Akiflow vs Sunsama | Full Breakdown & Comparison (2024)

Sunsama and Akiflow offer powerful task management features and a host of tools for managing your calendar and time better, here's an in-depth look.

Choosing between Sunsama & Akiflow?

Akiflow and Sunsama are two big tools right now in daily planner apps.

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, they are the closest of them all on the daily planner applications front. In 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.

What is Akiflow?

Akiflow is task management software combining tasks, calendars, and task consolidation by bringing tasks from apps like ClickUp, Notion, and Gmail. It is available on macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android. Akiflow is also known as a daily planner application.

Akiflow is used by freelancers, busy professionals, and those who want more than task management apps. It is popular for managing tasks and calendars in one and comes in a similar market to apps like Motion & Sunsama.

Video: Getting Started with Akiflow

Here's some of the basics of Akiflow and how it works for you:

What is Sunsama?

Sunsama is a daily planner app that lets you organize your week ahead with tasks from other apps and calendar events from popular tools like Google Calendar. It is available on desktop (macOS, Windows), iOS, and Android. It is very popular with busy professionals for managing their time with work-life balance as a focus.

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

Akiflow

Akiflow is a daily planner app for busy professionals for task & calendar management.

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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:

Sunsama

Sunsama is a daily planner app that wants you to be more mindful about your work.

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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.

Akiflow Pros

• Easy-to-use design
• Combines tasks & calendar
• Range of views, including upcoming
• Rituals feature for better work-life balance
• Time slots for better time-blocking management
• Comes with task consolidation for bringing in tasks from other apps

Akiflow Cons

• Pricing can be expensive for solo users
• It would be best if you took the time to learn the tool
• Akiflow on mobile isn't as impressive

Pricing Comparison

How does Sunsama compare with Akiflow

How much does Akiflow cost per month?

Akiflow costs $19 monthly, with a free seven-day trial if billed annually.

Is Akiflow free?

Akiflow comes with a 7-day free trial and no free pricing plan.

How much does Sunsama cost per month?

Sunsama costs $20 per month or $16 per month billed annually.

Is Sunsama Free?

Sunsama does not have a free plan outside of the 14-day trial.

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 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.

Sunsama

Sunsama is a daily planner app that wants you to be more mindful about your work.

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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.