rivva vs Sunsama: Start 2026 with the Right Planner
rivva outperforms Sunsama for 2026 planning by auto-scheduling work using wearable energy data, saving 2.5 hours daily versus Sunsama's 20-30 minute rituals.
Struggling to kick off 2026 without your to-do list overwhelming your energy levels and derailing your focus? Busy professionals waste up to 2.5 hours daily on chaotic scheduling, according to recent productivity studies. This rivva vs Sunsama comparison reveals the standout AI planner for rhythm-based auto-planning that reclaims your time.
Introduction: Kick Off 2026 with Smarter Daily Planning
It is January 2026, and the “New Year, New Me” energy is in full swing. But if you are like most professionals, that motivation often hits a wall of administrative chaos by week three. The difference between a productive year and a burnout-filled one usually comes down to how you manage your limited time and energy.
This year, the choice isn’t just about finding a digital calendar; it is about choosing an assistant that understands how you work. Two names dominating the conversation are rivva and Sunsama. While both aim to organise your chaotic work life, they take fundamentally different approaches. One focuses on mindfulness and manual rituals, while the other prioritises automation and biological rhythm. Here is how to decide which tool belongs in your 2026 toolkit.
What Are rivva and Sunsama?
At their core, both applications are daily planners that integrate with your existing tools (like Google Calendar, Gmail, Slack, and Asana) to create a unified view of your day. However, they solve the productivity problem from opposite angles.
Sunsama is a “digital mindfulness” tool. It forces you to slow down and manually plan your day, ensuring you are intentional about what you take on. It is built for people who want to feel more in control through structured rituals.
rivva, on the other hand, is an AI-powered productivity assistant. It assumes you are already busy and don’t have time for lengthy planning sessions. Instead, it uses automation and energy data to build your schedule for you, acting more like a proactive executive assistant than a passive calendar.
“Sunsama represents a mature approach to productivity: not more features or faster completion, but thoughtful planning and intentional work.” - Dupple Review
rivva: The Energy-Aware AI Productivity Assistant
rivva distinguishes itself by looking at you, not just your work. It integrates directly with health data from wearables (like Apple Watch or Oura) to understand your physical state. If you slept poorly or your recovery is low, rivva knows.
One of the best parts of the platform is Nia, your intelligent AI assistant. Unlike standard algorithms that just slot tasks into empty spaces, Nia coaches you on capacity. If you try to schedule deep work when your biometric data suggests you are depleted, Nia will suggest a change. It combines this with smart auto-scheduling and unique features like extracting tasks directly from emails, minimising the admin work required to keep your to-do list current.
Sunsama: The Guided Daily Planner for Intentional Work
Sunsama is less about automation and more about habit formation. It markets itself as a tool for “calm” and “intentionality.” The platform is famous for its guided planning rituals, which prompt you to review yesterday’s work and hand-pick tasks for today before you start working.
The interface creates a Kanban-style view where you drag and drop tasks into your calendar. It is highly visual and tactile. Sunsama encourages you to set a rigid end time for your workday, helping to enforce work-life boundaries. If you are the type of person who enjoys the process of journaling or bullet journaling, Sunsama digitises that experience, forcing you to confront exactly how much time your tasks will truly take.
Head-to-Head Comparison: Features and Functionality
When choosing between these two, you are essentially choosing between automation (rivva) and manual control (Sunsama). rivva wants to save you time by doing the heavy lifting; Sunsama wants you to spend time planning to gain clarity.
Here is the thing: rivva is built for speed and biological reality. It pulls tasks from your email and schedules them based on your energy levels automatically. Sunsama requires you to manually import and drag tasks onto your calendar every single morning.
Scheduling and Auto-Planning
rivva takes a “zero-touch” approach. You connect your calendars and task lists, and its smart auto-scheduling engine helps create feasible plans for you. It respects your preferred working hours and meeting buffers without you needing to drag blocks around. You can chat with Nia (your AI assistant) to readjust your day or schedule tasks & meetings.
Sunsama does not auto-schedule in the same way. While it helps you time-block, you must make the decisions. You drag a task from your list to a time slot. This gives you total control, but it also means if your day goes off track, you have to manually rearrange the puzzle pieces yourself.
AI Coaching and Task Support
Sunsama’s coaching is largely static—it warns you if you plan more than 5 hours of deep work, but it doesn’t know you. It uses generic best practices.
rivva’s assistant, Nia, offers dynamic coaching. Because it connects to health apps, it provides energy insights specific to your current state. If your recovery score is high, Nia might encourage you to tackle that difficult project morning. If you are dragging, it might suggest moving admin tasks to the afternoon. It also features energy-aware reminders, alerting you when it is time to switch gears based on your rhythm.
Integrations and Workflow Fit
Both tools play nicely with other tools, but in different ways.
Sunsama excels at unifying these into a single inbox that you process each morning. It forces you to look at every Jira ticket or Asana task and decide, “Am I doing this today?” It allows direct integrations with these tools.
On the other hand, rivva extracts tasks from these tools by connecting to your email and pulling task notifications that have landed in your inbox. It covnerts actionable emails into schedulable tasks without you needing to copy-paste or switch tabs.
rivva also offers two-way Google Calendar sync (connecting up to 4 calendars), ensuring your personal appointments block your work availability automatically.
How rivva Works: Rhythm-Based Auto-Planning
rivva operates on the belief that time management is useless without energy management. The setup process is quick: you connect your wearable device (or input sleep/energy details manually), your calendar(s), and your email(s). From there, the system takes over.
Instead of asking you to plan every day, rivva looks at your deadlines and your available “energy slots” to place work where it belongs. It is particularly powerful for neurodivergent users or those who struggle with decision fatigue, as it removes the “what should I do next?” paralysis.
Task Capture and Prioritisation
Capturing tasks in rivva is seamless. You can add tasks from anywhere via the mobile app or web interface. The standout feature here is the automatic task extraction from email.
While other tools require you to forward emails or use a plugin, rivva analyses your inbox to find commitments and turns them into tentative tasks. This catches the things that usually slip through the cracks. Once captured, the AI helps prioritise them based on your deadlines and historical work patterns, ensuring urgent items don’t get buried behind busy work.
Energy-Aligned Scheduling
This is rivva’s secret sauce. By integrating with your Apple Health and wearables, rivva understands your energy level.
If you use an Apple Watch or Oura Ring, rivva imports your sleep and recovery data. It then matches high-demand tasks with your peak biological windows. For example, if you are a morning person (a lark) with a high recovery score, rivva will slot your most cognitively demanding work for 9:00 AM. If you are an owl or have low energy, it adapts the plan to prevent burnout.
Real-Time Nudges and Adaptations
Plans rarely survive contact with reality. When a meeting runs late or an emergency drops in, rivva adapts instantly.
Nia provides real-time coaching throughout the day. If you are spending too long on a task, it nudges you. If you are powering through, it reminds you to take a break. Because of the instant sync between devices (iOS and web), these changes reflect everywhere immediately. You don’t have to stop and reshuffle your calendar; rivva does the “calendar Tetris” for you in the background.
How Sunsama Works: Ritual-Driven Time Blocking
Sunsama’s workflow is rigid by design. It demands that you start and end your day with specific rituals. The philosophy is that the act of planning is a meditation that prepares your brain for work.
You cannot simply use Sunsama; you must adopt its lifestyle. This is excellent for people who feel scattered and need a structured container for their day, but it can feel like a chore if you just want to get to work.
Daily and Weekly Planning Rituals
Every morning, Sunsama guides you through a multi-step process. First, you review what you did yesterday. Then, you pull in tasks from your integrations (Asana, Gmail, etc.). Finally, you drag those tasks onto your calendar to estimate how long they will take.
This process typically takes 15 to 30 minutes. While effective for clarity, it is a significant time investment. There is also a weekly review ritual to look back on your progress.
Focus Mode and Workload Controls
Once your plan is set, Sunsama offers a “Focus Mode.” When you click play on a task, everything else fades away, and you see only the task at hand and a timer.
This is helpful for single-tasking. Sunsama also tracks your “actual” time versus your “planned” time. If you consistently underestimate tasks, the system highlights this so you can adjust your expectations. It also warns you if you try to plan more work than is reasonable for one day, acting as a guardrail against overcommitment.
Pricing and Plans: Value for Money
In the current economic climate, value matters. Both tools are premium SaaS products, but there is a distinct price difference.
rivva’s quarterly plan at roughly $10.50 per month is significantly cheaper than Sunsama’s annual rate. Considering rivva includes features like energy insights and task extraction, it offers a higher “feature-per-dollar” ratio.
Pros and Cons: rivva vs Sunsama
No tool is perfect. Your choice depends on whether you value automation or manual control.
rivva’s Standout Strengths and Drawbacks
Strengths:
True Automation: The minimal planning promise is real. It saves administrative time.
Biological Intelligence: It is the only planner that cares if you are tired. The energy tracking prevents burnout.
Price: It is cheaper than Sunsama
AI Assistant: The AI assistant provides proactive coaching rather than just passive tracking.
Drawbacks:
Less Manual Control: If you love dragging boxes around a calendar, rivva’s auto-scheduling might feel like it is taking the wheel too often.
Learning Curve: Trusting an AI to plan your day requires a mindset shift from traditional manual planning.
Sunsama’s Key Advantages and Limitations
Strengths:
Mindfulness: The rituals force you to stop and think, which can reduce anxiety.
Unified Inbox: excellent for triaging tasks from many different tools manually.
Aesthetics: The interface is beautiful, calming, and highly polished.
Drawbacks:
High Friction: You must do the work every day. If you skip the planning ritual, the system falls apart.
Cost: At $20/month, it can be one of the more expensive planners on the market, especially since it doesn’t have AI features.
No Mobile Planning: The mobile app is a companion for viewing, not for the heavy lifting of planning rituals (which are desktop-first).
Best Practices for AI Planners in 2026
To get the most out of these tools, you need to feed them the right data.
Trust the Sync: Ensure all your calendars (personal and work) are connected. rivva’s two-way Google Calendar sync only works if you give it access to everything that takes up your time.
Be Honest About Time: If a task takes 2 hours, don’t book it for 30 minutes. Tools like rivva learn from your history, but honesty helps them learn faster.
Use the Mobile App: Productivity happens away from the desk. rivva’s instant sync between devices means you can capture a thought on your phone and find it scheduled on your desktop instantly.
Common Mistakes to Avoid with Daily Planners
The biggest mistake is treating these tools like magic wands. They are assistants, not miracle workers.
Ignoring Energy Levels: Scheduling deep work at 4:00 PM on a Friday is a recipe for failure. Use rivva’s energy-based planner to match tasks to your rhythm.
Over-stuffing the Calendar: Just because the AI can fit 12 tasks into a day doesn’t mean you should do them. Listen to Nia’s capacity warnings.
Skipping the Review: Even with automation, take 30 seconds to glance at rivva’s plan. AI is smart, but it doesn’t know your boss just called with an emergency unless you tell it.
Who Should Choose rivva Over Sunsama?
The choice is clear based on your working style.
Choose rivva if:
You are overwhelmed and want automation to handle the admin.
You have fluctuating energy levels or are neurodivergent and need a tool that adapts to you.
You want value for money ($10.50-14/mo vs $16-20/mo).
You want a tool that works in the background (auto-scheduling, email extraction) rather than requiring daily maintenance.
Choose Sunsama if:
You enjoy the ritual of manual planning and want to spend 20 minutes each morning organising.
You need a strict “shutdown” routine to stop working.
You prefer a manual drag-and-drop interface over AI automation.
Conclusion: Power Up Your Year with rivva
As we move through 2026, the definition of productivity is shifting from simply “doing more” to “doing what matters when you are best able to do it.”
Sunsama is a fantastic tool for those who need to force themselves to slow down. But for the modern professional who wants to reclaim time and work in harmony with their biology, rivva is the superior choice. With features like an AI assistant, energy-based scheduling, and automatic task extraction, it is not just a planner—it is a proactive partner in your success.
Start your 7-day free trial with rivva today and see what it feels like to have a schedule that actually fits your life.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is rivva available on desktop?
rivva offers web access optimised for desktop browsers alongside a native iOS app (Android coming soon), providing instant sync across all platforms for seamless use on any device.
Does Sunsama have a standalone mobile app for planning?
Sunsama’s mobile app serves as a companion for viewing schedules and tasks, but full planning rituals require the web or desktop version due to its drag-and-drop interface.
Can rivva integrate with wearables other than Apple Watch and Oura?
Yes, rivva connects with Whoop and other health trackers via Apple Health, importing sleep, recovery, and heart rate data for energy-aware scheduling.
What happens if I miss a day of planning in Sunsama?
Sunsama’s system relies on daily rituals, so skipping leads to an unstructured day without auto-recovery; you must manually catch up the next morning via task review.
Are there team features in rivva or Sunsama?
Neither offers native team collaboration like shared workspaces; both focus on individual planning with personal integrations to tools for team workflows.