Have you heard of the productivity app Skedpal? It’s a tool that allows you to outline your work and to-dos, plan when to complete each task, prioritize tasks so it’s clear what’s most important, and then add your tasks to your calendar.
Skedpal users say, “I know what to do and when to do it. AND it tells me if I'm over-booking myself or if I skip a task, it will reschedule it for me,” and “I have found it by far the best way to integrate my to-do list in my day-to-day, and really saves a lot of thinking, planning and worry.”
There’s no doubt about it—Skedpal has a lot to offer. But some great Skedpal alternatives available on the market might better fit your needs. Read on to learn about the best options for AI calendars to schedule your to-do list.
A quick look at Skedpal
Before we look at other tools, let me tell you more about Skedpal. Some of the highlights include:
- One app that houses your to-do list and helps you add your tasks to your calendar
- Follows a simple approach: outline your tasks, add intended timeframes to complete tasks, then prepare a schedule of your tasks in seconds (thanks to AI)
- It considers the timeframe you need to complete the task, your preferred times, task duration, availability, and more
- Syncs with Google Calendar, Office 365 & iCloud
- Skedpal + Asana integration is available to share tasks and projects with other team members
- It warns you if you’re being unrealistic with your to-dos and schedule
Image source: Skedpal
It’s a great tool with helpful functionality for staying on top of your tasks and managing your calendar. As of January 2024, it runs at $9.95/mo plus taxes billed annually or $14.95/mo (plus taxes) billed monthly.
Why look at Skedpal alternatives?
Even though Skedpal is an effective AI task management and scheduling tool, it has some limitations. It might not be the right tool for you if:
- You would rather avoid the steep learning curve that some users experience upfront
- You’re looking for a planning tool that can help you schedule meetings
- You want more features beyond task management
We’ve rounded up five other tools you might enjoy using and how they compare to Skedpal, listed in alphabetical order. We’ll give you an overview of the functionality, features you’ll love, and pricing as of January 2024 so you can choose the best app to help you manage your to-dos and busy schedule.
A quick note: I haven’t used all of these tools, so I’m not going to tell you which one is the best for you to use—that’s for you to decide. Here we go!
Clockwise
Functionality
Clockwise is an intelligent calendar assistant that works on top of Google Calendar (Clockwise for Outlook coming soon) and uses AI to help you design your ideal workday. With Clockwise, you can put your schedule on autopilot and leverage it to create uninterrupted blocks of Focus Time in your schedule. It helps users balance having enough time for deep work, meeting with team members or external parties, and ensuring they have enough time for themselves (via breaks, lunch, travel time, personal commitments, etc.)
Similar to Skedpal, Clockwise helps you optimize your time with AI. But Clockwise takes a slightly different approach to helping you plan your schedule. It’s great at adding Focus Time to your calendar, but not necessarily specific tasks (unless you leverage the Clockwise with Asana integration). Additionally, Skedpal helps users schedule their tasks around meetings and appointments. Still, you can't edit your calendar events in Skedpal—you must return to the source calendar to make changes. On the other hand, Clockwise can assist you and move meetings for you (should you use the flexible meetings feature).
Features
There’s a lot to love about Clockwise, including:
- Focus Time—automatic calendar holds for periods of uninterrupted deep work (and the tasks on your to-do list)
- The ability to mark meetings as flexible and give Clockwise permission to move them while optimizing schedules
- Flexible Holds, so you can save time for your recurring routines and one-off tasks (like your end-of-day walk, for example)
- Clockwise Links—an easy-to-use and even easier-to-share link that allows you to provide your availability with others while actively protecting your preferences
- Integrations with Slack and Asana for better team collaboration
- Enterprise-level security and priority support for the best experience
Pricing
You can get started with Clockwise for free (just keep in mind that some features require a paid plan). Plans with advanced features start at $6.75/user/mo billed annually, with additional options for larger teams and other needs.
Motion
Image source: Motion
Functionality
Motion is an all-in-one calendar app, task, and project management tool that builds a schedule based on your priorities and deadlines. Motion takes your meetings, tasks, to-do lists, and activities and creates an optimized schedule to complete it all (without you spending the manual time and effort). Like Skedpal, it operates as a task manager and project management tool. Motion also adds tasks to your schedule around your meetings.
Like Clockwise, Motion has a Meeting Scheduler tool that allows you to easily create a custom meeting booking page to share your availability with others. But that doesn’t mean Motion controls all your meetings—it still schedules and reschedules tasks around your meetings.
Overall, Skedpal is a nice choice for individuals who need help scheduling their tasks and taking control of their calendars. Motion is designed with teams in mind and works well for planning schedules around various projects and tasks.
Features
Motion offers many great features to help boost your productivity, including:
- The ability to prioritize and add tasks to your calendar to ensure you finish them ahead of deadlines
- Working hours so that you can calculate your tasks and meetings within a defined timeframe
- Alerts when your schedule seems too full or unrealistic
- Project management and planning across every teammate’s prioritized, custom schedule
- Enhanced task management features, including recurring tasks (daily or weekly), custom time windows for tasks, detailed notes for easy access, and banners to remind you to focus on the task at hand
Pricing
You can browse Motion with a seven-day free trial. Individual plans start at $19/mo billed annually, and Team plans start at $12/user/mo billed annually.
Reclaim.ai
Image source: Reclaim.ai
Functionality
Reclaim.ai offers AI scheduling for busy teams. With Reclaim.ai, you can schedule time for habits, block time for your tasks, find the best time for one-on-one meetings, track your time, share Scheduling Links to share your availability, and auto-schedule breaks with Buffer Time. Reclaim.ai is more of a calendar assistant than a task management tool compared to Skedpal, but you can integrate your team’s project management app (Todoist, Asana, Jira, ClickUp) to schedule and assign tasks on the calendar.
Reclaim.ai is available for Google users and has a waitlist for Office 365 users. They provide many example use cases on their website, including defending meeting-free days for deep work, simplifying 1:1 meeting scheduling, auto-scheduling meetings with clients or partners, making time to meditate daily, and so much more.
Features
Reclaim.ai offers a wide range of features—arguably more than most of the other tools on this list. Some of the best features include:
- Habits (or intelligent, adaptive calendar events) for building routines, which can be any activity or task you want to complete regularly, such as reading, taking a walk, exercising, etc.
- Integrations with your favorite project management tool so that you can block time for your project tasks
- Smart 1:1s for automatically finding mutually available times for attendees for one-on-one meetings (and the ability to reschedule these meetings in real-time)
- Buffer Time holds or automatic breaks after meetings so you can find time to decompress and take a breath
- Time tracking across activities, meetings, tasks, habits, and work-life balance trends
Pricing
There’s a free forever plan (Lite) for individuals for up to two connected calendars. The Lite plan doesn’t offer all the integrations that the paid plans do, so keep that in mind if you’re looking for project management integration capabilities. The next tier (Starter) is $8/user/mo billed annually, followed by the Business plan at $12/user/mo and Enterprise at $18/user/mo, both billed annually. Reclaim.ai is pricy compared to the other tools on this list.
Sunsama
Image source: Sunsama
Functionality
Sunsama is a digital daily planner. According to Sunsama, “We deserve tools that help create a healthy relationship to work, ensure our time is well-spent, and that we can do good work, day-in and day-out without burnout.” That’s why Sunsama offers guided daily planning, a unified daily view of tasks, emails, and meetings, and the ability to timebox your entire workday.
While Sunsama integrates with project management tools to make it easy to drag and drop tasks from your project into your daily calendar, it doesn’t automatically create your schedule for you like Skedpal does (unless you leverage auto-scheduling for individual tasks). You add your tasks and work you want to get done to your list for the day.
Features
Sunsama’s features center around intentional planning. The highlights include:
- Integrations with Todoist, ClickUp, Trello, Asana, Notion, Jira, Github, Gmail, Outlook, and Slack (and the ability to seamlessly drag and drop from these tools or turn items from these tools into tasks)
- Dark mode option
- Focus Mode so you can hyperfocus on your most important task without distractions
- Keyboard shortcuts for simplified workflows
- Time tracking analytics so you can understand how you spend your time at work
Pricing
Sunsama offers a 14-day free trial so users can try it out before subscribing. You can get a yearly subscription for $16/mo billed annually or a monthly subscription for $20/mo.
Todoist
Image source: Todoist
Functionality
Todoist is a well-known task management and to-do list known for being user-friendly. With Todoist, you can manage all of your to-dos and get a clear overview of what’s on your plate, assign priority levels to your work, delegate tasks to others, centralize all of your work in one place, and receive Todoist Karma—or points for completing tasks and using advanced features. It’s a robust task management tool, but it doesn’t include calendaring features like Skedpal and some other tools on this list.
Todoist helps users organize projects with easy-to-understand layouts and offers customizations for views (using labels and filters). Additionally, users can receive reminders for time-sensitive tasks on the Pro Plan. Todoist is a great tool for staying on top of your duties and to-dos across all areas of your life.
Features
Todoist keeps users organized and on track with these features:
- Sections & subtasks breakdown for organizing projects and tasks neatly
- Priority levels to indicate the day’s most important tasks
- Ability to share work by delegating tasks to other people in shared projects
- Email forwarding to turn emails into tasks or comments
- File uploads for additional context within tasks
- Productivity visualizations for staying on track and achieving goals
- Integrations with tons of other well-loved workday tools
Pricing
Todoist’s Beginner plan is free and includes five active projects. The Pro plan is $4/mo billed annually, and the team Business plan is $6/member/mo.
Going forward
And there you have it! If Skedpal isn't the right tool for your calendaring and task management needs, perhaps one of the others on this list is. Keep in mind that the best tool is the one that meets your needs and your budget. There's no right or wrong answer. If you're looking for an intelligent calendar assistant to preserve blocks of Focus Time for your tasks, try Clockwise.
About the author
Alyssa Towns is a freelance writer for Clockwise based in Denver, CO. She works in communications and change management. She primarily writes productivity and career-adjacent content and has bylines in G2, The Everygirl, Insider, and other publications. When she isn't writing, Alyssa enjoys trying new restaurants with her husband, playing with her Bengal cats, adventuring outdoors, or reading a book from her TBR list.
