Reviewed by Francesco D'Alessio
Ellie Planner Review (2024)
Best Features, Pricing, Alternatives & Verdict
Ellie Planner is a lightweight daily for calculating tasks and managing the week ahead. But how does it work and is it worth becoming as your default daily planner app?
What is Ellie Planner?
Ellie Planner is a simple daily planning app to help organize calendar, tasks & time-block.
What does Ellie Planner do?
Ellie Planner wants to help you better organize the week with a calendar and tasks, so they do this by using time-blocking and time-boxing techniques that help you focus on a set task in a block of time.
Many people find apps like this to be helpful to allocate set tasks to get done based on the time they are working on it helping them to reduce multi-tasking and associate the time to the task at hand - a growing technique used by many people.
With that in mind, Ellie helps you to create tasks, sub-tasks, create lists, create a backlog of tasks (in an area called Brain Dump), add events, connect Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar and Apple Calendar and even connect with apps like Todoist, Slack and Notion to bring in tasks for task consolidation.
Ellie Planner Best Features
Let's take a look at the best features within the experience and what we thought of the application for managing workload:
1. Calendar & Task View
The calendar view and task view are well connected.
Ellie allows you to see your calendar and switch between that and task management view too (which is laid out like a kanban structure).
In the Ellie Pro, you can see the time boxed view window on the right hand side allowing you to project tasks as they come up, but largely the calendar mode is well presented with week, month and even per day modes with plenty of settings to narrow it down.
Upcoming view for tasks allows you to plot tasks ahead in a bit more of a structured view and using the filtering option to narrow down the type of tasks with labels (a premium feature) was very easy and something we had no trouble using.
2. Brain Dump & Sub-Tasks
List management works well in Ellie.
Brain dump is a feature that allows you to just get your thoughts down and capture tasks that are important or on your mind. You can also create lists from anything, we created some from tools we need to review here on Tool Finder and it worked well.
Each task is broken down into a variety of elements including:
- Estimated time
- Due date and start date
- Repeating states
- Labels
Sub-tasks was one of the features we liked as a way to break down each task for managing the key activities within the task you have created.
3. Integrations & Plugins
Ellie Planner connects with Apple Calendar, Outlook and Google Calendar.
For task management, one of the nice things is that you can bring in tasks, much like apps like Sunsama and Akiflow, to apps like Notion, Slack & Todoist.
Add-ons also allow you to add experience by flicking a switch like due dates and other such abilities to further enhance your task management experience.
Ellie Planner: Things We Didn't Like
Some bits of Ellie Planner we didn't like as much.
1. Lack of Features
Features aren't as dense as say Todoist.
Todoist does offer more value for the money and less money overall - prices compared are $5 (Todoist) to $9.99 (Ellie Planner), you just cannot ignore this.
Ellie Planner is run by a solo developer, this is important to note. Comparing Tesco (a big UK retailer) with a smaller groceries supplier in your village or town can sometimes be quite harsh, Ellie Planner is a well-built app and the developer does deserve notable mention.
How much does Ellie Planner cost?
For Ellie Pro, it will cost you $9.99 per month or $299 as a one-off cost.
Use our special discount code: TOOLFINDERPRO10 via this link.
Ellie Planner Pricing
Let's look at the pricing of Ellie Planner, updated February 2024.
There is a free Ellie Planner plan that gives you unlimited tasks and iOS & Web access.
Ellie Planner: Our Verdict
Looking at Ellie Planner, it wants to be something in between Sunsama (a high-end productivity planning app) and Todoist (to-do list app).
Ellie Planner itself offers a clean experience with the ability to manage tasks, calendar and block your week ahead which is great, but a lot of the features are locked under the Ellie Pro pricing which is $9.99 per month - and comparing that with Todoist's offering comes in almost 33% more expensive per month.
If you're in the hunt for a weekly planning application and open to new concepts like more focus on time-boxing, brain dump areas, and integrations to bring in tasks, we'd recommend looking at Ellie Planner - also it supports a solo developer.
The app moves fast and is impressive at adding features & fixing bugs despite.
Best Ellie Planner Alternatives
Ellie Planner alternatives include Akiflow, Sunsama and Todoist.
