Compare The Best Planner Apps

Want to jump straight to the answer? The best planner app for most people is Todoist.

Planner apps can help you stay organized as an individual and help you plan and manage projects within a team. If you are looking for a sustainable way to create a balance between work and life, a planner app can do the trick. 

Through most planners’ unified platforms, you can transform your concentration and improve productivity without the hassle of remembering tasks, losing your to-do lists, or trying to maintain a large work project. 

 The Top 5 Best Planner Apps

• Todoist – Best for personalization 
• Serene – Best for limiting distractions for Mac users
• Any.do – Best for comprehensive reminders
• Fantastical by Flexibits – Best for flexible widgets
• ClickUp – Best for team planning

After reviewing dozens of planner apps on the market today, we narrowed it down to the top five best apps for improved productivity and organized planning. Continue reading to learn more about which option is right for you. 

Todoist — Best For Personalization

Todoist is an excellent planner app to help you stay organized and inspired. If you want an app that you can really personalize, Todoist is the perfect place to start. 

Todoist utilizes Kanban-style boards to help you visualize your tasks. Within these boards, you can add subsections, drag-and-drop tasks, invite your team members, and add labels or filters. You can also sort through these boards by priority, date, and name to find tasks easier. 

Todoist has a simple interface, and the Kanban boards showcase this simplicity with separate color-coded tags and filters. And with the use of emojis to brighten the page, you can make planning more exciting. 

Not only can you customize your boards, but you can also personalize the platform itself with more than 10 colored themes. With these themes, you can match your mood and style to your planning board to inspire creativity. 

Speaking of inspiring creativity, Todoist offers more than themes to do this. With Todoist Karma, you can benefit from a gamification feature that awards points for completing tasks. You can also visualize your productivity trends through activity history, a completed tasks archive, and colorful bar charts to measure your weekly and monthly productivity. 

Todoist is a flexible planning app, and it’s available on macOS, Windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad, and Android. But you can also use it through a Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Edge extension and wear it on an Apple Watch or Wear OS. 

You can transform Todoist into a planning machine with various integrations for time tracking, communication, and automation functionalities. Some popular apps include Zapier, Time Doctor, Monday.com, and Slack. 

You can try Todoist for free forever with a few features, including five active projects, five collaborators per project, 5MB file uploads, three filters, and one week of active history. Here’s a quick overview of the two affordable paid plans: 

• Pro — $4 per month. Includes 300 active projects, 25 collaborators per project, 100MB file uploads, 150 filters, themes, unlimited activity history, and reminders. 

• Business — $6 per month. Includes everything in Pro, plus 500 active projects per member, 50 people per project, team inbox, team billing, and admin and member roles.

Serene — Best For Limiting Distractions for Mac Users

If you have trouble concentrating on everyday tasks or workloads, Serene is a macOS planning app that can help you limit distractions. 

With a very aesthetically-pleasing design, Serene can help you feel calm and focus on the tasks you need to get done. Serene uses cool tone colors that are easy on the eyes and focuses on providing simple task views ensuring you aren’t too distracted with gamification or bright colors. 

Serene uses sessions to help you break down and prioritize your number one goal for the day. Once you’ve identified your daily goal, Serene will break it down into defined sessions that will help you achieve that goal. Each session starts with a reminder that creates a clear plan of action to help you get started instead of procrastinating. 

One unique aspect of Serene is its ability to limit distractions for you. If you struggle to stay off certain apps, constantly check your phone, or need help to stop scrolling websites while procrastinating—Serene can help you with its own app blocker, website blocker, and phone silencer. 

With Serene’s app and website blocker, Serene will prompt you to choose all the apps and websites you usually get distracted by when you first start a session. After downloading its unique Chrome extension to enable its blocking feature, you can finally focus on the work you set out to do. 

With the phone silencer solution, Serene blocks notifications and silences texts and calls so you can stay focused. Each planner session lasts between 20-60 minutes, so every time you begin a session, Serene will know when to shut off distractions and for how long.

Another nifty feature is Serene’s carefully crafted concentration music playlist, filled with ambient and classical music, which is scientifically proven to boost productivity and focus. 

Serene is one of the more simple planner apps on the market, but you can still batch tasks for different views and work through each session at your own pace. 

You also get access to weekly reports and insights that go straight to your inbox and help you track your productivity for that week. If you want to create a more advanced platform, Serene offers a list of popular integrations and webhooks. 

You can try Serene for free, which comes with all features and 10 free deep work hours. However, you can pay $4 per month for all the features and unlimited usage. Unfortunately, you can only use Serene on macOS and Apple devices, but the team is currently working on bringing the software to Windows in the future. 

Any.do — Best For Comprehensive Reminders

If you tend to forget your tasks, then Any.do is the best planner app for comprehensive reminders. Any.do helps you prioritize your daily to-dos by reminding you to do them. 

Whether you need reminders for one-time tasks or recurring tasks every week, Any.do can help you prioritize your commitments with ease. With an intuitive blue and white design, you can easily navigate the application and set a reminder with just a few taps. 

You can set reminders for daily, weekly, or monthly task recurrences or location reminders. Any.do’s location-based reminders can simplify your life and amplify productivity. You can let Any.do remind you of your gate code when you arrive home or remind yourself to silence your phone before an important meeting—with Any.do, you can do anything.

When you set a recurring reminder, you can choose what day and time it will repeat. You can also freely edit these reminders whenever you need to. 

Any.do offers a daily to-do list that can help you prioritize your daily tasks and organize your life. You can view your lists and projects in multiple views and color tag them to set categories. You can also add notes, subtasks, and attachments to provide better context.

If you need to keep track of any progress, Any.do lets you set custom due dates paired with your reminders, so you can track progress while ensuring you don’t miss any deadlines. Any.do is the perfect planner app for the household, as it offers productive collaboration on grocery lists and project management. 

Any.do syncs directly to your calendar of choice to help you manage your time more effectively. However, it also offers a nifty calendar of its own, where you can combine all of your events and tasks into one single app. 

The Any.do calendar comes with a homescreen widget that lets you know all of your tasks and events at a glance. And speaking of a homescreen widget, Any.do is compatible with one of the widest ranges of devices and software on the market today. 

You can utilize the Any.do planner app on the following: 

• Android, iPhone, and iPad
• Mac, Windows, and Huawei
• Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa
• Chrome and Firefox
• Apple Watch and Wear OS

You can try Any.do for free, but its paid plans offer much more advanced and flexible features. Here’s a quick overview of its pricing plans: 

• Personal — Free
• Premium — $3 per month billed annually
• Teams — $5 per user per month billed annually

Each paid plan comes with advanced recurring reminders, customized themes, WhatsApp reminders, color tags, location reminders on mobile, and an unlimited daily planner. 

Fantastical by Flexibits — Best For Flexible Widgets

If you are looking for a planner app that is flexible and customizable, Fantastical by Flexibits offers the best range of widgets and customizations on the market. With weather widgets and calendars, you can transform your day-to-day planning routine. 

Fantastical offers 14 different widgets you can mix and match to personalize your planning app. You can quickly see your upcoming events, tasks, and conference calls from a glance. The widgets come in small, medium, and large sizes, so you can tailor your screen to what suits you best.

Another unique widget feature is Fantastical’s built-in weather application. Instead of stretching your planning across multiple platforms, you can plan your day around the weather within one centralized application. The weather app offers a detailed, 10-day forecast and can display what the weather will be like during location-based events.

Fantastical offers an intuitive interface that you can customize based on your mood. You can choose between a light and dark mode or leave it as is, which is currently a combination of the two. With these modes, you can see your tasks in either calendar or full-screen views of your day, week, month, or even year.

You can plan tasks and events using templates, so you don’t have to worry about constantly recreating them. Tasks also notify you when they are due or overdue, helping you manage your lists easier. 

If you are working with an international team, Fantastical offers timezone support. All you have to do is choose the timezone that is relevant to you, and Fantastical will do the heavy lifting and convert the time on all events and tasks. Fantastical is also fully localized in English, French, German, Italian, and Japanese, so don’t worry about excluding members of the workplace. 

Fantastical is available on Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch. 

You can try Fantastical Premium for free for 14 days or choose between two paid plans. Here’s a quick overview of the rates when you pay annually: 

• For Individuals — $4.75 per month
• For Families Up to 5 — $7.50 per month

ClickUp — Best For Team Planning

Planning projects with a team can be difficult, especially if you don’t have the right resources. But with ClickUp, you can expect to work with up to 1,000 team members and still plan a successful campaign with ease.

Whether you need help with project management, sales, marketing, or HR, ClickUp has a solution for every planning problem. ClickUp lets you visualize and plan projects through customizable dashboards, where you can include Google Sheets, videos, documents, progress bars, and pie charts. 

ClickUp’s design is simple and intuitive while still giving you the option to customize your task views and track progress with widgets, sprints, time tracking, and embeds. You can choose the project view that works best for you and your team, as ClickUp offers a list, board, calendar, or Gantt workflows. 

The platform doesn’t just offer traditional views, as you can also choose from more advanced options, including map, activity, box, mind map, table, timeline, and workload.

You can collaborate with your team in real-time through ClickUp’s Chat feature. You can assign comments, share screen recordings, and receive notifications that bring everyone together. 

If your team is working on a large-scale project, ClickUp lets you break it down into subtasks, which you can view in multiple ways and edit in bulk. Not only does ClickUp allow you to break down tasks, but it’s heavily customizable and lets you create custom statuses, fields, lists, tags, and item types. 

ClickUp will help you streamline your workflow with daily, weekly, or monthly recurring tasks, automated processes, and task templates. You can save the most time with ClickUp just with these features alone. 

You can create a more productive team with ClickUp’s wide range of integrations. With more than 1,000 free tools, you can efficiently transform your workflow. Some popular integrations include Slack, GitHub, OneDrive, Outlook, Dropbox, and Zoom. You can also use ClickUp across Mac, Linux, Windows, iOS, and Android. 

If you are looking for a planner app that offers complete support, you are looking in the right direction with ClickUp. ClickUp offers 24/7 web chat and phone support, including on holidays, and has free coaching and daily webinars. From setup to functionality, you will always have help when using ClickUp. 

ClickUp offers a free forever plan with generous features that are perfect for personal use. With the free plan, you will receive 100MB storage, unlimited tasks, collaborative docs, real-time chat, and in-app video recording, to name a few core features. 

However, if you want to get the most out of ClickUp’s planning features, especially for teams of more than four, you can invest in one of its four paid plans. Here’s a quick overview:

• Unlimited — $5 per user per month. Includes unlimited storage, integrations, dashboards, guests with permissions, resource management, and agile reporting.
• Business — $12 per user per month. Includes everything in Unlimited, plus Google SSO, unlimited teams, custom exporting, advanced automations, and advanced time tracking. 
• Business Plus — $19 per user per month. Includes everything in Business, plus team sharing, subtasks in multiple lists, custom role creation, custom permissions, and priority support.
• Enterprise — Contact sales. Includes everything in Business Plus, and white labeling, advanced permissions, unlimited custom roles, and live onboarding training. 

How to Find The Best Planner Apps For You

There are a few factors that go into finding the best planner app. Sometimes it can be difficult to choose the right application, so we put together this methodology of the three most essential elements to consider before investing in a planner app for your work/life balance and organization.

Software and Device Integrations 

Before you invest in a planner app, you need to consider whether or not your chosen app integrates with other software and devices. You should find a planner app that integrates with various applications, such as Zoom and Google Calendar, to help improve your overall planning experience. 

As you’re looking at the different integration options, focus your efforts on other tools that you’re using on a daily basis. Even if a planner integrates with over 50 different tools, it’s useless if it doesn’t streamline your own planning purposes.

You should also consider the app’s device compatibility. The best planner apps works across multiple devices, such as Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone, Linux, and Android. This allows you to seamlessly transition from your work computer, to home laptop or smartphone.

UI Design

Planner apps should be easy to use and navigate to make your planning easier. You should invest in a planner app that offers multiple color-coded fields, easy-to-read fonts, and customizable templates. 

Your planner app should make you feel inspired and improve productivity through neat, simple, and fun organization features, such as gamification or flexible widgets.

If visualizations help you stay organized, this is going to be one of the most important features for you to focus on.

Multiple Project Views

A simple list or dashboard view can get old pretty quickly, especially for teams that work on large-scale projects. A valuable planner app should offer multiple project views, from dashboard and Kanban to tables and pie charts.

You might even want the option to use different project views for different types of tasks. For example, you might want to use board-style views for work and interactive lists for personal tasks.

Finding a planner app with multiple ways to view your projects can make planning fun and exciting while inspiring you to get everything done on time.

The Top Planner Apps in Summary

Overall, Todoist is our recommendation for the best planner app on the market today for most people.

Todoist is the perfect planner app for personalization and ultimate productivity, with unique platform themes, customizable Kanban-style boards, and gamification features. 

On the other hand, Serene is one of the best planner apps to help you limit distractions with app and website blockers if you use macOS. You can focus on exactly what you need to get done. 

ClickUp has some of the best planning software for team planning for up to 1,000 teams. Any.do and Fantastical are still excellent alternatives if you want more comprehensive planner reminders or flexible widgets for expansion.