PlanHourly vs Sunsama: Do You Need a $20/Month Daily Planner?
8 min read
PlanHourly vs Sunsama: Do You Need a $20/Month Daily Planner?
If you've researched daily planners for more than five minutes, Sunsama has probably caught your eye. It's beautiful. It's intentional. It has a philosophy about calm productivity that genuinely resonates.
So when people ask how PlanHourly compares to Sunsama, the answer isn't "one is better." It's "they're built for different people solving different problems." This post breaks down exactly where the two overlap, where they diverge, and which one makes sense for the way you actually work.
What Sunsama Does Well
Sunsama is a daily planning layer that sits on top of your existing tools. It pulls tasks from Asana, Trello, Jira, Linear, Todoist, Gmail, Slack, and Google Calendar into a single daily view. Each morning, you go through a guided planning ritual where you drag tasks into your day and set time estimates.
The experience is polished. The guided shutdown routine at the end of the day is genuinely thoughtful. And the integrations are deep -- if you live inside project management tools, Sunsama acts as a calm front-end for all of them.
Sunsama also carries unfinished tasks forward. If you planned something for Tuesday but didn't get to it, it shows up again on Wednesday. The idea is that nothing slips through the cracks.
For teams at software companies and knowledge workers managing cross-functional projects, this is powerful. Sunsama earns its $20/month for that audience.
Where the Paths Split
Here's the thing: most freelancers, hourly contractors, and solo consultants don't use Asana. They don't have a Jira board. They might have Google Calendar for client meetings, but their real planning challenge isn't "I have too many tools" -- it's "I have no structure at all."
If your day is a blank canvas and you need to decide what goes where, Sunsama's integration-first approach means you're paying for plumbing you'll never use. The guided rituals, while lovely, add friction when you just want to map out your hours and start working.
PlanHourly was built for that blank-canvas problem. You open it, you see today's hours, you drag tasks into time slots. That's it. No onboarding wizard asking you to connect six apps. No guided ritual unless you want one.
The philosophical difference goes deeper than features, though. It's about what happens to yesterday.
Brand New Day vs. Task Rollover
Sunsama assumes continuity. Unfinished work from yesterday appears today, waiting for you to reschedule it. This works well in corporate environments where tasks have external deadlines and accountability chains.
PlanHourly takes the opposite approach. Every morning is a Brand New Day. Yesterday becomes read-only -- you can look back at it, but nothing rolls forward automatically. There are no overdue badges. No red counters telling you how far behind you are.
Why? Because for freelancers and solopreneurs, the biggest productivity killer isn't forgetting tasks. It's guilt. It's opening your planner and seeing 14 undone items staring back at you. That's not a planning tool anymore -- it's a shame list.
With Brand New Day, you start each morning with a clean slate. You decide what matters today based on today's energy, today's deadlines, and today's reality. If something from last week is still important, you'll remember it. If you don't remember it, it probably wasn't that important.
This isn't for everyone. If you genuinely need task persistence across days, Sunsama handles that well. But if you've ever felt crushed by a growing backlog in your planner, Brand New Day might be exactly what you need.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | PlanHourly | Sunsama |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $7/month or $59/year | $20/month or $192/year |
| Focus | Hourly daily planning | Daily planning + tool aggregation |
| Backlog handling | Brand New Day -- fresh start each morning | Rolls unfinished tasks forward |
| Learning curve | Minimal -- drag tasks into hours | Moderate -- setup integrations, learn rituals |
| Best for | Freelancers, solopreneurs, contractors | Knowledge workers in tool-heavy teams |
| Integrations | None needed -- replaces other tools | Asana, Trello, Jira, Linear, Gmail, Slack, Todoist, Google Calendar |
Who Should Pick Sunsama
Sunsama is the right choice if:
- You already use two or more project management tools and need a unified daily view
- You work on a team where tasks are assigned to you through Jira, Asana, or Linear
- You want guided daily planning and shutdown rituals built into the app
- Task rollover is important to you -- you need the app to track what you didn't finish
- You value deep integrations with your existing workflow over simplicity
- The $20/month price feels proportional to the time it saves you switching between tools
If you're a product manager, engineering lead, or operations person juggling tasks across multiple platforms, Sunsama is genuinely one of the best tools in its category. It deserves its reputation.
Who Should Pick PlanHourly
PlanHourly is the right choice if:
- You're a freelancer, solopreneur, or independent contractor who plans your own day
- You don't use heavy project management tools -- or you want to stop using them
- You prefer a clean start each morning over carrying yesterday's baggage forward
- You want to see your day as hours, not as a task list
- You find most productivity apps overwhelming and over-engineered
- You'd rather spend $7/month than $20/month on daily planning
PlanHourly gives you a drag-and-drop hourly timetable, a task staging list where you collect ideas before placing them in time slots, focus mode for deep work blocks, recurring templates for days that repeat, and color-coded categories to visually separate client work from admin from personal time.
The app only shows you three things: yesterday (read-only), today (editable), and tomorrow (plannable). That's it. No weekly views stretching into next quarter. No backlog tab growing silently in the background. You can read more about what's included on the pricing page.
The Integration Question
Sunsama's biggest selling point is also its biggest assumption: that you already have a stack of tools and you need something to pull them together.
PlanHourly makes the opposite bet. Instead of connecting to your existing tools, it replaces the need for most of them. Your task list? It's the staging area. Your calendar? It's the hourly timetable. Your time tracker? It's the visual record of how you spent your day.
For freelancers who've been cobbling together Google Calendar plus Todoist plus a notebook plus a time tracker, PlanHourly consolidates all of that into one view. You don't need integrations when everything lives in the same place.
If you're curious how PlanHourly compares to simpler task managers, the PlanHourly vs Todoist comparison covers that angle in detail.
The Price Gap
This matters more than people admit. Sunsama costs $20/month -- $240/year. PlanHourly costs $7/month or $59/year if you pay annually, which saves you 30%.
For a freelancer earning variable income, the difference between $59/year and $240/year is real. That's not a knock on Sunsama. Their pricing reflects the engineering complexity of maintaining dozens of integrations. But if you don't use those integrations, you're subsidizing features built for someone else.
The Founder Perspective
PlanHourly was built by a solo founder who tried and quit every productivity app -- including Sunsama. The problem was never the apps themselves. It was that they all assumed a certain kind of user: someone with a team, a project board, and a manager setting priorities.
For people who set their own priorities every morning, those tools added noise instead of removing it. PlanHourly exists because the simplest version of daily planning -- "here are my hours, here are my tasks, let me put them together" -- didn't have a dedicated tool.
The Bottom Line
Sunsama is an excellent product for knowledge workers who need to unify a complex tool stack into a calm daily view. If that describes your work life, it's worth every dollar of $20/month.
PlanHourly is for people who don't have a tool stack to unify. You have hours. You have tasks. You need to put them together each morning without guilt, without complexity, and without paying for integrations you'll never configure.
Both apps believe daily planning should be intentional. They just disagree on what that looks like in practice.
Start your brand new day
Try PlanHourly free for 7 days -- no credit card required. Just your hours, your tasks, and a clean slate every morning.