Sunsama is a calming, journal-focused take on task management. After using it for a few weeks to manage my schedule, I've found that it pushes me to build a healthier relationship with work.
Its AI does the scheduling busywork for you: It pulls tasks and appointments from email, calendar, and productivity apps, and it reschedules when you can't finish everything. Sunny, the name of its text and voice chatbot, can turn a brain dump into actionable tasks, summarize your day's agenda, or clear your afternoon when life gets in the way.
But it also requires you to prioritize the tasks, organize them, and ask Sunsama to move them into available time slots, which makes you think through your work in this app more than in the competition.
It forces you to think about your tasks. Sunsama is more of a planner than a to-do list. Each morning, it reminded me of unfinished tasks, along with those I had planned to work on that day, helping me prioritize what to work on and what to save for later.
It then showed my day's predicted workload, counting both tasks and meetings, along with my preferred shutdown time, and it warned me if I was overbooked. It also nudged me to write down anything important and obstacles impeding progress.
It helps you focus, if you want to, and prioritize. I quickly came to like its Focus mode, which hides all but the task you're working on and gives you a space to add notes, check off subtasks, and track the time you're spending. Complete a task, and the next task automatically comes into view.
For the tasks you're not ready to put that much thought into, Sunsama includes a backlog feature, where you can list stuff you'd like to get to this week, this month, next quarter, next year, someday, or never. It's a way to get tasks out of your head with general scheduling but without having to think too much about when exactly you'll get around to them.
It's a universal inbox for tasks. Sunsama integrates with lots of external apps that today's professionals commonly use, including:
* Gmail and Outlook for both email and calendars, along with iCloud calendars and an email forwarding inbox to support messages from any email account
* Microsoft Teams and Slack for turning chat messages into tasks
* GitHub, Jira, and Linear for working on developer-focused issues
* Notion for working on notes
* Apple Reminders, Google Tasks, Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Planner, Asana, ClickUp, Todoist, Toggl, Monday.com, and Trello to pull in to-do lists
* Zapier for automated workflows, along with a new MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server to connect Sunsama to ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools
Pulling in 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 extra. Gmail was the most indispensable integration for me, though, since I could drag actionable emails onto my to-do list and see the full message contents without needing to open Gmail separately.
It gives you a bird's-eye view of your workday. When you're wrapping up for the day, Sunsama pulls in anything you worked on in integrated apps to build a full picture of your workday. This feature helped me see where the time went on a day in which I had cleared off a number of emails and pushed a couple of GitHub pull requests but hadn't added any tasks directly to Sunsama.
Its AI chatbot can type or talk. Sunsama includes a friendly, surprisingly funny chatbot called Sunny (currently in beta). Sunny can schedule a list of tasks on your agenda, change estimated task duration, add subtasks -- it handled almost any scheduling task we threw at it. Sunny can also clear your calendar for the day, something that's otherwise missing in Sunsama's core scheduling tools.
Sunny works with text and, uniquely for an AI scheduling tool, dynamic voice chat. Ask any question about your schedule, and it'll take care of the request and reply with the details. I especially liked using its voice mode to talk through my schedule first thing in the morning, as a screen-free way to plan out the day.
The voice mode is surprisingly capable, especially when voice mode in competing apps is often just a way to add tasks with voice dictation. I asked it what was on my schedule for an afternoon and then asked it to add a couple subtasks, and it accomplished the tasks with natural-sounding responses. And the chatbot has a personality. "Ah, a wise question!" it replied once when I asked if I had time to fit in one more task.
It adjusts your schedule the way you want. Sunsama schedules tasks for you -- but only when you ask it to. When planning your day in the desktop app, you can hover your mouse over a task and then press X on your keyboard to prompt Sunsama to schedule it in the next available slot. Similar keyboard shortcuts let you add tasks from integrations, messages from chat and email, and other things you need to accomplish to your day's plan.
It automatically adjusts your schedule throughout the day, moving tasks up when you check a task off early or moving them down if your current task takes longer than anticipated. If you schedule a new task on top of an existing task's time, Sunsama reschedules other tasks as appropriate. And it can automatically add gaps between tasks for a buffer to catch your breath or split longer tasks into smaller chunks.
Sunsama keeps you from overbooking yourself, suggesting that you push tasks to tomorrow instead. And if you don't find time to get to a task four days in a row, it moves the task to your Archive, suggesting that the task may not be a core priority -- a setting you can turn off if you'd rather keep delayed tasks front of mind.
AI shows up in unexpected ways. It automatically categorizes and estimates the time for new tasks. And it includes AI-generated summaries of emails and tasks in your daily report for a quick way to review what you've worked on.
It's these smaller AI integrations and automations throughout the app that proactively keep your schedule in order and your work journal detailed.
It's also a Pomodoro timer, journal, and habit-tracking app. You can start your day with what Sunsama calls a "ritual" to plan and jot down thoughts. And when it's time for you to wrap up, the app logs the day's work and recommends that you journal the day's highlights -- complete with touches like AI-generated summaries of emails you've added to your schedule for a quick reminder of what the task had entailed.
With a full schedule of tasks planned out each morning, it would be easy to disappear into work, clearing out tasks one after another. That nearly happened to me -- until a gong rang out in the background and Sunsama's Pomodoro timer popped up, suggesting that I take a break.
The app did the same thing when it was time for me to switch focus to another task, as well as when it was time to finish up for the day, offering another journal space for me to reflect on how the day went.
Instead of acting as an autopilot, it's a copilot, providing step-away-from-the-grind reminders that create a thoughtful balance between focused productivity and staying aware of the time.
It's privacy-focused. Sunsama's non-chat AI and automation features are powered by an "open-source AI model hosted securely in our cloud environment," according to Sunsama's privacy policy, which adds that "[your] data is processed privately and is never used to train external systems." Its AI chat is powered by third-party providers, including OpenAI and Anthropic, but Sunsama says it does not let third-party providers train on your data.
Additionally, all data in Sunsama is encrypted in transit and at rest, and it is not shared with third parties who don't already have access to it.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
It takes time to learn. Sunsama requires fewer clicks to set up than competing tools, but its vocabulary requires acclimation. It doesn't offer task prioritization, unlike competing apps Motion and Reclaim AI. Instead, Sunsama lets you tie tasks to "objectives" to focus on work that moves your goals forward. None of this is too difficult to grasp, but it does require changing how you think about tasks.
Its AI chat is somewhat limited. The AI chat doesn't save previous conversations, so most of the time you'll be starting with a blank slate. It also doesn't support image uploads, so it can't recognize written to-do lists, as Gemini can. And while Sunny's friendly, encouraging persona is fun, it can be a bit much at times.
Automation and AI don't work on mobile. Sunsama's mobile apps (Android, iOS) are well designed but do not include all of the desktop version's features. Whereas the desktop app shows, say, your full Todoist inbox, the mobile app shows only the Todoist tasks you've already scheduled in Sunsama. (To schedule a new Todoist task on the go, you have to copy it from the Todoist app and then paste it into Sunsama.)
Automatically scheduling tasks into your next available slot is, similarly, a desktop-only feature, as is the new AI text and voice chat. The mobile app does offer AI features to file tasks into channels and estimate their duration, and you can also use the web app in your phone's browser as a workaround for some shortcomings. The AI text and voice chat worked well from a mobile browser in our tests.
The app lacks a meeting scheduler. Sunsama's core focus is your personal work; it doesn't provide any team-focused, collaborative features. As such, it lacks a Calendly-style scheduling tool, which is a feature that many competing apps offer. You won't find any tools to view schedules in multiple time zones, either.
However, since both Google Calendar and Outlook include a built-in tool to share your availability and book meetings, Sunsama's omissions are less of a downside than they might otherwise seem.
It's expensive. At $25 per month, Sunsama costs over three times as much as Todoist and is over double the price of a subscription to Microsoft 365's Office suite. Its pricing has gone up 25% over the past year -- in line with price increases from other AI scheduling apps.
Sunsama does more than Todoist, but the value proposition makes sense only if you juggle complex schedules across multiple calendars and project management tools and if you can commit the time daily to plan and then review your work.
