4 Best Routine Alternatives for Daily Planning in 2025

Routine is a popular tool for planning your week, managing tasks & organizing your workload. Here's our most recommend alternatives to Routine.

Routine is one of the hyped to-do apps from the productivity space, but it isn't for everyone.

Among Routine's many features, like quickly capturing events, tasks, and notes, weekly calendar management, and upcoming abilities with meeting management, it might not live up to your needs, or you need an alternative that could be more suitable for everyday needs.

You have come to the right place.

Many people seek something visually similar to Routine, focusing on time-blocking, a balance of task consolidation (the ability to bring tasks into your system), and the ability to take notes. So let's find tools similar to these features that better match you with suitable alternatives.

Many people enjoy Routine, but here are some of the reasons you might be seeking out an alternative option that does a similar job with task management, time blocking, and week planning.

Here's why some people have been looking to leave Routine, and it might be why you have considered it too:

Slow Development

Routine has a small development team, which means it cannot ship features as fast as others, but it does a good job. This speed might be a factor for some people when looking at alternatives.

Lack of Planning

While your week-planning abilities are good, maybe you want some assistance. This is commonly referred to as guided planning and is becoming very popular in the daily planning market.

1. Sunsama

Sunsama presents itself as a similar experience to Routine.

The design is similar, with a cleaner, more minimal look than others on the market. While Routine has the week planning abilities, this is front and center in Sunsama, allowing you to time-block and jump into kanban week view, too. In contrast, Routine puts you into today's view more commonly, which is a preference.

Many people like Sunsama thanks to its focus on guided planning, which Routine doesn’t offer. Guided planning is a concept that helps you organize your week ahead inside of Sunsama. However, this is something that Routine lacks, as it’s much more manual to organize everything from your tasks and week calendar to your notes. What Routine does better is note collection, allowing you to capture quick notes and expand documents, which isn’t as robust inside of Sunsama. Still, many people view Sunsama as a mindful, more focused alternative with timer abilities, full task consolidation, and guided planning functions.

Pros:

• The most powerful for mindful planning
• Easy-to-use planning experience
• Comes with task consolidation
• Brings a good quality app for tasks

Cons:

• Can be expensive for many

Pricing:

Sunsama comes at $16 per month, billed annually, or $20 per month, billed monthly. No free plan.

2. Motion

Motion as a Routine alternative is very different. Motion presents itself as an AI-based scheduling tool that uses artificial intelligence to organize your tasks for you, whereas inside of Routine it’s much more manual as a way to organize what’s ahead for the week. There’s also much more focus on week planning, and inside of Motion you also get the ability to book meetings externally and manage projects even if you’re using it as an individual.

It looks like Routine wants to introduce more collaborative abilities in the future, but for now, Motion has much more powerful functions for AI and reducing the burden of productivity administration. Routine is also cheaper than Motion, but not by a vast amount. In the premium packages, there is only about a seven-dollar difference in monthly pricing, which isn’t a huge difference considering the additional features you get with Motion.

Pros:

• Reduces productivity administration using AI
• Auto-schedules and moves tasks based on priorities
• Comes with project management & calendar features
• Developing new features & better team features
• Good for replacing tools like Calendly for meeting bookings

Cons:

• Lacks task consolidation made popular in Akiflow & Sunsama
• Many people find Motion to be an expensive option
• AI re-scheduling can be aggressive

Pricing:

Motion is priced at $19 per month (annual) or $34 per month (monthly). There is no free plan.

3. Akiflow

Akiflow presents itself as a balance between Sunsama and Motion, allowing you to block time, which you can do in Routine, and better manage tasks from other applications, commonly known as task consolidation. Now, many people prefer Akiflow to Routine, thanks to its week planner nature of it, as well as the guided planning functions, which are good, but not as good as Sunsama’s abilities.

Many people find that Akiflow is much more comprehensive as a planning system. It helps you see all types of calendars while still being able to book meetings externally and plan tasks from other applications, scaling beyond some of the basic functions you see in Routine.

If you’re looking for a balance between Sunsama, Routine, and Motion, then you’ll look at Akiflow.

Pros:

• Turns all your tasks into one dashboard
• Consolidation for bringing tasks in from other task apps
• It comes with guided planning assistance for planning ahead
• Great calendar customization and meeting scheduling features
• Comes with regular updates, including new AI features

Cons:

• It is deemed expensive by many people
• Doesn't come with advanced AI features like Motion

Pricing:

Akiflow is priced at $19 per month or $34 per month, billed monthly. There is no free plan.

4. Ellie Planner

Ellie Planner is an interesting Routine alternative because it’s much more lightweight as planning software. You can use time boxing and systems like that to better manage how you’re focusing on your workload. It also is simple, like Routine, but Ellie Planner has much more of a structure to it that allows you to help plan and, in some ways, feels like the Kanban abilities you find inside of Sunsama.

Ellie Planner is independently developed like Routine, but don’t let this deter you. The development cycle is similar to Routine and presents good upgrades when they do come. There is also a mobile version that works very well. Ellie Planner is a good alternative to Routine if you’re looking for something lighter, but also similar to Akiflow and Sunsama, but at a fraction of the cost with less functionality.

Pros:

• Easy to use and get started with
• Apple & Google Calendar integrations
• Time-boxing concepts and features
• Developed independently

Cons:

• Features aren't released routinely
• Lacks Android app

Pricing:

Ellie Planner is $9.99 per month and has a freemium tier.