Most recommended
The app combines AI chat and automation to create and schedule tasks, and reschedule them as needed. But it shines by forcing you to think long and hard about what you really need to accomplish that day.
Sunsama is a calming, diary-focused task manager. After using it for a few weeks to manage my schedule, I’ve found that it helps me develop a healthier relationship with work.
Its AI manages your busy work schedule. Get tasks and appointments from your email, calendar, and productivity apps, and reschedule if you can’t complete them all. Sunny, the name of the text and voice chatbot, can turn brain dumps into actionable tasks, summarize your day’s plans, and clear up an afternoon of life’s distractions.
However, this app forces you to think through your work more closely than its competitors, as you need to prioritize and organize your tasks and ask Sansama to move them to free time slots.
It forces you to think about your tasks. Sansama is more of a planner than a to-do list. Each morning, I was reminded of the tasks I had planned to work on that day along with my unfinished tasks, which helped me prioritize what to work on and what to save for later.
It then showed me my estimated workload for the day, counting both tasks and meetings, and my desired shutdown time, with a warning if I was overbooked. It also inspired me to write down all the things that are important to me and the obstacles that are blocking my progress.
It helps you focus and prioritize when needed. I immediately liked its focus mode. This mode hides everything except the task you’re currently working on, giving you space to add notes, check off subtasks, and track time spent. When you complete a task, the next task will automatically appear.
For tasks you’re not ready to think about that deeply, Sunsama includes a backlog feature where you can list tasks you want to do this week, this month, next quarter, next year, someday, or never. This is a way to get tasks out of your head by setting a general schedule, but without having to think too much about exactly when you’re going to tackle them.
This is a universal inbox for tasks. Sunsama integrates with many external apps commonly used by today’s professionals, including:
- G-mail and outlook In addition to both email and calendar, iCloud Calendar and email forwarding inbox that supports messages from any email account
- microsoft team and slack To convert chat messages into tasks
- GitHub, Zilla, and linear To tackle developer-focused problems
- concept to work on notes
- Apple Reminders, Google Tasks, Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Planner, Asana, ClickUp, Todoist, Toggl, Monday.com, and Torero Import to-do list
- Zapier Automated workflows and new MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server Connect Sunsama to ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools
Ingesting tasks from Todoist and Trello worked as expected, and being able to add pull requests and issues from GitHub, or messages from Slack to my task list was a nice addition. However, Gmail was the most essential integration for me. You can drag actionable emails to your to-do list and see the full contents of the message without having to open Gmail separately.
You can get a bird’s-eye view of your day’s work status. At the end of the day, Sunsama captures what you’ve done in integrated apps to build a complete picture of your workday. This feature allowed me to see where my time went on days when I deleted a bunch of emails, pushed a few GitHub pull requests, but didn’t add any tasks directly to Sunsama.
AI chatbots can type and talk. Sunsama includes a friendly and amazingly funny chatbot called Sunny (currently in beta). Sunny can schedule a list of tasks on the agenda, change the estimated task duration, and add subtasks. They handled just about every scheduling task we threw at them. Sunny can also clear the calendar for the day. This is a feature that Sunsama’s core scheduling tool lacks.
Sunny processes text and handles dynamic voice chat, which is unique for an AI scheduling tool. If you have any questions regarding the schedule, we will respond with details upon request. I especially liked using voice mode to talk about my schedule first thing in the morning as a way to plan my day without using a screen.
Voice mode is surprisingly functional, especially when competing apps’ voice modes are often just a means to add tasks with voice dictation. I asked her about her schedule for the afternoon, then asked her to add some subtasks, and she completed the task with a natural response. And chatbots have personalities. “Oh, that’s a smart question!” I replied once, when I asked if I had time for one more job.
Adjust your schedule according to your wishes. Sunsama will schedule tasks on your behalf, but only if you request it. When planning your day in the desktop app, you can tell Sunsama to schedule your task into the next available slot by hovering your mouse over a task and pressing X on your keyboard. You can use similar keyboard shortcuts to add tasks from integrations, messages from chat or email, and anything else you need to accomplish to your daily plan.
Automatically adjust your schedule throughout the day, moving tasks up if you check them off early or moving them down if your current task takes longer than expected. When you schedule a new task in addition to the time of an existing task, Sunsama reschedules other tasks as needed. It can also automatically add gaps between tasks for buffers to give you a breather, or to break long tasks into smaller chunks.
Sansama prevents overbooking and instead suggests postponing the task until tomorrow. Also, if you can’t find time to work on a task for four days in a row, the task will be moved to the archives, suggesting that it may not be your top priority. You can turn off this setting if you want to stay top of mind with late tasks.
AI will appear in unexpected ways. Automatically categorize new tasks and estimate how long they will take. Additionally, daily reports include AI-generated emails and task summaries so you can easily see what you’re working on.
These small AI integrations and automations across apps will help you better manage your schedule and control your work diary.
It’s also a Pomodoro timer, diary, and habit tracking app. You can start your day by making a plan and writing down your thoughts, which Sansama calls a “ritual.” And when it’s time to finish work, the app will record your work for the day and recommend recording the day’s highlights in your diary. We’re also adding features like AI-generated summaries of emails you’ve added to your schedule for easy reminders of your tasks.
If you plan out a complete schedule of tasks each morning, it will be easier to stay immersed in your work and complete one task after another. I almost did, but a gong sounded in the background and Sansama’s Pomodoro timer appeared, reminding me to take a break.
The app worked equally well when I was focusing on another task or ending the day, giving me another diary space to reflect on how my day went.
Rather than acting as an autopilot, it acts as a co-pilot, providing reminders to take a step back from work, creating a thoughtful balance between focused productivity and time awareness.
We value privacy. According to Sunsama’s privacy policy, Sunsama’s non-chat AI and automation capabilities are powered by “open source AI models hosted securely in our cloud environment,” adding:[your] Data is processed privately and is not used to train external systems. ” The company’s AI chat relies on third-party providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, but Santhama said they can’t force third-party providers to train on users’ data.
Additionally, all Sunsama data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and is never shared with third parties who don’t already have access.
There are flaws, but they are not a deal breaker.
It takes time to learn. Sunsama requires fewer clicks to set up than competing tools, but you do need to become familiar with its vocabulary. Unlike competing apps Motion and Reclaim AI, it doesn’t offer task prioritization. Instead, Sunsama allows you to connect tasks to “goals” so you can focus on the work that moves your goals forward. These are not difficult to understand, but they do require a change in the way you think about the task.
AI chat is limited to some extent. AI chat doesn’t save previous conversations, so you’re mostly starting from a clean slate. It also doesn’t support image uploads, and unlike Gemini, it can’t recognize written to-do lists. Sunny’s friendly and encouraging personality is fun, but can be a little overwhelming at times.
Automation and AI don’t work on mobile. Sunsama’s mobile apps (Android, iOS) are well designed, but do not include all the features of the desktop version. In the desktop app, you’ll see your entire Todoist inbox, for example, but in the mobile app, you’ll only see Todoist tasks that are already scheduled in Sunsama. (To schedule a new Todoist task on the go, you need to copy the task from the Todoist app and paste it into Sunsama.)
Automatically scheduling tasks to the next available slot is a desktop-only feature, as is the new AI text and voice chat. The mobile app provides AI functionality to file tasks into channels and estimate their duration. You can also use the web app in your phone’s browser as a workaround for some of its drawbacks. In our testing, AI text and voice chat worked well from a mobile browser.
This app does not have a meeting scheduler. The main focus of Sansama is your personal work. No team-focused collaboration features are provided. As such, it lacks a Calendly-style scheduling tool, a feature many competing apps offer. I also can’t find any tools to view schedules for multiple time zones.
However, both Google Calendar and Outlook have built-in tools for sharing your availability and booking meetings, so Sunsama’s omission is less of a downside than it might seem.
It’s expensive. Sunsama’s $25 per month is more than triple the price of Todoist and more than double the price of a subscription to the Office suite in Microsoft 365. Its price has increased by 25% in the past year, similar to price increases for other AI scheduling apps.
Sunsama does more than Todoist, but this value proposition only makes sense if you can juggle complex schedules across multiple calendars and project management tools and find time each day to plan and review your work.
