Diurnal and Akiflow
Akiflow is a consolidator. It pulls tasks out of Slack, Gmail, Jira, Notion and a dozen other tools into one inbox, and you drag them onto a calendar. Diurnal consolidates nothing. It is an overlay you open with ⇧⌘A to write a line, filed on a day beside your meetings.
So the question is where your work comes from. If it arrives in other people's tools, Akiflow is built for that. If you think of it yourself, Diurnal is shorter.
Side by side
| Diurnal | Akiflow | |
|---|---|---|
| Shows your whole day in the overlay | ||
| Pulls tasks in from other tools | ||
| Works with no network | ||
| Books a calendar event as you type | ||
| Captures by voice on the Mac | ||
| Runs as a native Mac app | ||
| Runs on iPhone, Windows and the web | ||
| Organises the week as a board |
One day, one keystroke
Press ⇧⌘A over anything, type “send the invoice friday 10am #admin”, and the day, the time and the tag are read out of the sentence. Hold ⇧⌘L to say it instead. There is no inbox to triage first.
It is native Swift with a local store as the working copy, so the day is there with no network. Akiflow assembles its inbox from services it has to reach.
Where Akiflow is the better answer
Its integrations are the product. Slack, Gmail, Jira, Asana and Notion feed one inbox, so work assigned to you appears without retyping. If other people's tools define your day, that is the comparison.
It pulls work in from tools you already live in, which Diurnal does not do at all. It also runs on Windows, on a phone and in a browser.
Which one suits you
Pick Akiflow if your tasks live in Slack, Jira or a shared inbox and you want one place that gathers them, or if you need the same app on Windows and on a phone.
Pick Diurnal if your work is mostly your own, you are on a Mac, and you want the distance between a thought and a filed task to be one keystroke.
Questions
- What does ⇧⌘A open?
- The day, over whatever you are in: tasks, your Google meetings and a timeline together. There is no inbox to triage first, because nothing arrives that you did not type or say.
- Does Diurnal have a focus timer?
- Yes. 25 and 5, with a longer break every fourth round, counting down in the menu bar. Akiflow has the same cycle, so neither of us wins that one.
- Does Diurnal connect to Slack or Jira?
- Not today. It reads your Google calendar and the line you type. If your work arrives in other people’s tools, Akiflow is built around exactly that and does it well.
Other comparisons
Facts about Akiflow were checked in . Software changes; if something here has gone out of date, it is a mistake rather than a position.