15th Jul, 2024
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.
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Daily planners want to help you manage your busy schedule.
They want to help you see your calendar and tasks in one app. People want to be more organized, so seeing these tools in one place helps you better focus on your plans for the week ahead and lets you plot your tasks into your calendar.
This is a list of the more professional day planner apps available. While they are typically designed for busy professionals, they can be used by anyone.
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. This video helps to break these down further:
Our best daily planner apps are Motion, Akiflow & Sunsama. These are most recommended for planning tasks and recommended for busy professionals.
The best free daily planner apps are Todoist, Ellie Planner, TickTick & Morgen. All of these offer ways to plan your tasks and co-ordinate calendar events too.
The best planner apps with AI features are Motion, Structured & Sunsama. All are using AI in different ways to plan your tasks for you or save time with effort.
These are the daily planner apps listed and our recommendations:
App | Best for | Pricing |
---|---|---|
Planning your day with AI | $19 per month | |
Importing tasks from other apps | $19 per month | |
Notes, tasks & calendar in one | $12 per month | |
More holistic planning | $16 per month | |
For lightweight plans | $9.99 per month | |
For on-the-go iOS planning | $49.99 lifetime | |
Goal planning & day plans | $6 per month | |
For task management | $5 per month | |
For task management | $4 per month | |
For calendar first planning | $9 per month | |
For ADHD & day planning | $8 per month | |
Calendar, emails & tasks | $12.50 per month |
Motion is the best daily planner that focuses on using AI.
You can use Motion to help plan your day using AI by allowing it to re-schedule tasks and events to suit your day best. Motion is a good daily planner app that people use as busy professionals to plan their day it comes with a good range of availability on devices too.
If you're a busy professional with a budget, Motion is a good solution.
Motion costs $19 per month (billed annually) so those considering it, need to be aware of how much this will cost. For rescheduling, Motion works well and comes as a novel option on the market for planning your day and week.
Motion is not free and costs $19 per month.
This makes Motion one of the more expensive day-planning apps on the list.
The AI system in Motion takes some time to learn from how you plan your day, but the idea is, that the more task context you give it, the better the outcome for your plans. This means it will learn how to schedule, allocate tasks, and plan for you.
Akiflow is a good all-round day planning app.
Many professionals use Akiflow to help manage tasks and calendars in one place. Its special feature allows you to import tasks from apps like Notion, ClickUp, and Gmail (and over 10 more external apps).
This concept is called task consolidation and is becoming popular with professionals who don't want to jump between apps all the time.
The idea is that Akiflow can import tasks from other apps allowing you to plan all those tasks in Akiflow's dashboard. So think, an email from Gmail to a message from Slack can be added as tasks in Akiflow and organized into your plans.
Much like Motion, Akiflow is an expensive day-planning app.
The combination of tasks, calendar, meeting scheduling, guided planning, and task importing from other apps makes Akiflow reasonable in value. Being able to bring in tasks from other apps can save time switching between software.
If you're again, a busy professional and struggle to manage your tasks in one place, then Akiflow is a great option for you. Many people like Akiflow as it brings all of your tasks in one place meaning that you can better reduce context-switching between apps.
Routine is a clean and minimal day planner app.
People who use Routine find that they can combine notes, tasks, and calendars to help build a productivity hub. Routine has a today view for planning the day with meetings and tasks, a good calendar view for planning what's ahead, and a light list view that allows you to capture notes and jottings, too.
Week calendar mode is perfect in Routine as it helps you zoom out and plan the week with per-week objectives and per-day objectives meaning you don't have to plan everything into your calendar, it can sit on the outskirts ready to be planned in.
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 co-ordinate tasks, and plan ahead but also allows you to capture notes and works well on all devices to better capture all that in one.
Sunsama is a mindful day planner that is popular with those who zoom out.
Guided planning makes Sunsama the best mindful planner as it helps to zoom out of tasks by helping you plan the day and close the day you've just had by asking a series of questions and reflecting on what tasks you have on your to-do list.
For day planning, being able to plot tasks into Sunsama's week view and use 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 be holistic with their planning approach.
Planning using guided planning in Sunsama is very nice for those who need help planning. For some people, the time to re-think what they need to do is something that they neglect every day and this could be damaging to what you're working on and the projects you're allocating your time to.
Sunsama is best for those who want a day planner with more work-life balance tools as part of it. Those who are struggling to juggle lots of tasks need to re-think how they manage what they have on their plate better.
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 then to drag tasks into your week plan for planning later which helps get the unsorted tasks sorted.
Ellie Planner is a good free daily planner app with unlimited task creation.
Ellie Planner isn't as popular for busy professionals, we'd recommend 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.
Structured is a superb iOS daily planner app.
Structured comes on macOS but works best on the go for planning your day. This is thanks to the style of planning that 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 offers a $29.99 lifetime subscription offering their all-access features inside of this package making it one of the best value day planner apps out there.
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.
Timestripe is a goal-planning app with daily planning abilities.
Timestripe works by allowing you to add tasks that act as goals meaning you can align these "goals" to your weeks and months ahead. Inside of Timestripe, you can see your week goals, month goals, year goals, and beyond making it the perfect daily planner for planning far in advance and co-ordinating what's ahead.
This does make it good 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 for planning tasks and goals.
For those who want to think more holistically, Timestripe is perfect. Allowing 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 use a kanban board to plot out ideas.
With over 10 years of experience, Todoist brings a high quality application that makes task management much easier. The reason it lives on this list is that Todoist are getting calendar mode soon and this is one of the best tools for tasks, it will do the same for calendar and daily planning too with the view.
TickTick is one of the best friendly, approachable budget to-do apps that actually, unlike Todoist, has a calendar experience within this at the time of our posting. TickTick brings the ability to plot tasks in the calendar view with week, month and day modes to better align tasks into 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 making sure you create healthy routines. This is a bonus feature of TickTick but allows it to be another layer into the daily planning system. Habits can help build healthy routines and use the application longer too.
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.
Eager to learn Morgen, we've got a course to help your learn Morgen calendar.
Morgen is a great tool for calendar management but it does allow you to bring in tasks. The best feature for this is that fact you can time-block those tasks into your calendar really easily but also that you can organize them into project lists using task lists.
Meeting scheduling for planning meetings means you don't need tools like Calendly as the tool can be used to setup routine meetings and even meetings on the go too. Worth exploring as an option for meeting planning, calendar management and task management if you plan light weight tasks and like to time block in your calendar app.
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.
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