Day To Day Planner App, Structured, Sunsama Or Free

Structured is free to download and use, and the two features that make it a daily planner rather than a to-do list, importing your calendar and repeating a task, are both behind Structured Pro. That's from its own help centre, not a review.

Which is the thing to know before picking a day to day planner app. Every roundup on the results page has a "free plan: yes" column, and the column is true, and it tells you nothing about whether the free plan does the job you downloaded it for.

Short version. If you want a visual timeline on an iPhone and you're willing to pay, Structured is the obvious pick and its yearly price on the US App Store is $29.99. If you want your existing task apps pulled into one planned day across Mac, Windows and Linux, Sunsama does it for $17 a month billed yearly and has no free plan at all, which it says plainly. If you want to pay nothing, Google Calendar's own tasks get a start time and a duration and appear on the grid, with one catch on recurring tasks that I'll get to. Everything below came off each vendor's help centre, pricing page or store listing on 15 September 2026.

What A Daily Planner Actually Has To Do

A to-do list holds what you intend to do. A daily planner puts it on a clock. So before comparing apps, I wrote down the four actions that separate the two, because that's what the free tiers should be judged against.

Put a task on today's timeline with a length. Pull your real calendar in so the timeline is honest about the meetings already there. Make a routine repeat without retyping it. And get it back out, either to your calendar or to a file, so you're not stuck.

Four actions. Here's who does which for free.

The Job Matrix

The pattern I didn't expect is in the first three columns. For Structured and Ellie, the free plan gives you a timeline and takes away the two things that make a timeline useful on a Tuesday. TickTick does it the other way round, recurring tasks are free and the timeline is Premium. Neither is wrong. They're just splitting the same four actions at different places, and a "free plan: yes" column can't show you that.

Structured, Read From Its Own Help Centre

Structured's help centre has a table of what's free and what's Pro, per platform, edited in June. It's the most useful page about the app anywhere and it isn't on the homepage.

Free, on iOS, Android and web, you get timeline tasks, all-day tasks, an inbox, subtasks, notes, icons, colour coding and sync. Timeline views are iOS and web only. Duplicating a day is iOS only. Widgets and notifications don't exist on the web.

Pro adds calendar import on all three platforms, recurring tasks on all three, Reminders import on iOS only, Replan on iOS only, and Structured AI on iOS and Android but not the web. The help centre also says Android is "a work in progress, meaning that not every feature of Structured is available yet" and that Structured Web is "still in beta." There's no Windows app. Windows users get the browser version.

Then there's the direction of travel. From the integrations FAQ, verbatim. "It is not possible to export tasks or events from Structured into a different calendar app. Currently, you can only import tasks from your external calendar app into Structured." Your calendar flows in. Nothing flows out. Export exists, as a JSON file, on Apple devices, and the same page says you can't print or export the schedule to Excel or PDF.

I'd want anyone buying Pro to know that before they build a year of routines inside it. The price, per the help centre, "depends on your region, your currency, and the purchasing power of your region," so they don't print it. The US App Store listing does, sort of. It lists a Lifetime at $99.99 and yearly points at $9.99, $29.99 and $49.99 without saying which you'll be offered, and the $29.99 yearly is the one I'd assume for a US account. If you see a different number in the app, the app is right and this paragraph is out of date.

Sunsama Says No Free Plan, In Writing

Most vendors hide the absence of a free tier behind a trial button. Sunsama's pricing page has a section headed "Free forever plans create bad incentives, and aren't sustainable," and under it, "Sunsama doesn't have a free forever plan and doesn't plan to."

I find that more useful than a free tier that can't do the job. You get 14 days, no card, everything unlocked, and then it's $17 a month billed yearly or $22 billed monthly. Apps on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux. The integration list is long and it's the actual product, because Sunsama doesn't want to be where your tasks live. It pulls from Todoist, Notion, Asana, Jira, Google Tasks, Microsoft To Do and a dozen others, and puts them on today next to your Google or Outlook calendar.

That makes it the only app in the table whose entire pitch is other apps' tasks, which is one way of dealing with the fourth action, since the tasks were never yours to export. It also makes it the most expensive by a distance, and if your tasks already live in one app rather than five, most of what you're paying for is plumbing you don't have.

Morgen is the nearest comparison and I've already priced it, including the doubling for paying monthly, in the apps for time management piece. Same 14-day trial, same no-free-plan shape, $15 a month billed yearly.

Ellie And TickTick, The Cheap Middle

Ellie is one person's app and the site says so. Free is genuinely free forever, unlimited tasks, brain dump, on iPhone, iPad and the web. Pro is $9.99 a month, with a yearly toggle that says save 20%, which works out to $95.90 a year if you do the arithmetic, and Pro is where timebox mode, Google and Apple calendar sync, recurring tasks and due dates live. So the free plan is a list, and the planner is Pro. There's a $299.99 lifetime. There's no Android app, and the FAQ says there are no plans for one.

TickTick is the value pick in most roundups and its own pricing page explains why in numbers. Free gets you 9 lists, 99 tasks per list, 2 reminders per task, a basic calendar view and, importantly here, recurring tasks. Premium is US$49.99 a year, the page doesn't show a monthly option, and it's where timeline view, task duration and the multiple calendar views live. So the routine is free and the clock is paid, which for a lot of people is the right way round, because a routine you've written down is most of the battle and a timeline is the part you stop looking at in week three.

That's my judgment and not a test. I haven't lived in TickTick for a month. I'm reading what each vendor charges for and asking which of the four actions the charge sits on.

The Free Route Has One Catch

Google Calendar creates tasks natively now, and Google's support page describes the setting as "Start date and time: Enter the start date and how much time you plan to spend on the task." That's a timeline task with a length, on the calendar you already have, for nothing. Tasks with a date show on the grid. There's a Pending tasks view that lists the last 365 days.

The catch is one sentence on the same page. "You can't add an end time for recurring tasks."

So the daily planning job works in Google Calendar for one-off tasks and half-works for routines. A repeating task gets a start time and no length, so it can't be drawn as a block of time. If your day is mostly routines, that's the exact thing you wanted a planner for, and it's the exact thing the free route can't draw. If your day is mostly one-off work with a few fixed meetings, it's fine and you should stop shopping.

Apple's version is the same shape with the opposite limit. The iPhone Calendar can show scheduled reminders, and the guide says a reminder with a time appears "at that time in the full-day schedule." A time, not a length. Reminders repeat fine, and there's a small quirk in the guide worth knowing, that future instances of a repeating reminder are dimmed and can't be ticked until the current one is. Deleted reminders sit in Recently Deleted for 30 days.

I've gone deeper on the Google side, including how to use it as the whole system, in the Google Calendar for time management setup.

What A Year Costs

The two lifetime rows are worth a second look because they're priced so differently against their own subscriptions. Structured's lifetime is roughly three and a third years of its yearly plan. Ellie's is a little over three years of its yearly plan too, but at three times the money, and Ellie is one developer, which is a real consideration when the word is "lifetime." I'd buy Structured's lifetime if I knew I'd keep it. I'd hesitate on Ellie's for that reason alone, and I say that liking the app's honesty about itself.

iPhone, Android, PC

The related searches split the query by device and the honest answers differ.

On iPhone, Structured is the full app, every free and Pro feature exists there first, and it needs iOS 18 or later. Ellie is also iPhone-first. Both feel like they were designed on that screen because they were.

On Android, Structured runs but its own help centre calls it a work in progress and the feature table shows the gaps, no timeline views, no duplicate days, no Replan, no Reminders import. Ellie doesn't exist. TickTick and Sunsama are complete on Android. So is Google Calendar, obviously, which is the strongest reason the free route wins on that platform.

On a PC, there's no Structured app for Windows, only the web beta. Sunsama and Morgen have Windows and Linux apps. Ellie has a Windows app. TickTick has one. If the planner needs to be open on a second monitor all day, that narrows the list faster than any feature.

Questions People Ask

What's the best app for daily routines? The one where recurring tasks are free, and in this set that's TickTick or the built-in calendars. In Structured and Ellie, routines are the paid feature. In Google Calendar, a routine can't have a length.

What's the best daily planner app for mobile? Structured on iPhone, if you'll pay for Pro, because the timeline is the best of these on a phone screen. On Android, TickTick, because Structured's Android app is still catching up by its own account.

Is there a free daily planner? Yes, several. The question is which of the four actions the free tier keeps. Google Calendar keeps three and a half. Structured free keeps the timeline and loses import and repeat. TickTick free keeps repeat and loses the timeline.

What's the most popular daily planner? Structured holds two of the ten results for this search, its homepage and its App Store page, and the two store listings that rank alongside it are a template-based app advertising 2000+ planner templates. Popularity isn't the question I'd ask, though. Whether the free tier does the job is.

What's the best free digital planner? If "digital planner" means a PDF you write on with a stylus, that's a different product and the task management applications comparison doesn't cover it either. If it means a free app that plans the day, Google Calendar with Tasks, with the recurring-task catch above.

What I'd Do

Write your next Tuesday into Google Calendar as tasks with lengths, routines included, and live with the no-length-on-routines problem for a week. If it didn't bother you, you're done and it cost nothing.

If it did, the routines are your job, and I'd pay for the app that charges for the timeline rather than for the routine, which is TickTick at $49.99 a year, or Structured at $29.99 if the phone is where you plan. Buy Sunsama only if your tasks are already scattered across three or more apps, because that scatter is the problem it's priced to solve.

And keep whatever you pick honest about the fourth action. Structured tells you in its help centre that nothing syncs back out. Most apps don't tell you at all, and the task tracking app piece covers how little any of them publish about what happens to your data after you tick a task.