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Polylane vs Sunsama
Two calm planners aimed at two different problems. Sunsama asks what you will do today. Polylane asks how everything you are building fits into one week.
Last updated: 4 October 2026
Sunsama and Polylane at a glance
- Built for
- Sunsama: A daily planning ritual — opening it each morning and deciding what you will actually do today.
- Polylane: A map of parallel pursuits across a whole week, not a single day.
- Best when
- Sunsama: You already know what your pursuits are and the pain is over-committing every morning.
- Polylane: You need to see how everything you are building fits together before you plan the day.
- The trade
- Sunsama: Guided daily planning, plus weekly objectives and time review.
- Polylane: No guided daily ritual, and no tasks arrive from other tools on their own.
| Comparison point | Sunsama | Polylane |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | A daily planning ritual — opening it each morning and deciding what you will actually do today. | A map of parallel pursuits across a whole week, not a single day. |
| Best when | You already know what your pursuits are and the pain is over-committing every morning. | You need to see how everything you are building fits together before you plan the day. |
| The trade | Guided daily planning, plus weekly objectives and time review. | No guided daily ritual, and no tasks arrive from other tools on their own. |
An independent comparison by the Polylane team. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by Sunsama. Official sources: Sunsama features.
The short version
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 are columns and channels are rows, 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.
What Sunsama is built for
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 central to the product. It also supports weekly objectives and daily/weekly time analytics.
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.
What Polylane is built 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, Timeline, 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.
Where they actually differ
- 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 — Polylane keeps related tasks in named batches that reschedule together across projects and channels.
- 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.
When to choose Sunsama instead
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 pulls nothing in on its own: work arrives by typing or as a CSV import, and the only connections are Google Calendar and Outlook. For some people that is disqualifying on its own.
- You plan on a phone. Polylane runs in the browser and installs to your home screen, but it has no native 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.
What Polylane does not do yet
Worth knowing before you switch anything, because none of it is on a promised date.
- No native app yet. It runs in the browser and installs to your home screen.
- No integrations beyond Google Calendar, Outlook and .ics export. Import is CSV.
- Calendar sync is not two-way. Your Google or Outlook meetings show as busy time, and on a paid plan the blocks you schedule can be sent to your calendar, but edits you make to them there do not come back — and we are not going to describe that as two-way sync.
- No AI of our own. Brain dump turns pasted notes into tasks with your own Claude, OpenAI or Gemini key.
What each one costs
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 $180/yr, paid annually; monthly billing in India is ₹499/mo incl. GST. It lifts the project and channel limits, syncs across devices, and exports .ics. It opens with a 14-day trial. Studio, the shared workspace a team edits together, is $120/seat/yr, paid annually, from 2 seats up to 20.
Every paid plan carries a 14-day money-back guarantee, and you can cancel any time. Full detail is on the pricing page.
Running both
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.
Trying Polylane
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.
About this comparison
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 4 October 2026. Polylane is not affiliated with or endorsed by these companies.
If something here is wrong or out of date, email kreativish.ai@gmail.com and we will correct it.