Real differences you feel within the first hour
Sunsama and Akiflow both promise to make your day smoother, but how they do that feels completely different — and you’ll notice it within your first 30 minutes.
When I booted up Sunsama for the first time, my screen was filled with gentle onboarding prompts: explainers about planning your day, some reflective questions, light integrations. It expects you to slow down. Akiflow, by contrast, opens up all business. It throws a command-bar-style interface in your face (Ctrl + K is everything), and immediately asks if you want to connect your calendar, Todoist, Notion, email… I mean all of it, now. Not later.
I remember actually pausing and thinking, “Okay wow, I need to focus differently depending on which one I use.” Because Sunsama makes you pause and plan. Akiflow makes you quick-add console-style. The difference almost feels like journaling versus terminal commands.
So if the way you work depends on momentum, Akiflow will immediately sync with your typing-first brain. But if your issue is jumping straight into chaos without thinking, Sunsama will literally slow you down and force you to process.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And full disclosure, I’ve bounced between both depending on how scattered I am on any given month.
What happens when you drag tasks across days
Surprisingly, this is a major test of whether I’ll trust a planner. Move things across the week and watch how they handle it. In Akiflow, when I drag stuff to tomorrow, it just moves. That’s it. There’s no prompt, no tracking, no sense of shame or leftover guilt. It behaves like a task box with teleportation.
Sunsama, though… Sunsama makes a *whole deal* out of rescheduling. It’ll ask you why you’re moving it. Often, it logs how often things are getting postponed. And when you come back the next morning, you might get a gentle nudge that says, essentially, “hey, wanna try not rescheduling that thing for the third day in a row?”
This would be super annoying if it weren’t weirdly reassuring. Because it subtly lets you track patterns in your delay habits. That is, IF you’re into the whole “digital mindful self-growth assistant” thing. If you’re not, it might just slow you down without much upside.
Also: when I once moved five things at once in Sunsama via drag, two of them shifted fine, one duplicated, and two reverted back immediately with no error. I thought I was losing it. Eventually found that one task had a blocked Google Calendar conflict, and the others had a nested label issue from Trello. None of those errors showed in the UI 🙃
How each one behaves with calendar cloning
So, here’s the situation I fell into last Tuesday: I had an Apple Calendar integration feeding into Google, which then synced into both Sunsama and Akiflow. I know. Very stable genius move.
Sunsama somehow kept showing duplicate task event blocks that weren’t even clickable — clearly ghost reflections from the duplication. I went into Google Calendar and moved one of the events, and only *one* ghost block inside Sunsama disappeared. The other one stayed but shifted one row down. Could not delete it. Could not interact with it. Like a zombie task.
Akiflow, on the other hand, let me choose whether to display multiple calendars on import. I deselected the mirrored one, and boom — the weird ghosts vanished. BUT, bigger issue: I noticed that when hiding one of the sources, it also stopped registering time blocks I created manually on that calendar before. So now I had to reconstruct what I was actually planning. Super not ideal.
Eventually fixed it by only keeping one sync path active (Google → Akiflow directly), and cutting Apple Calendar out of it. Like pruning weird roots off an AirTag plant 😛
Quick capture quirks I ran into mid-meeting
This one matters when you’re thinking fast. Capturing tasks during meetings is part of how I survive. Akiflow’s universal capture (Cmd + Shift + Space) is instant — pops up anywhere — and lets me type, tab to project list, dead simple enter. The frustrating part is that sometimes those tasks disappear after entry. They’re not deleted, just unscheduled and living in Inbox, but there’s no confirmation. And if you type fast and hit Enter twice too quickly, you CAN accidentally close the capture window before it saves. It’s happened more than once. Annoying but once you know, you adjust your rhythm.
Sunsama uses the daily planning ritual as the primary capture workflow. So to quick-capture, you’re adding tasks inside the browser or app itself — there’s no global shortcut out of the box. You can add the browser extension for this, but I found it sluggish. Half the time, it didn’t load the current tab title or URL when I wanted to save a task reference. Also, in one Zoom call, I tried capturing a task with the extension and ended up with a blank task card. Just empty. Turns out Zoom tabs don’t populate, but it failed silently.
Akiflow here is decisively better in a pinch.
Integration depth vs integration intention
The platforms both say they talk to Notion, ClickUp, Asana, and Gmail. But what they mean by “integrate” couldn’t be more different.
Akiflow treats integrations like pipes. It pulls in items from different platforms and turns them into inbox tasks you can time-block manually. It’s great if you need everything in one place. They have this little lightning bolt next to the task title showing where it came from. What it doesn’t do: update status back in those apps. So I can pull in half my ClickUp backlog, but if I archive or complete from Akiflow, it doesn’t reflect that back unless you go in and do it manually or reconnect workflows.
Sunsama is slower about adding integrations — like, deliberately slow. But the ones it does integrate with tend to behave more responsibly. When I connect Trello or Jira, dragging a task into my Sunsama day automatically syncs status when I mark it done. It’s slower, sure, but cleaner.
I once switched a Jira task status to “Done” inside Sunsama, and 3 seconds later got a Jira Slack update saying “Akiflow — done.” Momentarily wondered if I broke both.
Turns out: I didn’t. Sunsama just fully updated the origin task. Akiflow wouldn’t have done that.
Weird bugs in planning flow and how I dodged them
I mentioned before that dragging tasks in Sunsama can glitch out when there are conflicting calendar sources. But one weirdest one happened when I closed and reopened the app — it “forgot” that I had assigned durations to my tasks. The little time badges vanished for all but two tasks. I wasn’t sure if I was gaslighting myself 😐
Support told me it was probably a local cache error and to Clear App Storage. That nuked all past integrations and I had to reauth them. Worth it? Maybe. But I started screen-recording my ritual builds after that, just so I could prove what happened if it broke again.
Akiflow, meanwhile, has bugs that feel more like race conditions. I’ll drag a task to overlap with another — and visually, it looks fine, but it actually pushes the underlying task 10 minutes down without telling you. Once, after syncing with Outlook, pressing “Today” brought up my Thursday view. Nothing else changed, just the date label. It went back to normal after restart, but only AFTER I cleared cache manually.
The stealth nature of these bugs bugs me (pun intended). Neither platform throws errors when things quietly break.
Daily review features that actually get used
Sunsama wins here. It’s got that cozy 5-minute planning ritual when you open it: What are you focusing on? Anything leftover from yesterday? Want to move it forward or drop it entirely?
It asks that using actual prompts, not just empty fields. And yes, people ignore them after a week. I did too. Then I forced myself to run through the journaling once and realized I’d been carrying the same task phrased three different ways, rescheduling it for six days straight 🤦♂️
Akiflow doesn’t do structured review. Nothing asked me to reflect. No end-of-day check-in. Just raw output. So I tried building my own using Zapier and Google Sheets — export completed tasks to spreadsheet row. Ran great for 4 days, then Zap stopped firing randomly. I’ve rebuilt it twice since. Sigh.
When one will completely break your momentum
Last week I had half a dozen little notes scattered across Gmail, Telegram, Slack, and Finder. I thought, I’ll finally try capturing everything into Akiflow and do one mega review. Found I couldn’t sync Telegram unless I used a third-party IFTTT-style bot. Slack worked better — but even then, channel messages didn’t save properly unless they were saved by me. Couldn’t send OTHER people’s messages as tasks.
VS Sunsama, where capturing felt like journaling about my guilt. But at least when I added links or references, it stored them reliably. I pasted a shared Google Doc and added a minor note under the comment, and the weekday view kept it organized.
Akiflow amps your speed but punishes disorganization. Sunsama builds forgiveness into the flow, but sometimes so much that I delay actually *doing* the task.
I’ve broken both on accident. And relied on both like crutches.