Koala vs Tiimo vs Sunsama vs Motion: which ADHD app for work fits you?

The short version: Tiimo builds visual routines, Sunsama runs a deliberate daily planning ritual, and Motion auto-schedules the tasks you enter onto your calendar. All three are good at what they do, and all three still leave you as the one building and maintaining the plan. Koala is the one built specifically for ADHD at work: you say what you have to do in plain words, and it turns that into a broken-down, scheduled day that remakes itself when things change.

One disclosure first: we make Koala (we're Koala For Work, the tool is just Koala), so we have a stake in this. To keep it honest, the facts on Tiimo, Sunsama and Motion below come from each tool's own documentation, published reviews and community threads, and we've named each one's genuine strength before its limit. Our founder has tried most of them and would tell you none quite fitted her, which is why Koala exists. This page is the comparison; the personal version is Why don't ADHD apps work for me?

Quick comparison

What's the gap none of them fill?

It isn't a missing feature. It's that all three still make you the planner. Tiimo hands you a canvas to fill in. Sunsama hands you a ritual to perform every night. Motion goes furthest and places tasks on your calendar for you, but you still enter and manage every one, and it schedules them to hit deadlines with no sense of what you can actually hold, so it packs the day toward burnout. In each case you are the one building the plan, entering the work and keeping it current. Through an ADHD lens that maintenance is the most expensive part, and none of them take it off your hands.

None of them was built for this specific problem either. "ADHD-friendly" here mostly means a generic planner with friendlier colours. A tool made specifically for ADHD at work barely exists as a category, which is the gap. It would have to assume the things ADHD actually brings to a workday: variable energy, days that don't go to plan, the real cost of switching into yet another app to keep it updated. It would expect the inconsistency instead of punishing it.

That is the premise Koala starts from. You don't build or maintain a plan at all. You tell it what you have to do, in the same plain words you'd use to a colleague, and it turns that into tasks broken down and scheduled into a workday. When something lands or changes, you tell it, and it re-makes the day around it. There's no nightly planning ceremony, and no red overdue pile-up when a day goes sideways, because it just makes the day again. Sizing the work to what you can realistically do is part of it, but the deeper shift is that the planning itself stops being your job.

Tiimo: visual routines

Tiimo is the community's first answer for routines. Reviewers credit its neurodivergent-led design and the visual timeline that replaces a wall of text with icons and colour, and it's most often recommended for daily structure, mornings and transitions.

The limit: it's routine-and-life shaped, so it won't weigh your project deadlines against your capacity, and it leans on routine and streak mechanics that some ADHD users find motivating and others find guilt-inducing. We've written about why streaks cut both ways. Reach for Tiimo when the thing you lose is the thread of your day, not the plan behind your work.

Sunsama: the deliberate planning ritual

Sunsama is the one productivity reviewers most often call the best overall daily planner. It pulls tasks from your email and work tools, asks you for time estimates, and flags it when you've planned a 14-hour day. The calm, deliberate pacing is what people praise.

The recurring criticism: the ritual is the product. You have to perform it every day, and it's the priciest of the classic planners here. If a nightly planning ceremony came easily to you, you probably wouldn't be reading a page like this. Sunsama fits the person who wants to plan deliberately and will keep showing up to do it.

Motion: AI that auto-schedules your calendar

Motion is the closest thing here to a tool that carries the load. Its AI takes your tasks and auto-places them onto your calendar around your meetings, then reschedules automatically as your day changes, syncing with Google Calendar and Outlook. For an ADHD adult who freezes on deciding what to do next, having that decision made for you is genuinely valuable, and it's why Motion turns up in ADHD roundups.

The limit is the important one for this comparison. Motion schedules to hit deadlines, not to respect what you can hold, so with no capacity ceiling it can pack the day past the point of sustainability, which reviewers repeatedly link to burnout. It's also the most expensive planning model of the four to start on, with no free plan, only a short trial. Motion fits the person whose main problem is deciding, and who can be trusted to push back on a calendar that's been filled too full.

Koala: built for ADHD at work

Koala. This one's ours, so apply scepticism, and here's the honest case.

In practice it's the difference between owning a plan and describing your work. You say what's on your plate, in plain language, and Koala's AI turns it into a broken-down, scheduled workday, then reshapes that day as things land, get done or fall through. There's no blank canvas to fill, no nightly ritual, no maintaining a system on top of doing the actual work. It plans against what you can realistically take on rather than just the deadline, so the day it hands you is one you can actually start, and when a day doesn't happen there's no overdue pile-up waiting, it simply makes the next one.

Work itself is shifting under all of this. A growing share of knowledge workers now run part of their day through AI assistants like Claude, and Koala is built to sit inside that change rather than beside it. It connects to your assistant over MCP, so you can plan out loud in the chat you're already in and have the work land in Koala as scheduled tasks, with no second round of typing. That's not what the tools above are built for. If that's already how you work, here's how the connection works.

Koala is deliberately a work tool. You open it when work starts, you close it when work is done, and the rest of your life is yours to run on whatever genuinely works for you there. That's the honest limit: it won't build your morning routine like Tiimo, because it isn't trying to. What it's built for, and what almost nothing else is built for, is the specific shape of doing a job with ADHD: the overwhelm of a full plate, the days that go off-plan, the inconsistency that generic planners quietly penalise. If that's the problem, it's the one Koala exists to remove. $24 a month, free trial first.

How do you actually choose?

Name the most expensive failure of an average work week, then match it:

• I lose the thread of my routine and my mornings fall apart → Tiimo
• I never plan, and I'm willing to sit down and do it every day → Sunsama
• I freeze on deciding what to do next and just want it placed on my calendar → Motion
• I know everything on my plate at work but can't turn it into a doable day, and I'm done being the one who builds and maintains the plan → Koala

Most of these have free trials. Trial one at a time, for two weeks, and judge it by a single test: did the bad days get cheaper? Anyone's system works on a good day. The one worth paying for is the one that still holds on the day you had no capacity to spare.

Sources: Pricing, platforms and positioning drawn from each tool's own site and documentation plus published reviews and community threads as of July 2026: Tiimo (tiimoapp.com), Sunsama (sunsama.com), Motion (usemotion.com), including ADHD-specific reviews of Motion noting its lack of capacity limits and burnout risk (choosingtherapy.com, morgen.so). Koala details are our own. We make Koala, so weigh the comparison accordingly.