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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.
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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!
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A shared documentation and note taking tool that tip-toes the line of a flexible no-code platform (for teams of all sizes).
Notion is part of a category of apps often referred to as an "all-in-one", for which we aren't particularly fans of.
The main problem we have with this is it feels more like a cop-out when asked to define what you are—we do everything.
Notion started as a team knowledge base app, and that's what it should really be defined as. The problem is, as you're doing well in a single category, some apps decide to double-down, while others look to increase their TAM (Total Addressable Market). Notion is in the latter camp.
We've found that rolling out all-in-one solutions with customers is actually more difficult to get team adoption due to overwhelm.
Take Notion, it's not opinionated. In them deciding to make it super flexible, allowing it to "do anything", it by design becomes overwhelming with time. We know, it'll be incredibly exciting at first—all of the limitless potential! But then that "potential" turns to overwhelm in weeks and months.
What structure should I add these notes in? Should I add tasks here? Or over here? Do I message you on Slack, or @comment you here in Notion? Because it does "everything", it introduces micro-fatigue for doing anything.
Although, if you're looking for an incredibly flexible note taking tool that struts the lines of "no-code builder", where you actually see structure as a negative, then that's where an all-in-one app like Notion will actually shine.
Rating: B+
This is an area that Notion excels because at the end of the day, Notion is primarily just a database at the core. This means that the API is up there when comparing Airtable vs Notion on the database side of things.
Not to mention, the sheer number of tools built atop Notion, and the templates marketplace (all things that signify Notion is more of a database/no-code tool), add up to making Notion have a pretty solid and flexible API.
Start your free trial of Notion here.
When teams start having micro-success with Notion, they end up trying to use it for everything, and this is exactly where Notion's limitations and flaws are shown.
We're taking customer notes in Notion, what if we actually had our customer's information in Notion as well! Thus the mistake of trying to use Notion as a CRM is born. It will never be a proper CRM. Yes, Notion has relational databases at the core, and a CRM is really just a bunch of relational databases at the end of the day, but the difference here is opinionation and structure.
Versus getting into this point further here, that's where we've written a post explaining why Notion is not a CRM.
Your team is using Notion collaboratively with some of your clients now, eh? That's great! We have a collaborative shared knowledge base, what would make this even better? A project management tool—let's build that right into Notion as well, because tasks are really just line items in a database, right?
Wrong.
The same issue arises as before. What makes a good project management tool like Motion actually good, is the opinionation and structure. You can't just start connecting tasks to customers to notes to videos to XYZ. That's a surefire way to overwhelm absolutely everyone on your team.
The goal of a project manager is to actually get work done—with Notion as a project manager, you'll be spending more time building out a project manager, tip-toeing the line of product manager (instead of project manager).
Here's a more detailed post of our thoughts on how Notion stacks up as a project manager as compared to the leaders on the market.
Choosing to roll out something like Notion across your team requires immense thought, structure, documentation, and training.
So are you trying to build all of this out yourself? And if so, are you a product designer? Do you understand your team's specific needs even better than they do? Or are you just trying to build what you think is needed and then plan to have everyone use it in that way?
If the latter, adoption is more than likely to fail, and you might want to reconsider choosing an all-in-one tool like Notion, and instead opt for something more purpose-built as your team's internal knowledge base like an alternative like Slite.
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!
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