Let's unpack the best Sunsama competitors and alternatives as we begin to better plan our days. Here's our most recommended Sunsama alternatives.
Maybe you've looked at some Sunsama over the last few weeks and thought that it doesn't quite tickle your fancy.
It's a very unique application, focusing quite heavily on the mindful element of your task management. Organizing tasks might feel a little bit pressured in some Sunsama with their heavy focus on guided planning, the pomodoro timer system and reflecting on your workday, which might not be right for some people.
It's not for everyone and that's why we've put together a list of the best alternatives. Ones that span the realm of AI, planner management and use chatbots to help you communicate with your workload. All of these alternatives have been vetted by our team and resemblance and Sunsama in many of the features that they offer.
Akiflow is a very close like-to-like alternative to Sunsama. Many people see the similarities in the ability to bring in tasks from other apps, guided planning functions, and calendar abilities, however, there are some differences to this application between these two applications.
It is focused on consolidating your tasks across multiple applications and they do this well. The guided planning isn’t as extensive as Sunsama and Akiflow has more AI focused features like a chatbot called "Aki" allowing you to communicate with your tasks and day plans. It’s slightly more expensive on the annual pricing too.
Routine is another application available on a wide range of devices.
Many people like Routine because it offers the calendar functionality of Sunsama along with a clean, minimal design. You can also capture notes, tasks, and events as part of the experience. Routine has a great weekly planning feature, which many people prefer compared to Sunsama. For those looking for a minimal mobile application (something Sunsama struggle with) users who need something functional on-the-go will also appreciate Routine.
Motion is an attractive alternative to Sunsama if you need help planning your day and struggle with prioritisation.
The application uses an algorithm to organise your tasks based on priority level. This is a really helpful feature, as many people find prioritizing difficult. While Sunsama offers guidance on how to structure your day, Motion’s AI actually plans it for you — something Sunsama doesn’t do particularly well. There are also now many additional AI-powered features, such as AI note-taking for meetings and other functions, which come at a premium cost on top of the standard subscription.
Todoist is a really easy task management application.
It doesn’t fully replace all of the functions in Sunsama, but it does a great job of helping you plan your day. Todoist lacks the guided planning feature and some of the reflective elements, but it provides the essentials of task management - helping you plan your lists, organise your Kanban and manage your calendar (for premium Todoist users). It also saves you about a quarter of what you’d pay for Sunsama each month. Additionally, it supports team collaboration better than Sunsama in our opinion.
Ellie Planner feels like Sunsama, but with a more simple approach.
The app centers around capturing your ideas, time blocking them onto a calendar and setting up your week of plans. If you're looking for Sunsama without the guided planning, task consolidation and reflection features, this is it. Many people think this app looks a lot like Sunsama, but does feel limited in more advanced features, but if you're not in the hunt for that, then this will set you up well. Ellie Planner is also cheaper and independently developed too.
If you're looking for something with a mindful feel like Sunsama, this could be it.
Morgen is a well-known calendar app, with a feature called Smart Frames. This feature is especially good for those who want help planning and organizing their week, with AI, pairing the most important tasks to the best time slots. This helps to organize your day to feel a little bit more tailorted towards things like your energy levels and reduces the need to constantly organize said tasks. Morgen is more of a calendar experience compared to Sunsama, which has more of a daily planner, but they do have some good integrations and bring in tasks, like their Notion and ClickUp integration.
Are you hunting for something more to-do list-like? TickTick, much like Todoist, presents a classic to-do list experience; however, it offers a good calendar mode as packed into their calendar mode that allows people to plot their tasks into a calendar in week, month, and agenda view. TickTick is a favorite for packing in tools like habit-racking, too.
Whilst TickTick is a to-do app at heart, you might want something less intense and less expensive than Sunsama for managing your list. TickTick presents a good bundle of features in the application at a much lower cost than Sunsama, $36.99.
Timestripe as a Sunsama alternative is interesting, and here’s why.
Timestripe presents itself as a unique to-do list application that allows you to plan not only for today but also for the week ahead and for the year ahead.
Timestripe tries to focus on long-term planning by giving you as many long-term planning alternatives as possible. For example, if you’re looking to organize your 5-year or 10-year goals, there are options like this in Timestripe.
The benefit of this is that you can filter backward and help to correlate your goals to your daily tasks. And everything inside of Timestripe is broken into these elements.
This is very reminiscent of the Sunsama-guided planning abilities but much more open-plan. So many people who like the fact that Sunsama zooms out might like Timestripe even more because of these different long-term planning elements.
Whilst Timestripe doesn’t bring in extensive calendar abilities, task consolidation, or have that guided planning element, it is a great application for those looking to better long-term plan with their tasks and zoom out of the everyday.
There are lots of different types of Sunsama alternatives mentioned above, so you’re probably looking for a little bit more guidance about which one is right for you.
Now of course, what you might be seeking with Sunsama as an alternative is potentially a cheaper-priced one, or maybe even one that includes more artificial intelligence. There’s a wide range of different things that you might want from your daily planner application.
So what we’re going to do is overview some of the best ones for particular scenarios. So the first scenario to look at is the AI elements of your daily planning. And for many people, this is becoming incredibly predominant, especially for daily planning, where they can prompt an AI system to create them something a little bit more structured around their day, helping with the fatigue of prioritisation and the ongoing changes that happen in the background when it comes to Slack emails and Microsoft Teams messages notifying you of something more important to do.
And when it comes to the AI side of things, Motion is typically the best one on the market, with a close second being Akiflow.
Motion is most likely the best alternative, because what it does very well is allows for you to coordinate your task management, bringing in the most important tasks from other applications, but also based on what they believe the algorithm is highest priority. It also has more recent document abilities, which can help you and your team plan a project more efficiently.
The second option that has a lot of artificial intelligence is Akiflow. And they’ve more recently introduced a new chatbot, which some users might like, because you can chat with your AI about what tasks you need to do, reorganising them, reallocating them and saving that mental administration of workload, which sort of replaces the concept of guided planning that was predominantly and quite typically part of Sunsama as one of its strengths.
So you might be looking to save a little bit of money using another alternative to Sunsama. So let me share some recommendations. The best alternatives that are lower cost would be Todoist or Superlist, and tools that are between the prices of $5 and $10, as they will provide you the basis of organizing your calendar and your tasks without the potential extreme pricing that these types of applications bring with them. Todoist also has a lot of habit-tracking features as part of it, and has recently made an aggressive push towards bettering their calendar experience as part of that.
If you’re looking for a Sunsama alternative that’s good for goal planning, then I’d highly recommend taking a look at ones like Sunsama is TimeStripe, which are very good at helping you to zoom out and focus on your long-term goals. A little bit like what Sunsama does, but with more of a long-term focus.
For example, Sunsama does week planning and even adjectives quite well, whereas TimeStripe, a tool that I’m recommending here, typically does the whole zoom-out much better, and still has some theme functionality like Sunsama has.
Finally, if you’re looking for a team-based alternative to Sunsama, then we highly recommend checking out Motion or Todoist. Both offer good team management functions.
Todoist more recently pushing towards a workspace experience that allows you to better manage your team’s projects, and Motion going quite aggressive on their team pricing, making it more affordable for teams to actually use Motion than individual users alike.