3 min read

Battle of a better planner: Sunsama Vs Routine.

Battle of a better planner: Sunsama Vs Routine.
Image by Author

the most advanced planner vs the planner for the productive people.

A big part of our everyday goes inside planning, whether you do it consciously or unconsciously.

You do plan your day, week, month and years. Just a year or so, I have started considering planner an essential tool in my everyday life and the realization came from the book ‘GRIP by Rick Pastoor. Highly recommended book, here’s a short review:

GRIP Book — Part 1, Grip & Your WEEK
Here’s my key learning from book — GRIP by Rick Pastoor

Everything inside the umbrella of Personal Productivity Space excites me and I have developed a special love for PLANNER. For me, a planner is a system which helps me in clearing my mental space by putting all the important events, tasks and notes inside the piece of a digital tool and I can track my schedule, progress of a specific goal or project just by a glance.

I have started using calendar to plan my day with Amie and have used it as a combination tool of Task + Planner and slowly fall in for the design and simplicity of Cron. Later on, I started exploring this very exclusive space of Planner.

Now, As my go to planner I am using Routine and recently explored Sunsama, Here’s my thoughts:

Image from Author; Image Left — Routine & Right — Sunsama
  • Routine has a specific Today View with tasks and events in an unified timeline view.
  • Sunsama offers a space for plan and visualize your day with key tasks and schedule.
Image from Author: Image Left — Sunsama and Right — Routine

Task or event entry in both the planner is very simple and intuitive, the difference is Routine supports Natural Language Processing and Sunsama has option of go for task or event plan separately.

Image from Author: Image left — Sunsama and Right — Routine

Both the planner supports keyboard shortcuts; Routine has a hotkey of Ctrl + Spacebar for quick capture, current task, task of the day, next events — An amazing idea and execution. With Sunsama keyboard shortcuts you can quickly capture tasks or event by Ctrl+Shift+A.

Image courtesy Author: Image left — Sunsama and Right — Routine

Most interesting and specific features sets that makes each one special:

Sunsama:

  • Guided plan your day — a step to step guided support in planning your productive day
  • Weekly objective — one of key idea of getting things done is to set your weekly objective and keep it close.

Routine:

  • Detailed Notes with Pages (markdown support) — kind of hybrid note-taking app, liked the idea of plan your key goals of monthly and quarterly basis.
  • NLP (Natural language support)
Image from Author: Left — Sunsama and Right — Routine

Integrations: Sunsama & Routine

  • Sunsama: A very long list of integrations supported by Sunsama includes Todoist, Outlook, Gmail, Asana, Notion, Trello, ClickUp, Github, Jeera, Slack…
  • Routine: Google workspace, Notion, Zapier and Trello, Asana, ClickU[ and Slack are on the product roadmap.

The above points are a few which helps me sail thru my days and weeks. For you it might similar or different, you can checkout both the Planner link below:

Price and Availability:

Sunsama offers 14 days free trial and after that 16 US$ per month (paid annually) and 20 US$ per month (paid monthly)

Sunsama is available on iOS & Android and also Web, Desktop (Windows)

Routine offers a free starter plan & Professional plan in pipeline at US$ 15 per month

Routine has iOS app, MacOS, Web and Windows app.

Thanks for reading.

Keep reading, keep sharing.

Astu.