Polylane vs Sunsama

Sunsama is a daily planning ritual. You open it in the morning, decide what you are actually going to do, and give each thing a place on the calendar.

Polylane is a map of parallel pursuits. Projects run down one axis and channels across the other, so you see every lane at once, link the work that ships together, and drag batches onto a day.

If your problem is committing to more than a day can hold, Sunsama is aimed at that. If your problem is that four pursuits are running and two of them went quiet without you noticing, Polylane is aimed at that. The rest of this page is about telling the two apart before you pay for either.

Sunsama wraps a habit around your day. It walks you through picking today's work, sizing it against the hours you actually have, and putting it on a calendar instead of into a list that ignores time. The rhythm is the product.

It also connects to the tools where your work already lives, so tasks arrive in the daily plan rather than being retyped. If most of your work is assigned somewhere else and the hard part is deciding what to do with it today, that is the shape of problem Sunsama was designed for.

Polylane starts one level up, at the pursuit. The loop is matrix, link, calendar.

• Matrix — every project on one axis, every channel on the other. One screen shows where work is stacking up and where a lane has gone silent.
• Link — work that ships together becomes a batch. A script, a thumbnail, and a newsletter for the same launch move as one thing when the date slips.
• Calendar — drag a batch onto a day and the week turns into something you can look at honestly.

Three views read the same data: Overview, Flow, and a Graph view for the connections between everything. Polylane answers the state of every pursuit before it answers the shape of your next hour.

• The unit you plan in — a day in Sunsama, a pursuit in Polylane.
• Where the work comes from — pulled in from tools you already use, or created in the grid.
• How work moves — task by task, or as linked batches that reschedule together.
• What the main screen shows — today, or every project against every channel.
• What a good week looks like — a day you finished, or a month where nothing you are building went quiet.

None of that is a scorecard. Both tools do their own job well and neither substitutes for the other.

There are real reasons, and here are the ones we would give you.

• Your problem is the day. If you already know what your pursuits are and the pain is over-committing every morning, a guided daily ritual will do more for you than another board will.
• You need work pulled in from elsewhere. Polylane has no integrations and no import. You type your work in. For some people that is disqualifying on its own.
• You plan on a phone. Polylane runs in a browser and has no mobile app yet.
• You want a mature product. Sunsama has years of refinement and a support operation behind it. Polylane is young, and parts of it are a first version.
• You want to be coached through the habit. Polylane shows you the board and stays out of the way. It will not walk you through your morning.

Worth knowing before you switch anything, because none of it is on a promised date.

• No mobile app. Browser only.
• No integrations and no import. Work starts in Polylane.
• Google Calendar sync is one way, Polylane to Google. Edits you make in Google do not come back, and we are not going to describe that as two-way sync.
• No AI features.
• Studio — the shared workspace for up to five people at $39/mo — is a founding waitlist, not a plan you can buy today. If you need a shared workspace now, this is not it.

We do not quote what Sunsama charges. It is theirs to set, it changes, and a stale number on our page would help nobody. Their pricing page has it.

Ours: Free gives you two projects, the default channels plus two custom ones, calendar scheduling, and task linking, with no cloud sync and no calendar export. Solo is $19/mo or $180/yr (₹499/mo incl. GST in India) and lifts the project and channel limits, syncs across devices, and exports .ics. It opens with a 14-day trial.

Every paid plan carries a 14-day money-back guarantee, and you can cancel any time. Full detail is on the pricing page.

Some people will, and it is a reasonable answer: Polylane for the map across pursuits, Sunsama for the hour by hour. Know before you start that nothing connects the two. Anything that has to appear in both gets typed twice.

The Free plan needs no card and runs the whole loop on two projects, which is enough to tell whether a matrix is how your head wants to see the work. If it is not, you have lost twenty minutes and Sunsama is still there.

Start free, or tell us what is missing if something on this page is the thing standing in your way. It helps us prioritise honestly.

Disclaimer: Notion, Motion, Akiflow, Sunsama and Todoist are trademarks of their respective owners. Information in this comparison is gathered from public sources and is accurate as of July 2026. Polylane is not affiliated with or endorsed by these companies.

If something here is wrong or out of date, email support@smatsols.com and we will correct it.