Diurnal and Sunsama
Sunsama walks you through the day: what you are taking on, how long each thing takes, and when you have committed to more hours than the day holds. Diurnal has no ritual. You press ⇧⌘A over whatever you are in, type one line, and it lands on a day beside your meetings.
The deciding difference is the network. Sunsama needs a connection to load a day. Diurnal keeps a local store as the working copy, so it opens on a plane.
Side by side
| Diurnal | Sunsama | |
|---|---|---|
| Shows your whole day in the overlay | ||
| Walks you through a daily planning ritual | ||
| Works with no network | ||
| Books a calendar event as you type | ||
| Captures tasks by voice | ||
| Runs as a native Mac app | ||
| Runs on iPhone, Windows and Linux | ||
| Organises the week as a board |
Planning without the sitting down
Press ⇧⌘A anywhere, type “review the deck tomorrow 3pm #work”, and the day, the time and the tag come out of the sentence. The same key closes the overlay, so you are back in your document a second later. Hold ⇧⌘L to say it instead.
It is native Swift, and the local store is the working copy rather than a cache. A bad conference network changes nothing about whether the app opens.
What the ritual buys you
The guided plan is the product and it is good. Sunsama carries yesterday forward, estimates every task and tells you when you have planned eleven hours into an eight hour day. Diurnal leaves that discipline to you.
Its timeboxing drags a task into a block on the calendar and keeps the two in step, which Diurnal does not do. It also runs on six platforms where Diurnal runs on one.
Which one suits you
Pick Sunsama if you want the morning ritual and real capacity estimates, if your tasks arrive from a tracker rather than your own head, or if you plan from a phone or a Windows machine.
Pick Diurnal if you want planning to cost a keystroke rather than a sitting, you work on a Mac, and you need the day to still be there when the network is not.
Questions
- Does Diurnal work offline?
- Yes, once you are signed in. The local store is the working copy, so the day opens on a plane and catches up later.
- What does planning look like without a ritual?
- One keystroke at a time. ⇧⌘A, a line in your own words, and the day, time and tag come out of the sentence.
- Can Diurnal move my calendar events around?
- Yes. It books new events and changes ones you already have, from the overlay. What it does not do is timebox a task into a block the way Sunsama does.
Other comparisons
Facts about Sunsama were checked in . Software changes; if something here has gone out of date, it is a mistake rather than a position.