The digital daily planner that helps you feel calm and stay focused.
Sunsama fits into the day planner app category, acting as a digital planner helping with task management and time blocking.
It can help with planning your daily work, time blocking and scheduling your important tasks each day. It takes a zen-like approach to helping you intentionally plan your day, allowing you participate in the planning process of your day all while giving you a calendar view of your tasks. Many people that struggle with focusing claim that it helps them better schedule their day, allowing them to get more work done.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
If your organization uses a full project management tool like Asana, ClickUp, or Trello and you want another tool to help you schedule tasks onto your calendar view and plan when you'll do each specific task, then Sunsama can be a great addition to your productivity tools.
If you don't have a need for a full project management tool and are more so looking for a task management app to get your daily work done, then Sunsama is a great choice. Just keep in mind that Sunsama only allows you to plan your schedule a few weeks in advance so if you have larger projects at hand, it might be a bit frustrating since you'll need to backlog most of your tasks until the time to actually work on them gets closer.
If you like to take an intentional, zen-like approach to planning your day, and can see yourself carving out 15-20 minutes a day for planning, then Sunsama could be the best day planner app for you.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Sunsama is not a project management tool, it's very much a task management software. It allows you to only plan only up to two weeks in advance. So if you are looking for a way to manage larger projects or collaborate with team members then you might find yourself looking for 2 tools to accomplish what one tool should be able to do (e.g. Motion vs Sunsama). So re-iternating again, if you are in the market for a new project management tool, and are considering Sunsama, you will be disappointed as this is not what it was made to do.
You should also not use Sunsama if you don't think you'd be good at keeping up with the planning process of your tasks. Sunsama doesn't automatically schedule or prioritize your tasks for you, YOU need to do that each day, so if you forget or it falls to the wayside, you might end up paying for a tool that is sitting dormant. There are other productivity tools (Motion) that use AI to schedule your day that might be better for you in this case.
Let's dive in deeper ⤵
Rating: B
Sunsama has invested a lot of time into their ke features such as their daily review, weekly review, and weekly objective functionality. All features that try to get you to plan daily, what tasks need to get done, and how they tie to the actual goals and objectives of the week.
That said, people have complained that they wish there was more of a monthly and quarterly objectives, since weekly is often too short of a time to plan for larger goals.
Sunsama is also a calendar app that integrates deeply with tools like Asana, allowing you to pull tasks from Asana and put them onto your calendar for daily planning. It's a clever idea, especially if you're already using and loving Asana, but just frustrated by the lack of integration with a calendar. Something that Motion actually does out of the box as it's an all-in-one task and time management tool.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Rating: A-
This is one of the areas that Sunsama totally excels. They have a super minimal and beautiful interface. They also have calming features like focus mode and daily shutdown, which allow you to take a deep breath, removing all other distractions, allowing you to focus your attention.
Rating: B-
With such a stellar UI, you'd expect the UX to be fantastic. And it is, in many areas. For example, things function the way you'd expect them to, and they have keyboard shortcuts for most things.
That said, it does feel like there's many missed opportunities to automate some of the things you need to do during your daily review (and yes, you need to review your Sunsama daily so that it doesn't fall behind). Why not have an option to automatically reschedule your day for you, why is it such a manual process? The same frustration that we have with a tool like Asana.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Rating: C-
Sunsama has an iOS and Android app that is relatively basic, and they refer to it as a "companion to the web app". So this means you can add basic tasks to Sunsama while on-the-go, and see what's on your calendar/schedule for the day, but you're not going to actually be planning any work while on-the-go.
You're also not going to have any actual calendar scheduling functionality while on-the-go. The truth of the matter is that it feels a bit rushed. We also experienced a pretty buggy mobile app experience with the app randomly crashing. There's only day view for the calendar for example, and the back gestures on Android don't even seem to work when backing out of tasks.
Let's just say that it's fair in that they are referring to it as a companion (for expectation setting), and you're not going to be replacing your calendar of choice or your primary project management app on mobile anytime soon.
With all of that said, you're going to want to use their desktop app or web app for planning your day and getting actual work done.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Rating: C-
Sunsama does not currently have an API. As it's more focused on native integrations with tools like that of with Asana, ClickUp, or Trello. So with that, you can see that their focus isn't actually on extending Sunsama into a flexible tool outside of what they've decided to integrate deeply with.
If you're using one of the main tools they integrate with, this might be a good thing, but for now, with no API, you cannot integrate it with your team's CRM for example, which leads us to feel they are more focused on being an individual daily planner application instead of a team project manager.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Is Sunsama worth it? If you need a daily planner application or task management software and are willing to intentionally take the 15-20 minutes to plan your daily work, then we think it's worth giving a shot. Their daily review and weekly review features are meant to help you reflect and better help you with managing your time overall.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
If you're not already using and loving another project manager like Asana, we'd recommend simply using Motion, as when you compare Motion vs Sunsama, you really need Sunsama and Asana together (2 separate tools) to get what Motion gives you out of the box.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
A daily planner tool to help you centralize your schedule.
Akiflow falls into the daily planner app + productivity app category. It helps individuals that have tasks in multiple different tools (e.g. email, Asana, Slack, Google Calendar, Notion) and want task consolidation. Akiflow's integrations allow you to build workflows from various apps to add to-do list items in Akiflow, and within Akiflow you are able to arrange the tasks into a calendar view. It aims to be your personal task manager.
Akiflow as a task manager is great if you are using many different tools (Gmail, Outlook email, Google Calendar, Asana or ClickUp, Slack, etc.) and you want one tool to help with the task consolidation and daily planning of your tasks. If you are a part of a team that is using a project management tool and you feel like you are constantly consolidating your to-dos from different channels, with Akiflow's integrations you can automatically have a running list of all of your task list items which can be helpful.
Akiflow might be well suited for you if you're working at an organization where you have little say about the number of tools used for the team to communicate internally, and you want to have more control over organizing your tasks and planning your day.
Akiflow has a powerful command bar and keyboard shortcuts, so if you are more of a power user who enjoys this level of productivity it's worth giving a shot to help with time management and using it as a personal task manager.
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
If you are looking to reduce the number of of productivity apps you use, then there might be better tools out there for you. The whole problem Akiflow is trying to solve is that some teams have become reliant of using so many tools to manage projects that we now need another tool to have a central place for all of our tasks 😅 For example, if your team is not yet using a project management tool (or you individually know you need to manage larger projects), then considering something like Motion might be best as it would eliminate your need for a project management tool + a daily planning tool (it offers daily planning, time blocking, and calendar scheduling capabilities in addition to full project management capabilities).
On the other hand, if you don't need integrations with other tools and just want a task management app that can help you act as your personal task manager, then you can even consider something like Routine and Sunsama which are both beautiful more minimalistic time management apps.
Finally, if you are easily overwhelmed at the thought of spending 10-20 minutes per day organizing your tasks, then Akiflow won't be a great task management app as it requires you to manually drag tasks onto your calendar.
Rating: B
Akiflow was created as a response to the cognitive overload from using a lot of different tools to communicate and plan our work. They've invested a ton in their integrations with the goal to help you centralize your schedule and have one tool that answers the question of what you need to work on next. Their calendar experience allows you to drag tasks straight onto your calendar view so you can visualize your day.
You can label your tasks into categories like "personal" "marketing" "bugs" "school" so you can easily view groupings of your tasks. Their progress visualization is also great to keep track of how many more tasks you need to complete for the day. At the end of the day, their daily shutdown feature will show help you reflect on your current day and plan tasks for future days.
While Akiflow is impressive, there is a lot of Akiflow alternatives on the market with similar features. Sunsama and Routine are two of the main competitors along with Motion, although Motion stands out more as they have AI capabilities to help auto-schedule your tasks (including rescheduling your tasks for you if you don't complete them).
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
Rating: B-
While Akiflow's interface has improved time, compared to other daily planning tools, it's more clunky to use. It looks similar to your email inbox with a calendar on the left hand side where you can drag and drop tasks. But when viewing all your tasks that have come through from your integrations, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and cluttered.
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
Rating: C+
The truth of the matter is just because you can consolidate all of your tasks in one place, doesn't mean you should. For instance, just because you need to respond to 5 Slack messages and answer 3 emails, should you add it to Akiflow and then manually drag the items onto your calendar as a part of your daily tasks? We'd say probably no.
It can be easy to over engineer your schedule with Akiflow. When we used it, we found this is exactly what happened. We found ourselves slightly overwhelmed with the number of tasks in Akiflow. At the end of the day, you want to be more productive, not spend more time scheduling tasks and planning your day.
More than that, when you complete a task in Akiflow, it doesn't sync back to the app that sent over the task so you can end up having to check it off twice.
To get the best experience with Akiflow, we suggest being highly selective in terms of which tasks you want to be in Akiflow. If they are meaningful tasks that require some planning, then they are useful to add. If they are tasks that are not as substantial, then we say it's best to probably not clutter your Akiflow task list with them.
It also does feel like there's many missed opportunities to automate some of the things you need to do during your daily review (and yes, you need to review your Akiflow daily so that it doesn't fall behind). Why not have an option to automatically reschedule your day for you, why is it such a manual process? The same frustration that we have with a tool like Asana and Sunsama.
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
Rating: C
Akiflow's mobile app for Android and iOS is in beta, so it is still relatively new.
Rating: B
This is where Akiflow excels out of all the daily planner applications, with native integrations. They have a super barebones Zapier connector allowing you to build your own custom workflows with Akiflow (although be warned, they only allow for "create task", no search/update functionality, meaning the custom integration you can build will be quite barebones).
That said, you could have a simple integration like: do you want a new task in Akiflow when a new lead is added to your CRM? That is possible with Akiflow and other daily planning tools lack. Although we would recommend keeping CRM and relationship-focused tasks outside of your project manager and use your CRM task section instead.
All this being said, Akiflow is the best daily planner app if integrations with other tools is important to you.
If you use a ton of productivity apps and are craving one tool to help you with daily planning while continuing to use all the other tools for different reasons, then we'd recommend at least signing up for a Akiflow free trial to see it in action.
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
Is Akiflow worth it? If you identify as a professional power user who wants one tool to help with task consolidation, then it's worth signing up for a free trial. Just remember you will still need to manually plan your tasks into your day and falling behind on this won't allow you to get the most out of the tool. That said, it's a much better daily planner alternative than using paper planners and certainly beats out Google tasks as well!
If you're not already using and loving another project management tool and would prefer one solution that offers daily planning, time blocking, meeting scheduling and project management capabilities, we'd recommend simply using Motion, as when you compare Motion vs Akiflow, you really need Akiflow and a project management together (2 separate tools) to get what Motion gives you out of the box.
Akiflow could be a good personal task manager with an improved calendar experience to reduce cognitive overload, but prepare to invest sometime in learning how to best use it to get the most out of it.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
7-day free trial + $10 off your next billing by using the link above.
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