Sunsama costs $5 more a month for less of the job.

Calendar

Sunsama has a real calendar. The difference is who fills it.

Sunsama's daily view sits tasks alongside your synced calendar, which is genuinely one of its strongest features - it's not pretending to be a calendar, it is one. The catch is every task needs to be dragged into a slot by hand, every single day. Daylo places new tasks automatically the moment they're created, using your existing schedule and stated priorities.

A side-by-side of the same task in Daylo and in Sunsama, index 1.

Tasks

Sunsama's daily ritual is thoughtful. It's also a chore.

Sunsama's whole design philosophy is a deliberate, unhurried daily planning ritual, and for people who want that ceremony, it works. But it asks you to manually plan every task, every day, before you can start working. Daylo skips the ritual: tasks land on your calendar with a time already assigned, and you can always drag to adjust.

A side-by-side of the same task in Daylo and in Sunsama, index 2.

Natural-language input

Both capture from a sentence. Only one places it for you.

Sunsama has a command bar behind Cmd+K that takes plain-English input, so capture is quick on both sides. What differs is the next step: Sunsama is built around you deciding, during the daily ritual, which slot the task belongs in. Daylo reads the time out of the sentence and puts the block there, and you drag it if it guessed wrong.

A side-by-side of the same task in Daylo and in Sunsama, index 3.

Automation rules

Sunsama has no automation - every decision is yours.

There's no rules layer in Sunsama; every placement, every reschedule, every buffer is a manual choice you make during your planning session. Daylo's rules engine takes recurring judgment calls off your plate - add buffer after big meetings, suggest a focus block on light days - so you're not re-deciding the same thing every morning.

A side-by-side of the same task in Daylo and in Sunsama, index 4.

Focus / time blocking

Sunsama's shutdown ritual is great. Daylo's timer is automatic.

Sunsama's end-of-day “shutdown” review is a genuinely nice habit for closing the loop on what got done. For active focus time, though, Daylo's timer runs during the block itself - defending it from new meetings in real time and producing a focus score the moment the session ends, no evening review required.

A side-by-side of the same task in Daylo and in Sunsama, index 5.