Diurnal and Akiflow
Akiflow is a consolidator. It pulls tasks out of Slack, Gmail, Jira, Notion and a dozen other tools into one inbox, and you drag them onto a calendar. Diurnal consolidates nothing. It is a page you open with ⇧⌘A and write on, where every paragraph becomes a task.
So the question is where your work comes from. If it arrives in other people's tools, Akiflow is built for that. If you think of it yourself, Diurnal is shorter.
Side by side
| Diurnal | Akiflow | |
|---|---|---|
| Write freely, and every paragraph becomes a task | ||
| Free, with every feature included | ||
| Runs as a native Mac app | ||
| Pulls tasks in from other tools | ||
| Runs on iPhone, Windows and the web |
Write, and it keeps itself
Press ⇧⌘A over anything and write. In “send the invoice friday 10am #admin” the day, the time and the tag are read as you type. Hold ⇧⌘L to say it instead. There is no inbox to triage first.
Akiflow carries an unfinished task to the next day and marks it overdue. Diurnal asks about a task you stopped touching, then moves it to next week.
Where Akiflow is the better answer
Its integrations are the product. Slack, Gmail, Jira, Asana and Notion feed one inbox, so work assigned to you appears without retyping. If other people's tools define your day, that is the comparison.
It pulls work in from tools you already live in, which Diurnal does not do at all. It also runs on Windows, on a phone and in a browser.
Which one suits you
Pick Akiflow if your tasks live in Slack, Jira or a shared inbox and you want one place that gathers them, or if you need the same app on Windows and on a phone.
Pick Diurnal if your work is mostly your own, you are on a Mac, and you would rather write it down than file it.
Questions
- What does Diurnal do that Akiflow does not?
- It keeps itself tidy. You write on a page, nothing needs a date, and a task you stop touching asks about itself before it moves to next week.
- Is Diurnal free?
- Yes, right now, with every feature included. Akiflow is $34 a month, or $19 a month billed yearly.
- Does Diurnal connect to Slack or Jira?
- Not today. It reads your Google calendar and what you write. If your work arrives in other people’s tools, Akiflow is built around exactly that and does it well.
Other comparisons
Facts about Akiflow were checked in . Software changes; if something here has gone out of date, it is a mistake rather than a position.