Fluidwave vs Sunsama: which should you use in 2026?

Sunsama organizes work by day. Tasks live in channels and a backlog, you pull them into today during a planning session, and each gets a time estimate so the day adds up to something realistic. It is a deliberately simple model, and its strength is that it keeps you honest about capacity. The trade-offs: tasks cannot block each other, there is no Kanban with status columns or Gantt view, and nothing ranks the list for you.

Fluidwave takes the opposite stance on ordering. Auto-prioritization ranks your list using 12 criteria you can reorder, including overdue, due dates, quick wins, importance, complexity and goals, and the Active filter hides anything you cannot work on right now: future start dates, tasks outside their schedule and anything waiting on someone else. There is a typed Waiting status for a waiting-for list, which Sunsama lacks, plus Table, Card, Kanban and Gantt views, subtasks and dependencies with circular-dependency detection.

Both apps parse dates and times when you add a task. Fluidwave’s input bar also parses recurrence, priority and reminders from a single sentence. Fluidwave tracks habits with streaks, goals and intentions today; Sunsama has weekly objectives, with habit tracking on its roadmap.

Sunsama shows Gmail and Outlook in a side panel so you can read messages and drag them onto the day as tasks. That is a good way to plan around your inbox, but it is read-only: replying, archiving and labeling still happen in your mail app.

Fluidwave includes a full Gmail client. You can read, compose, reply, reply-all, attach files, star, label and search without leaving the app, across any number of Gmail accounts. AI triage takes you through the inbox one thread at a time with a summary, a priority score and a suggested action, and you confirm with a single key: reply, task, archive, trash, unsubscribe or skip. A task made from an email stays linked to the thread, with chips on both sides. The Newsletters view handles bulk one-click unsubscribe, and Teach Triage turns a plain-English note about how you sorted a message into a draft automation rule.

The honest caveat is provider support. Sunsama reads both Gmail and Outlook; Fluidwave is Gmail only. If your inbox is in Microsoft 365, Sunsama’s panel is the one you can actually use, and Fluidwave’s deeper email features will not help you yet.

Both apps are built around time blocking. Sunsama lets you drag tasks and emails onto the calendar, shows planned versus actual time, syncs with Google and Outlook calendars, and its auto-schedule places planned tasks into free slots. The ritual around it, a morning plan and an evening shutdown, is what keeps people paying.

Fluidwave’s calendar has day, week and month views with an Unscheduled tasks panel alongside. Drag a task onto the grid, resize it, or split it across several sessions with the remaining minutes tracked. AI scheduling runs in two modes: an instant one that packs the visible tasks into free time in their prioritized order, and a Claude-powered one that weighs task names and context when ordering and splitting sessions. Both respect working hours and leave breaks around events, and suggestions render as dashed blocks until you confirm them one by one or all at once.

Sync is where the philosophies differ. Fluidwave reads your Google Calendar only to find free time and writes back only the sessions you choose to sync, per session or in bulk, across multiple accounts. It supports Google Calendar only, so Outlook calendar users should stay with Sunsama. Fluidwave does not have a planned-versus-actual review; if that reflection matters to you, Sunsama does it well.

Sunsama’s AI is focused: it estimates durations, breaks tasks down and can plan your day, but it is not a general assistant, and automations run through Zapier rather than inside the app. It does ship an official MCP server.

Fluidwave’s chat assistant has roughly 110 tools, covering task creation and bulk updates, scheduling and session confirmation, email triage actions, automations and view switching, and it works by voice. Every AI change can be undone with Cmd+Z. The visual automation builder is a node canvas: a trigger (an email arrives, a task changes), a condition with Matches and Otherwise branches, and actions on both email and tasks such as archive, label, set priority, convert to task, update status or set a due date. An AI reply step drafts or sends a response from plain-English instructions, live preview shows what a rule would match before you save, and the builder flags rules that contradict or overlap each other.

Both apps connect to Claude. Fluidwave’s Claude MCP connector exposes 23 task and list tools, and a public REST API with OAuth is available for anything else.

Sunsama costs $17 per month billed annually or $22 month to month, with a 14-day trial that needs no card but no free plan afterward. Fluidwave is free forever, with no subscription, no credit card and no AI add-on.

Sunsama has apps for macOS, Windows, Linux, iPhone and Android. Fluidwave runs on the web, as a macOS app and on iOS and Android, with Windows and Linux desktop apps still coming; it is available in 16 languages.

Offline support favors Fluidwave. Sunsama’s desktop and web apps need a connection, and only its mobile app works offline for basic edits. Fluidwave is offline-first: tasks and synced email live in a local cache, so you can keep reading and editing without a connection and everything syncs when you reconnect.

On privacy, Fluidwave states that nobody at the company reads your email, that full message bodies and attachments are never stored and are fetched from Gmail only when you open them, that Google tokens are encrypted with AES before they reach the database, and that email is never used to train AI models, sold or used for advertising. Claude is the only model provider.