Dec 24
Daily planner apps are growing in popularity as many people look to combine tasks and calendar in one place. A place to plan and work, here's our recommendations for the best day planners, both free & paid, to pick and use daily.
Daily planner apps aren't going away.
Many people love them for their combination of calendar and to-do list features, which allow them to better manage their daily routine. But what makes them so helpful?
Daily planner apps are powerful tools for planning your week ahead and organizing priorities and tasks in one place. Many tools and resources can help, from paper to powerful task management tools that can help you plan more effectively. Let's explore the best recommendations for planning your time.
Daily planner apps are a combination of to-do list apps & calendar apps. They are designed to help you time-block your tasks onto your calendar to see what you need to focus on. They can cost between $10 and $25 per month and come with various features, including task consolidation, team planning, and AI tools.
Here is a glance at all of the planner apps in this list:
Motion is probably the most advanced daily planner on this list. It uses AI to serve your daily and weekly schedule better, help you reorganize clashes, and help with one of everyday people's most significant pain points: prioritization. Busy professionals are flocking to Motion to take the weight from their inability to judge the importance of a task and better take the administration of planning out of the day.
Motion learns from you over time to make better decisions, but this doesn't come cheap. Motion charges $19 per month (billed annually) for planning for you, which many people are happy to pay. Motion combines a calendar, project management (with team abilities, too), and meeting scheduling for finding times with others, alongside all this powerful AI auto-scheduling.
Motion is priced at $19 per month, billed annually, or $34 per month (monthly). There is no free plan.
The Bento Methodology
The Bento Methodology is a framework to help you better focus on priorities, not tasks. Used by over 500+ students, the system and method has been featured in Ness Labs, Fast Company & TechRadar.
Learn MoreAkiflow is designed to be your dashboard for tasks. That's the best way to describe this tool. It combines a calendar with task management and something called task consolidation. This allows a user to manage and time-block tasks into their calendar in Akiflow and from other apps like ClickUp, Notion, Gmail, and even more. This is becoming a helpful way to reduce switching between apps (thanks to 2-way task sync) and consolidate tasks into one place for better focus during a workday.
Much like Motion, busy professionals flock to Akiflow as a base for their tasks. This has made it a popular tool, with freelancers and small teams working across many task management tools or apps during their busy workdays. It also comes with guided planning features, meeting scheduling abilities, and a good set of features in the calendar for planning and time-blocking, but with Motion's $19 per month pricing (billed annually), which many people are open to paying thanks to the all-in-one feel without the stress of moving work management tools that you already use in your day.
Akiflow is priced at $19 per month, billed annually, or $34 per month, billed monthly. There is no free plan.
Routine is a minimal planner application that combines tasks, calendars, and light note-taking.
Many people are drawn to it because of its clean look and feel, but not only this but also the smaller features that make capturing things into Routine enjoyable. Those who will find Routine suitable for them don't need the advanced AI features we see in tools like Motion or task consolidation like in Akiflow, but the ability to bring all three core productivity systems (notes, tasks, and calendar) into one house. Easy on the eyes, Routine is one of the most attractive-looking daily planner apps.
Suppose you're looking for a middle ground between Sunsama and Todoist. In that case, this might be the best application as it allows you to coordinate tasks and plan ahead but also allows you to capture notes. It works well on all devices to better capture all that in one.
Routine is free now, with a $12 monthly pricing coming soon.
The Bento Methodology
The Bento Methodology is a framework to help you better focus on priorities, not tasks. Used by over 500+ students, the system and method has been featured in Ness Labs, Fast Company & TechRadar.
Learn MoreSunsama is a mindful day planner popular with those who zoom out. Guided planning makes Sunsama the best mindful planner. It helps you zoom out of tasks by helping you plan the day and close the day you've just had by asking questions and reflecting on the tasks on your to-do list.
For day planning, plotting tasks into Sunsama's week view and using their planning features like timer, AI channel allocation, and flagging when you're overloading your list with tasks is perfect for planners who like to take a holistic approach. Planning using guided planning in Sunsama is very nice for those who need help planning. For some people, taking time to rethink what they need to do is something they neglect every day, which could be damaging to what they're working on and the projects they're allocating their time to.
Sunsama is best for those who want a day planner with more work-life balance tools. Those who struggle to juggle many tasks need to rethink how they manage what they have on their plate.
Sunsama comes at $16 per month, billed annually, or $20 per month, billed monthly. No free plan.
Ellie Planner is a lightweight daily planner that looks like Sunsama. Ellie is designed to help you plan your week using a week Kanban view, tally your tasks in lists, and help you flag your tasks as important. Many people like it for the time-boxing abilities, the time-boxing method is used by people like Elon Musk to plan.
Ellie Planner has a good brain-dumping area, which helps you drag tasks into your week plan for later planning and sort the unsorted tasks. It is a good free daily planner app with unlimited task creation. Ellie Planner isn't as popular for busy professionals; we'd recommend it more for those who are planning light and want to see their tasks in a calendar view. Many people say that this is a combination of Todoist and Sunsama.
Ellie Planner is $9.99 per month and has a freemium tier.
Structured is a superb lightweight daily planner app for MacOS that works best when planning your day. This is thanks to its planning style, which uses a day view so you can add tasks in order of what you need to do next. This makes it popular with those who want to create routine tasks and plan using time-based tasks. Structured is not available on Android.
Structured works best for iOS users who want something to plan their week using a timeline view of their day allowing them to add in tasks as they go. People tend to like to plan housework, errands, and even their personal lives like movies and work.
Ellie Planner is priced at $9.99 per month with limited free functionality.
Timestripe is a goal-planning app with daily planning abilities. Timestripe allows you to add tasks that act as goals, meaning you can align these "goals" with your weeks and months ahead. Inside Timestripe, you can see your week, month, year, and beyond goals, making it the perfect daily planner for planning far in advance and coordinating what's ahead.
This does make it suitable for daily planning with a calendar view and the ability to add tasks and sub-tasks to each of these goals. Timestripe is a perfect daily planning app with goal planning and is used mainly by individuals to plan tasks and goals. For those who want to think more holistically, Timestripe is perfect. This allows you to view your goals ahead and have them alongside your plans for the day so you always keep sight of the goals and tasks you need to head towards.
Todoist is the best-in-class to do application in our opinion. It provides a brilliant way to handle tasks, manage project lists, and even plot ideas with a Kanban board.
With over 10 years of experience, Todoist is a high-quality application that makes task management much easier. They now have a planner-like experience connecting with Google Calendar for better planning and time blocking for the week ahead.
Todoist is free to use with limits. Pricing starts at $5 per user per month with team plans.
TickTick is one of the best friendly, approachable budget to-do apps. Unlike Todoist, it actually had a calendar experience within it at the time of our posting. TickTick allows you to plot tasks in the calendar view with week, month, and day modes to better align tasks at the right time. The issue is that this comes only in the paid plan.
Calendar mode is one of the big features in TickTick that allow us to feature it as a daily planner application. For many people some light calendar mode might be enough for them to consider TickTick as their planner application as it has due dates, progress bars and also fantastic ways to capture on multiple devices too. Habit tracking is great for creating healthy routines. This is a bonus feature of TickTick, but it allows it to be another layer in the daily planning system. Habits can help build healthy routines and use the application longer, too.
Priced at $35.99 per year, but has a generous free plan.
Morgen is a calendar application at heart but it has been trying to bring both calendar and task into one hub. Whilst it isn't a pure breed daily planner application, we think it still is an option as you enter your decision making when looking for a daily planner application.
That combination between calendar events first and tasks, with task lists with the ability to time-block them into your calendar actually makes it a not bad solution. For one calendar it is free to use which makes it perfect for getting started and using the concept of tasks and calendar together without investing in some of the options above that do limit you.
Morgen is priced at $13 per month.
The Bento Methodology
The Bento Methodology is a framework to help you better focus on priorities, not tasks. Used by over 500+ students, the system and method has been featured in Ness Labs, Fast Company & TechRadar.
Learn MoreAmazing Marvin is a customizable planner app that uses a combination of features to help you build your week's schedule. Features include rescheduling tasks, a planner calendar, and plug-and-play strategies for making your week more effective, such as timers, task management systems, and more.
The software is popular with ADHD as people tend to like the range of features that you can pick for you.
Amie is a calendar application that has expanded much further to help you manage your week better. You can now connect tasks, emails, events, and more in one location. Amie wants to help bring that all into one location.
Amie is priced at
The Bento Methodology
The Bento Methodology is a framework to help you better focus on priorities, not tasks. Used by over 500+ students, the system and method has been featured in Ness Labs, Fast Company & TechRadar.
Learn MoreNotion is an all-in-one workspace for managing notes, documents, and projects. It also serves as a planner, helping you organize everything in one location. You can use Notion to help build a calendar or to-do list widgets alongside your notes and ideas, all in one place. It might take you more time to build this inside of Notion, but the benefits are that they are a powerful way to craft your own plan of the week using the features.
Rise Calendar is a calendar tool for teams but serves as a planner experience. As part of their experience, it comes with task management that you can use as an individual. You can lightly use the project abilities, but the way you can add sub-tasks and organize your focus and time block is a helpful planner feature that makes it one of our recommended options.
Twos is a note-taking application that has expanded into the planning experience. It allows you to plan tasks, organize them for the day, and plan ahead using a calendar. Twos is becoming a compelling lightweight way to plan your week ahead.
There is a wide variety of daily planner apps so let's narrow them down even further:
The best day planner apps for mindfulness or more holistic planning are Sunsama and Timestripe, both apps that promote health and work-life balance.
Structured is the best iOS daily planner app as it is perfect for on-the-go with timeline-like abilities for planning the day view and easily adding tasks on your iPhone or iPad apps.
Students looking for daily planners should look at something cost-effective and good for planning workload at university or college, the best daily planner for students are Structured or TickTick both have lower costs, but help plan the day.
One of the best all-round day planner apps for Android is Any.DO offers a good way to balance tasks and calendars on Android with a good Google Play Store widget too. Alternatively, TickTick is also good for Android too.
Akiflow works well on Windows for daily planning and helps you manage your tasks effectively there along with all the features like rituals, task consolidation & more.
Routine has one of the best MacOS features for daily planning called console that allows you to capture tasks, notes, and events using a command bar function.
A lot of people credit both Sorted 3 and Structured as the iOS apps that best help them plan the day as they combat the day-to-day struggles of having ADHD.
Those with ADHD tend to go with Amazing Marvin for handling their tasks and using the powerful tool add-on feature to add the tools that matter to them on macOS.
One of the best free day planners for Android users is TickTick. TickTick also comes with a calendar view (premium) and habit-tracking too.
From trending reads, trending tools and beyond
Choose from hundreds of productivity tools
View All