Todoist vs Morgen Calendar

Todoist is one of the longest-standing task management apps (founded in 2007!). You get exactly what you'd expect from Todoist — the ability to create tasks, prioritize them, and organize them with labels. You can view your tasks in a list, kanban view, or calendar view (paid tier).

With the rising popularity of time blocking, Todoist has received immense pressure from it's customers to build a calendar view and allow for task time blocking. That said, time blocking is a secondary feature to Todoist and is quite barebones compared to other daily planners. Many folks integrate Todoist with Sunsama or Akiflow for the full daily planning experience.

If considering Todoist for business, whether you're an individual or a team, there are better task management apps available that will give you more productivity power (e.g. other tools that will allow you to schedule meetings, time block tasks, manage projects, see your workload, and collaborate with team members), so as a heads up, make sure to consider those before diving head first into Todoist for business.

Morgen Calendar falls into two categories. First and foremost, it's a calendar with a much more beautiful interface than Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Mail. The second category Morgen toes the line with is being a daily planning tool. But when considering it as a daily planner tool, it's quite barebones compared to other daily planners on the market.

Morgen's AI planner that help you create plans by recommending when you should work on which tasks. It checks your availability and task deadlines to structure your day, pulling in tasks from other tools to suggest time blocks inside your "Frames" (Morgen’s templated work blocks), then lets you do a once-over before approving.

A while ago, Morgen had a free tier, at at that point we thought it was a good tool to try if you're dipping your toes into the world of daily planning. But with their new pricing, it's tough to justify the cost compared to other tools (for example, Motion is the same price but gives you full project management capabilities plus their AI scheduling is a lot more advanced).

In general, we'd love to see Morgen become more differentiated with time.

• Clean interface
• Integrates with common project management tools
• Drag-and-drop task scheduling directly onto your calendar

• Less powerful than most daily planners
• Expensive for what they offer

Morgen's AI Planner creates a proposed schedule for your next 1–8 days based on information you created (task priority, availability, and due dates). They also have preview mode within the planner, which is where you'll see proposed tasks "pulse," letting you clearly see what's new. You can tweak, resize, remove, or reprioritize tasks before you decide to add to your schedule.

While it sounds good in theory, this does require you to sit down and "get organized" rather than just building out your day for you. As a busy business owner, I will tell you this is a "sounds nice" feature, but in the day to day, I want to show up and get to work.

But if you want some control over how your tasks are planned, this will appeal to you more than something more automated, like Motion for example.

Frames are Morgen’s way of helping you get intentional about when you work on certain types of tasks.

Think of them like reusable time templates. For example, you might block off 9–11am for "Deep Work" and 3–4pm for "Admin." Instead of deciding every single day when to focus or when to do lighter tasks, you set those patterns once.

Then that helps Morgen's AI planner to appropriately place tasks inside those frames. So if something is high priority and tagged as deep work, it’ll try to land in your "Deep Work" frame.

While my perfectionist mind truly loves the idea of having perfectly set aside time for similar tasks, unfortunately, this isn't the reality of how I work 90%. As a business owner, I am thrown into unblocking team members, writing a script, then editing a review within a matter of an afternoon.

Once you have tasks inside the system, the AI has placed them on your calendar, and you have approved, the AI will try to make your schedule more realistic. For example, it will automatically add a little buffer to your task estimates. So, if you're the type to underestimate how long your tasks are going to take, then this is a small but helpful way to counter that.

Not different from other planners, but still a nice-to-have feature, the AI scheduler also splits up your work. Instead of dropping a giant multi-hour block onto your calendar, Morgen helps you fit them more naturally into your day by splitting them across multiple sessions.

Lastly, unlike tools like Motion that automatically shift your schedule around to adjust for overdue or missed items, Morgen will suggest a new time rather than reorganize based on your selection.

It gives you more control over your schedule, but that also means it comes with added mental load of needing another "to do" to approve the tasks.

• Monthly: $30/mo per user. In our opinion, this is far too expensive compared to the other daily planners available.
• Yearly: $15/mo per user (billed annually). This pricing is much more reasonable.