Linear vs Akiflow

Linear is in an interesting category. It's in one way a product tool (e.g. focusing on bugs, feature requests, and sprints/cycles), and another part project management (for managing the tasks around the cycles).

The thing is, Linear is very much built for your engineering and product team to tie in all of this information together. You'd be hard-pressed to use Linear as a replacement for the company's general project management tool.

If you're heavily a product-focused company, and most of your employees are engineers and product people though, you can probably get away with just using Linear as your team's project manager.

While some people may say that Asana is a main competitor, we'd probably say that your product/engineering team is trying to fit into the more general project management needs of the rest of the organization.

It's not uncommon for much larger companies to use a general project management tool like Motion or Asana, along with Linear. Heck, even the engineering/product team at Motion uses Linear internally (alongside Motion of course).

The main competitor in this area is really the Atlassian suite (mainly Jira), and, well... Linear is just better and more modern in just about every way. Teams that use Linear often greatly enjoy using it, and have an appreciation for it (hugely advocating it). Whereas teams that use Jira when asked what they think would typically respond with an "it's fine, I guess".

Linear also integrates quite well with modern software like Slack via Dispatch. Their API is a joy to work with, and we're actually starting to see modern teams integrate their software with Linear before even that of Jira. That said, most any enterprise tool will integrate with Jira more likely than Linear. So it really depends on the size of your team and the accompanying stack that you're using.

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