Akiflow and Sunsama are some of the more recent giants in the to-do list app or daily planner spaces. Picking between them is super hard because they offer really similar experiences helping you better co-ordinate the week ahead and plan in the most important tasks.
Let's help you pick the perfect one for you and give you our take on the best of the breed.
Both of these tools are very similar in nature — actually the closest of them all on the daily planner applications front. This comparison feature we’ll set the record straight and see which one is the best investment for your time and money Sunsama or Akiflow.
Sunsama vs. Akiflow: Quick Glance
Let’s just take a quick look at both Sunsama and Akiflow and their general premise:
- Akiflow — Think of Akiflow as you base for tasks and calendar in one. Like Sunsama it can bring in tasks from other application like project management software you might use at work. In essence, Akiflow wants to be your base for everything calendar and tasks.
- Sunsama — A much more mindful approach to tasks, Sunsama wants to be the hub for your day and focuses on not overloading your schedule helping you better work on week objectives to help a more higher level approach to tasks.
Both these twos help you better collate your tasks and calendar optimised for time-blocking. The important thing with these two daily planner apps is that you will not get a free trial so making sure you choose the best one for is important going forward.
Features Comparison: Akiflow vs Sunsama
Thinking of these two tools for tasks and calendar, they are so similar in nature, but what makes them different, let’s explore their pros and cons as we related them together.
Akiflow Pros: Brilliant Aspects
These are the best elements of Akiflow and where it excels:
1. More Integrations
With 10 integrations, both Sunsama and Akiflow offer a good amount of optionality — but Akiflow goes further by adding a Zapier integration offering up to 3,000+ connections possible, a much better optionality.
The tools you can connect and bring into Akiflow allow you to connect with tools within apps like Zapier and IFTTT to create small automations. This is popular for those who better make Akiflow their task dashboard for the day ahead. This allows you to connect services that Sunsama cannot provide right now like Microsoft To-Do or Linear for managing tasks from those platforms.
2. You Can Schedule Meetings
Whilst Akiflow doesn't have the best meeting scheduling tool - there's a way to share availability with other people that you cannot do with Sunsama (although Sunsama has great meeting note abilities). In Akiflow, you can share availability with a link or with a selection of dates that can be copy and pasted.
This is perfect for sharing externally and makes Akiflow a great way to handle events, meetings and tasks in one - something that Sunsama lacks. This works well and you can create some parameters in settings to better manage the meetings coming into your schedule with defaults and pre-created meeting details for new meetings.
3. Smarter Time Blocking
A new feature from Akiflow has come to the table called "Slots" allowing you to create a series of tasks within a time-block. This is perfect for those who calendar-block and want to better add a bunch of tasks instead of creating a messy handful of tasks outside and stuff them in - or even just having them live in inbox.
Time slots is a decent feature that we haven't seen in Sunsama. The closest thing in Sunsama is the weekly objectives feature which focuses more objectively about tasks.
Sunsama Pros: The Good Bits
There's plenty of brilliant elements in Sunsama with a focus on better mindful approaches to tasks there's plenty of novel features within Sunsama:
1. Holistic Weekly Objectives
Whilst Akiflow has added guided planning more recently, Sunsama has been the king of this for many years allowing users to better plan their week. We still believe that Sunsama do this best despite a deeper exploration into Rituals, which is Akiflow's guided planning.
Sunsama starts the day with you and ends the day for you. This is great for your holistic approach to task management and this oozes throughout the application into features like weekly objectives, focus mode and auto-scheduling - all mentioned below. One of those is weekly objectives that allow you to pick the front running tasks for the week and then stem your planning down from that.
This is sort of like a "skip the bs" feature that allows you to set up a weekly objective and auto-plan in dedicated time per day on each of this. This is much more holistic instead of getting trapped into micro-tasks that don't make sense. Sunsama’s premise and values scream work/life balance. The branding and messaging just ooze this focus on your focus and it makes Sunsama quite an appealing experience as they push for you to limit your work hours, making more of a focus on priority and even locking (sort of) out of Sunsama when the day is complete and next day is planned.
2. Focus Mode in Meetings & Tasks
This works brilliant as a standout feature in Sunsama. Whilst available in Akiflow, this works a lot better in our opinion than the likes of Akiflow's focus mode. Per task this works great (above) allowing you to see the task, add sub-tasks, start a timer and set a project amount of time. If you exit Sunsama, the timer will follow you (at least on macOS) which makes focusing on the task at hand, much better when browsing the internet.
For meeting notes, you can create a Sunsama meeting which is your meeting personal assistant and perfect for creating action items, discussions points and general meeting nots when you're trying to keep focused. You can "run" a meeting and see a timer across all the discussions and make some extensive notes. (above)
3. Auto-Scheduling
Auto-scheduling is a neat feature that lives inside of Sunsama and doesn't quite rival fully fledged AI systems that re-organize your to-do list but will allow you to slot tasks into your busy schedule or even re-allocated them for another time.
Auto-scheduling is a relatively new feature within Sunsama and solves the issue of dragging into the calendar for quicker access the modal pops up next to the task for quicker use.This is something that Akiflow doesn't really have and allows for better guided planning.
Akiflow Cons: Missed Opportunities
1. More Flexible Focus
This is very much a pro in some ways and a negative, but if we’re looking at both of these.
Akiflow is much more of an open-canvas for your tasks than Sunsama is. Akiflow does have some neat features like Rituals for better daily planning and hand holding you to closing your day down, but not managed integrations could get wild in your inbox and overwhelm your workload. The views are much more in-depth than Sunsama in our opinion.
Sunsama Cons: The Not So Good Bits
1. No Proper Mobile App
Sunsama has gone for a read-only approach on mobile meaning you cannot organize your calendar and tasks but merely view them which is better for on the go needs, but less so if you want to move things about.
This is fully intentional and something Sunsama advocates for but in a mobile world many users find this frustrating about Sunsama and really want to see a mobile application that allows them to use all the power features of Sunsama on iOS, Android & iPad.
Our Ratings: Akiflow vs Sunsama
1. Design
Design is very opinionated but Sunsama wins here for us. The clean look and feel of the week planner view, colour and the focus on daily planning makes it our winner.
Winner: Sunsama
2. Features
Packing in the features, Akiflow takes the award. Sunsama does offer a host of hidden features that present good function but when it comes
Winner: Akiflow
3. Performance
From our tests, Sunsama struggled switching between calendar and tasks in comparison with Akiflow which we didn’t have any issues with. A minor bug we think, but something to note down. Akiflow we didn’t have any issues when testing the functions, speed & performance.
Winner: Akiflow
4. Practicality
The mobile does let down Sunsama when it comes in comparison with Akiflow because the Sunsama app is very much read-only. This is part of Sunsama’s opinion in the productivity space, but when you compare the two — if mobile is a deal breaker — this will be important.
Winner: Akiflow
5. Value
Both applications aren’t cheap but Sunsama loses this battle to Akiflow, only on yearly which is typically what people who will commit to these two applications will go for.
Winner: Akiflow
Akiflow Pricing vs Sunsama Pricing
When it comes to pricing, this might be important for your budget. Here’s the current pricing and breakdown, this is of course subject to change:
- Akiflow offers a $14.99 pricing if you commit to the yearly pricing making it shy of $180.
- Sunsama on the other hand offers two options. $20 per month or $16 per month — making the difference in pricing around $12 for the year.
In our opinion there’s not much in the pricing if you decide to go with the premium yearly.
Akiflow or Sunsama? Which Tool?
Here let’s make it super duper simple for you to choose between Sunsama and Akiflow.
- Akiflow is better for someone who wants more detailed features and a less mindful approach to your tasks and calendar. There’s
- Sunsama is best for those who want a better work/life balance. Akiflow offers similar features but the premise of the Sunsama as a daily planner is to do this at the core and you notice this with focus mode, daily planning and pushing you to not overload tasks.
Go further with our reviews on Tool Finder to see which one is right for you.
Our Pick: Akiflow
This is our pick of the bunch, Akiflow offers a stronger overall feature package and seems like they are rapidly adding features which if you like a constantly updated product will be nicer for you. It won in all the categories we reviewed it against above.
- Sunsama vs. Akiflow: Quick Glance
- Features Comparison: Akiflow vs Sunsama
- Akiflow Pros: Brilliant Aspects
- Sunsama Pros: The Good Bits
- Akiflow Cons: Missed Opportunities
- Sunsama Cons: The Not So Good Bits
- Our Ratings: Akiflow vs Sunsama
- Akiflow Pricing vs Sunsama Pricing
- Akiflow or Sunsama? Which Tool?
- Our Pick: Akiflow
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Francesco D'Alessio
Francesco D'Alessio
Francesco D'Alessio
Francesco D'Alessio
Francesco D'Alessio
Francesco D'Alessio
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