Best Daily Planner Apps in 2025? Motion vs Sunsama vs Akiflow vs Routine

‍0:00 - We'll Help You Pick a Daily Planner

‍0:29 - Similarities

‍0:52 - Motion as Daily Planner + Project Manager

‍2:19 - When to Use Sunsama & Akiflow

‍3:22 - Differences between Sunsama & Akfilow

‍3:52 - How Sunsama Works

‍4:14 - How Akiflow Works

‍4:34 - Sunsama vs Akiflow Verdict

‍5:04 - Manual Task Planning or Automated?

‍5:55 - Routine (Free)

‍6:37 - Daily Planner for Personal Use

‍7:04 - Routine: Limitations For Professional Use

‍8:16 - Final Verdict: Your Perfect Daily Planner

‍9:36 - Subscribe if we helped!

Andra Vomir: So you're looking for a daily planner app that can help you with task management to schedule tasks on your calendar and help you with time blocking. You've probably stumbled upon Motion, some Sama Aki flow and routine. And that's what we're going to be covering in today's video. By the end of this video, you're going to know exactly which one of these tools you should use, because while on the surface, they may Once you dive in deeper, they're actually quite different from one another.

[00:00:27] All right, let's get into it. So first things first, let's get the commonalities out of the way. Yes, they are all tools to help you manage your tasks, to pop tasks onto your calendar, to help you with your daily planning and to help you with time blocking as well. Funny enough, they are also Combinator if you know what that is.

[00:00:44] So this is really like a battle of the Y planning apps. So let's start with Motion, which happens to be our favorite tool out of the bunch. What we love about Motion is that it is not just a task manager, but it's actually a project manager as well. [00:01:00] So if you are somebody who works for a business and you have multiple team members, if you're interested in collaboration at all, Motion's going to be the tool that you should lean towards.

[00:01:09] Not only that, it also has. AI capabilities to help you plan and schedule your day. So we personally don't like spending a lot of time planning our day. It's a very manual process typically, and it is with some of the other tools that we're going to talk about. With Motion, you can just hit a keyboard shortcut that opens up the task module and then you enter in your tasks, you set the priority and the due date and the time it's going to take you to get it done.

[00:01:33] And it's a little AI magician does its thing and it pops it on your calendar directly for you. So say you have a super busy day and you have a bunch of things scheduled but an urgent task comes up, you would just set the priority as ASAP and it would automatically rearrange your entire schedule for you.

[00:01:50] This is a huge time saver. It also has some other cool features like if you're working on a larger project, you can mark a task as blocked by another team member, for example, and then [00:02:00] Motion will help prioritize that task to be completed by your team member, which is really cool because it actually helps.

[00:02:05] The entire project move forward. It also has a meeting scheduler, which is really cool. So with Motion, you're really getting this ultimate platform for time management, not only for yourself, but for your greater team as well. So let's move on to Sonsama and Akiflow. Sonsama and Akiflow are quite similar, and it even took me a while to wrap my head around the main differences.

[00:02:25] They will both help you centralize your task list, and they will help bring in tasks from your different tools that you're using, like your email and Notion, for example, and. Slack and a full fledged project management tool like, for example, Asana or ClickUp. What you're going to notice is that the difference between Motion and Akiflow and Sunsama is that Motion is actually a project management tool.

[00:02:47] So you don't need to use a third party tool like Asana or ClickUp along with Motion because it takes care of all of those capabilities for you. While with Akiflow and Sunsama, you are probably going to be using [00:03:00] Asana and click up along with these daily planning tools because they don't have a full fledged way to help you manage your projects.

[00:03:07] Where this comes in handy though is if you work for an organization that for example is using Asana and you can't get them to move off of that and you want the time blocking and daily planning capabilities, then Sunsama or AccuFlow. That said, there are still differences between Sunsama and Akiflow.

[00:03:25] The main difference is really in the integrations and the API. You're going to notice that all those tools that I mentioned earlier, like your Gmail and your Slack and your Notion and your project management tool, they're going to all integrate with Sunsama and Akiflow. However, Akiflow has a much more powerful API that actually allows you to build workflows.

[00:03:45] into your daily task management tool. So let me tell you what I mean. So with Sunsama, for example, you are going to have your tasks in your project management tool and notion. For example, you can build integration so that when certain [00:04:00] tasks are a part of a project, for example, they get pulled over to Sunsama and then you get to manually.

[00:04:06] plan and organize your day. And what I mean by manual is that the task will appear and you have to manually drag them onto your calendar with Aki flow, same sort of thing. However, it can go one layer deeper. So if you have a CRM, for example, and you want to build a powerful integration so that when a new lead is added to your CRM, you can automatically have that create a task in Aki flow.

[00:04:29] So here's where the real difference between the two of them lies. If you are a person that is more technical and wants to build super powerful workflows, then we would recommend AkiFlow for you. If you're comparing Sunsama and AkiFlow. Sunsama is more beautiful to use, and I think has a nicer interface and it's a little bit less.

[00:04:48] cluttered. I also really like their weekly view planning where you can just go and drag in your tasks for each day. So if you're not really too fussed about those powerful integrations, I'd say Sunsama [00:05:00] might be a better app for you in that case. All this being said, just want to Re emphasize though, that the other main difference between Akiflow, Sunsama, and Motion is that with Akiflow and Sunsama you are the one who's going to be manually planning your day.

[00:05:15] So you're going to have your tasks that come into Sunsama or Akiflow and then you're going to have your calendar view and you're going to be dragging each task at the time that you want. it to get done. This is also where the problem lies because we all know that we don't always get all of our tasks done on the same day.

[00:05:32] So while AkiFlow and Sunsama have these really nice shut down routines for the end of your day to get you to reflect on your day and plan your next day ahead. We prefer Motion because we don't have to do anything. It just literally automatically uses AI to reschedule our tasks for the following day or the following week, depending on when the deadline is.

[00:05:53] Okay, so now let's talk about Beautiful Routine. I say Beautiful Routine because in terms of its user interface, [00:06:00] it is absolutely the most beautiful of the bunch. It is aesthetically pleasing and I think the team put a lot of effort into making it just really nice and enjoyable. to look at routine falls into the daily planner app category in terms of productivity tools, but it is very much more focused on things like helping you with habits, break new habits, create new habits, track habits, et cetera.

[00:06:25] They're the newest kid on the block compared to all the other tools that we've mentioned in this video. But with that, they are very much. I guess limited, especially when it comes to professional use, we'd recommend routine. If you have say hobbies or you want to just have like a productivity tool that's free because their lowest tier is currently free that you can kind of dabble in this world of daily planning.

[00:06:49] But if you are considering routine to help you get work done, like in your job, wouldn't really recommend it because it's not really flexible enough to help you with the granularity that's [00:07:00] involved with working. So as an example, one of the frustrations that we had when we were playing around with routine and trying to use it is that you have your calendar view of your day, and then you can just add tasks in like with any other tool.

[00:07:17] But say you have a task that is going to take you two hours to do, and it's urgent and you want to drag it into your schedule. It doesn't shift everything around for you. So that was like immediately a point of tension. And I I can't see myself actually using it for work with priorities and, uh, things that I need to work on are constantly shifting.

[00:07:37] However, if I want to put something in like, you know, meditate in the morning or write in my journal or pick up the kids from school or something like that, then I think Um, routine could work, um, very much for your personal use. Currently does integrate with Gmail and your Google Calendar and Notion. And they do say that they have like Slack and Asana coming soon.

[00:07:59] [00:08:00] However, because of the reason that I mentioned, I'm just not sure that they're quite ready yet for business, but they do have like a business tier coming soon. So maybe they're going to get there. It's an app to keep an eye on. But for now, absolutely would say they fit into the personal daily planning space, not professional.

[00:08:16] Okay, so let's recap. Motion can help you plan your tasks. It's a full fledged project manager. It can help you with time blocking and it uses AI to help you schedule your day. If you need a project management tool, this is definitely the tool that I would recommend. First off, if you're looking to collaborate with team members.

[00:08:33] Absolutely would recommend Motion over any of the other daily planning tools. If you are working for an organization that is already using Asana or ClickUp and they're pretty much solidified in that and you just want something for personal use to help you consolidate your tasks, we'd recommend Sunsama or Akiflow.

[00:08:50] Akiflow more so if you want to build more powerful workflows like I, for example, having a lead come into your CRM and creating a task for you in Akiflow, [00:09:00] you're going to get that capabilities with AkiFlow, but you do have to be more technical. Now if you're not more technical and you just want a tool that's going to pull in your tasks, then Sunsama is a great option as well.

[00:09:11] And it's also really pretty to use. And last but not least, Routine is very much for personal use, not professional use. So if you just want to build some healthy habits, if you are a hobbyist, if you want to just try some time blocking, then definitely would recommend it. It is a really beautiful app to use and they also have a mobile app with a nice calendar.

[00:09:29] So it's. Definitely worth checking out if you want like a light version. But like I said, not for professional use. If you like this video, please give us a thumbs up and hit that subscribe button. If you want more, check out our other software reviews and also our mini series that features myself and my husband, Alex, where we deep dive a little bit more into our backstory and what got us here today doing software reviews in the first place.

[00:09:51] See you next time.

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