Akiflow vs Trello

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.

Now the caveat: If you decide to dump everything into Akiflow, your inbox can become overwhelming fast. Unlike Motion, it won’t automatically prioritize and rearrange your day, so you'll still need to manually plan.

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.

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

Trello is probably a project management tool that most people have heard of. It was one of the first project managers to hit mainstream popularity because it was the first project manager to allow for kanban board view from a web app, bringing with it a super user friendly interface.

This was an incredible feat back in 2011 and what resulted in its rise to popularity, especially in the B2C space (general consumers, not majorly breaking into the B2B space). For example, you'd use Trello to manage your personal tasks, maybe more as a prosumer, and less as a business owner.

We used Trello here at Efficient App for years, before ultimately switching to Asana, when they too added kanban functionality, as we felt that Trello sort of got a bit stuck, while their competitors were evolving and working to further innovate in the project management space.

The main differentiation that Trello had was kanban board functionality, and that's about where it started and ends. Thing is, kanban view is now a staple of any modern project manager on the market in this day and age.

Feature set wise, since Atlassian now owns Trello, they've prioritized integrations within the Atlassian suite.

Trello does board view well, but that's about the bulk of it. As they haven't really seemed to update Trello much in the past 6+ years, the bulk of the credit that we can give Trello comes from it having incredibly deep integration with the Atlassian suite of tools (e.g. Jira,Confluence, and Bitbucket).

With Atlassian's acquisition of Trello, came with it more of an integration with Atlassian's tooling.

Trello actually has a pretty solid mobile app on both iOS and Android. This is in part to how much time they've had to perfect it. Early on, being more in the B2C space, and coming out more when the iPhone was gaining major traction, a solid mobile app is something that the general consumer wanted. So this is something they've spent a lot of time perfecting.

We also have to give Trello credit in this area. They have a super robust API and powerful Zapier connector. If their Zapier connector doesn't have quite what you're looking for, you should be able to do chat you'd like to do using their developer API.

If your team is heavily relying on the Atlassian software stack, then Trello is likely to bring with it some native integrations to help your team out as well.