.

We used Akiflow when it first came out a few years ago, after about a month we found we over did it. Turns out that adding every Slack message, email, and task to one interface ends up being overwhelming, and hard to keep up with 😅 So we stopped using it after a month.

Knowing that, don't make the same mistake we did and add everything to Akiflow. Keep just your most important stuff in there.

The task manager it's works well though. It lets you drag new or imported tasks to your calendar, then lets you decide what you want to do with them (snooze, plan, or reschedule). The UI is clean, and the keyboard shortcuts are reminiscent of Superhuman Mail, which makes for quick work once you get the hang of it.

So, overall, it comes down to what you're looking to solve. If that's centralizing tasks across your many apps, then Akiflow is going to do just that, but if your problem is more prioritization and workload management, there are other, stronger tools out there.

• Fast keyboard shortcuts
• Clean, focused interface
• Consolidates tasks into one inbox
• Strong integrations (including Zapier)
• Built-in scheduling links for sharing availability

• Easy to overload your inbox
• Can feel repetitive if you fall behind on triage
• Basic AI features (Not as robust as advertised)

Akiflow can help reduce chaos when you have tasks that live in different places. For example, when you start something in Gmail, pop over to Slack to comment, or jump into Asana to assign yourself a new task, all of that gets added to your cognitive load, and somewhere in between, half of it gets forgotten. Since Akiflow can integrate with many common tools, its centralized inbox gives you a single source of truth for "what's next."

For more technical individuals or teams, Akiflow also offers API access and Zapier integrations. Meaning you can build automations. So, if you had your CRM platform and wanted to automatically create a task when a new lead is added to your CRM or when a support ticket hits a certain status.

Akiflow lets you triage tasks (plan, snooze, or reschedule), and they've included keyboard shortcuts that help speed things up. The system is highly manual, so when you inevitably fall behind or miss a day, catching up requires some legwork on your part.

And, while they do have "Aki," their "AI Assistant like in the movies" who is supposed to be your "Executive Assistant beyond human limits," we were pretty disappointed when we tested it out.

Don't expect this AI to do much heavy lifting because it acts more as a ChatGPT wrapper than a complex assistant.

You can drag tasks directly onto your calendar right from your inbox and plan your day.

It's more of a hands-on feature that requires intentional planning, but means more control too. You get to decide when things happen and how long they take. Basically, nothing moves unless you move it.

For some, that's great, especially if you really need a place to aggregate your tasks so you can visualize them and start executing. Just know that anytime priorities shift, you will need to hop back in and rework your calendar, versus tools like Motion that utilize AI to do it for you.

• Monthly Plan: $34/month (Quite expensive compared to other daily planners that are more powerful)
• Yearly Plan: $19/month billed annually

Fantastical is a calendar app only for MacOS and iOS users (Android users, skip this review and check out Notion Calendar, Morgen, or our favorite: Motion instead). It became popular early on for being the first to do natural language event creation, which for a long time made Fantastical stand out.

Today, Fantastical is best suited for individuals or families who are deep in the Apple ecosystem and want an Apple-native calendar experience. It's not a calendar we'd recommend for professional use or teams, as there are far better, more powerful, and modern calendars on the market. But we know people who love it for it's fast keyword shortcuts and usable mini-calendar features.

The biggest limitation is that Fantastical feels dated. It does all the basic features like event creation and light task management, but there are other features that seem out of place and unnecessary.

• Apple-native (macOS and iOS)
• Clean, familiar interface for Apple users
• Supports iCloud, Google, Microsoft, and Exchange

• Apple-only (no Android support)
• Not recommended for professional teams
• Feels outdated compared to modern alternatives

Fantastical built its name on natural language, and it still does this really well.

It's as simple as typing something like, "Meeting with Stephanie at Starbucks in Stone Oak on Wednesday at 10 for two hours,"and it understands the title, location, date, time, and duration without you clicking through all the drop downs.

It's not a full AI assistant that’s going to reschedule your life, but for quickly adding events throughout the day, it's fast and reliable.

For those who love a good keyboard shortcut you'll be happy to know that Fantastical has a few.

A favorite being that with a few clicks on your keyboard you instantly open a small calendar overlay on your Mac.

From that mini view, you can:

• Switch between month, week, or list views
• Toggle between different calendar sets (personal, business, finance, etc.)
• Quickly peek into the future
• Check availability without breaking your workflow

There's also smart behavior in a week view that helps you jump to today. The calendar shifts so that today is always on the far left. Most apps lock you into a static Sunday–Saturday grid, so "today" keeps moving visually.

All these seemingly little details add up to a pretty big reduction in mental friction.

Like more calendars, when someone books time with you using Fantastical’s "Openings" feature, the app can automatically attach a Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Webex link to the event. It lets you choose your preferred provider inside your meeting template.

Overall, it's convenient and removes extra steps, but again, most calendars offer similar functionality, so while it’s helpful, it’s not a reason to switch altogether.

• Free: Available with limited functionality
• Individual/Team:
• • 14 day trial, then $4.75 per month billed annually
  • 14 day trial, then $6.99 per month billed monthly.