Reviewed by Francesco D'Alessio
Sunsama Review (2024)
Best Features, Pricing, Alternatives & Verdict
Sunsama is one of the most talked about daily planner apps because they've been out in the world for over 10 years now, but now it challenges many other apps & tools. How do we rate Sunsama in the world of daily planner apps?
What is Sunsama?
Sunsama is a daily planner app with a focus on tasks and calendar.
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What does Sunsama do?
At heart, Sunsama is your to-do list and your calendar in one place.
This is why a lot of people like Sunsama for handling everything in one - including tasks from other apps. Think of Sunsama as your to-do app and calendar management in one experience. We call these types of productivity apps - daily planner apps - they help you organize the week but in a bit more a structured fashion and Sunsama lives up to this offering.
Sunsama offers a way for you to tally what you want to do for the week, see your events coming up, import tasks in real time from other popular project management apps and even get some indirect help planning where and how many tasks go into your to-do list for the day. This makes it similar to other daily planner apps like Akiflow and Motion.
Sunsama Pros & Best Features
Here's the best bits of Sunsama we think shine (sorry for the pun) and make it brilliant:
1. Task Consolidation
You can bring tasks into Sunsama from other apps, even paste links in.
Sunsama does something similar to Akiflow by bringing your tasks from other apps like ClickUp, Notion and Gmail and bring them into your to-do list experience.
Now, why is this helpful? Bringing all your tasks into one view is a much more effective way to be able to manage them because you're not "context switching" between them every 5 minutes. Say someone sends you a ClickUp task.
You can see them inside of Sunsama and drag them into a time-block versus having to jump over to ClickUp, move it around and then come back to Sunsama and likely copy and paste it. A good example of this is (above) you can see Todoist has been integrated with Sunsama allowing me to time-block and start the task created in Todoist, from Sunsama.
The concept is you use Sunsama as a task dashboard for management of all of your tasks and use the calendar view to time-block them in allowing you a link back to the original task to make sure you can submit completion once all done. Having that window into other apps helps and you can connect the following tools; Todoist, Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Notion, Jira, GitHub, Gmail, Outlook & Slack.
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2. Guided Planning
One of the leading features of Sunsama.
Not many daily planner have hand-holding features like this.
Now, this is what it says on the tin. Hand-holding is where the app better helps you plan by holding your hand through the planning process. Also known as guided planning, this process is designed to refine your tasks with the support of the system - so you don't overload your list and under-load your to-dos.
One of the reasons Sunsama is a quality to-do app for mindful planning is thanks to features like this that help you to better guide your day. How Sunsama does this is when you close down a day or want to plan ahead, a view appears (like above) that helps you to plot out the tasks for the next day, align tasks with weekly objectives, drag in archive tasks and even tasks from other apps like mentioned in task dashboard.
This better helps to close down and plan ahead days for more focused workload. Sunsama also prompts you in this process when you've overloaded your day giving you insight into the fact that with your calendar and to-dos you won't be able to get them done.
3. Focus Mode
Sunsama works well to weave in a clean design anywhere it can.
There's no clutter, no mess inside this application making it a pleasure to use for those who like minimal design and simple productivity applications. We rated Sunsama very highly for this in design because it oozes ease from day one and that bleeds into the mindfulness of task management.
Focus mode is another feature tucked away in Sunsama that allows you to open up a task, get into a clean timer view and allow for breaks. This is an awesome feature for planning, making notes as you go and even for meeting notes too as you speak with someone. You can switch between break and timer mode - once you start a timer, it will count towards the metric "worked time" that calculates how long you actually spend on a task.
When you exit Sunsama, the focus mode continues with the timer on macOS being displayed overlaying applications making it easy to come back from task completion.
What People Don't Like About Sunsama
Here's a few elements that could be better and that people didn't enjoy in Sunsama:
1. Laggy Speeds
Something we noticed in Sunsama is that sometimes when scrolling in the week Kanban view, on the macOS version, there's slight glitches that cause the experience to not be as buttery as other applications like Motion and Akiflow.
This could be very circumstantial and doesn't dramatically affect the experience, however, it is notable on desktop - where the main and core Sunsama experience is. Please note, this could have been a performance issue - but some others have mentioned this in reviews of Sunsama on the channel.
2. Condensed Mobile
If you want to use Sunsama on mobile and you're a keen mobile advocate, always on the go. We'd recommend against getting Sunsama.
It lacks a fully fledged mobile experience and that's part of the core experience and something they speak about a lot when you get Sunsama. The mobile version of Sunsama is spoken about as a "read-only" application which basically means it is designed as more of a list of the list and not designed to be moved, planned with and taken as the base for your management like the desktop editions.
For some people this is fine, mobile might not be important. For others, this is painful. From our own experience of using Sunsama, this is sort of part of their "mindful" and work life balance messaging, well at least it could be. Using mobile and managing tasks there is sometimes messy unless you have something less complicated like Todoist and even then.
Sunsama don't shout that their mobile app is the best and it isn't for what you think.
3. A Pricey Option
As per normal productivity apps get a lot of stick for charging even low rates. But Sunsama isn't one of those application it proudly markets at $20 per month (if paid monthly) and brings a brilliant overall experience that is well-crafted, meaning they pay attention to the process of the application. Nothing is half-shipped and thought out in a process.
Nonetheless, if pricing is important to you. Then Sunsama is pricey in comparison with to-do list application which commonly cost between $3 to $12 per month at most.
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How much does Sunsama cost?
Sunsama is priced at $20 per month or $16 per month (annually).
If this is scary pricing for you, we'd recommend looking at to-do list applications.
To-do list applications typically cost between $3 and $12 per month making them more approachable pricing wise.
Sunsama Verdict: Opinion
Sunsama is a brilliant daily planning application, and if you're on the hunt in the market for one, it provides you with a great mindful experience for planning tasks ahead.
There's a lot to like about Sunsama, and I think a lot of the focus has to be around how you go about managing your tasks. There's good focus on not overloading yourself, making sure the day is done, and also making sure that you're planning ahead with the guided planning features. This is something that really isn't as comparable on the market, for the sake that there's not many Sunsama-like products that are doing so much inside of the application in one.
If you take a look at it in comparison with Akiflow and Motion, its closest competitors, to be honest, as an experience, it stands a little bit separate from them. Although it has task consolidation and team functionality, it does have its own thinking about what it wants to be as a productivity application. I would typically recommend this for people who are looking for a new approach to their productivity.
Much like other applications in this space, it's opinionated, but it also helps you to focus your productivity and try a new, unique type of management of your tasks, and to make you think more outside of the box compared to the regular task management that you expect in other applications on the market.
So, I would say this is best for people with the budget and those who are looking to be a bit more prioritized and focused, and zoomed out on their task management as a whole.
Best Sunsama Alternatives
Motion, Akiflow & Ellie Planner are all good Sunsama alternatives.
- Motion - an AI focused to-do list experience for managing tasks and calendar.
- Akiflow - the most similar alternative to Sunsama with similar task consolidation.
- Ellie Planner - want a lower budget Sunsama, consider this one
For a more in-depth Sunsama alternatives feature. Check this out.
Which app is the best Sunsama alternative?
Akiflow has to be the closest to Sunsama with the ability to bring in tasks and the rituals feature for better guided planning, if you're in the hunt for a Sunsama alternative or weighting them both up, read our Akiflow vs Sunsama piece.
Used by over 10,000 highly productive people. Try with 7-day free trial
Try Akiflow now for a 10x productivity boost
