Amazing Marvin vs Ellie Planner

Amazing Marvin is a personal productivity app for organizing tasks and planning work. It supports recurring tasks, time estimates, color coding, focus sessions, time blocking, workload planning, and review reports. Users can choose Day Planning, List-Based, Spontaneous, or GTD workflows, and adjust more than 300 settings, layouts, themes, colors, and feature controls. Calendar sync is available, and imports are supported from Todoist, TickTick, Asana, ClickUp, and Google Calendar. The app runs on the web, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Marvin Pro starts at $8 per month; annual billing costs $96 per year and saves 33%. The 14-day trial provides full access without a credit card, but after the trial users cannot add or complete tasks until subscribing. Support includes personal email contact, and community channels include Facebook Group, Discord, and Reddit. Users can cancel through settings at any time.

Ellie Planner is a daily planner for collecting tasks and shaping them into a plan for the day. Its Brain Dump feature provides a place to offload tasks, while the Daily Kanban lets users drag tasks into a calendar to block out time. Ellie also lists analytics, a built-in time tracker, recurring tasks, and focus sessions. Optional connections include Google, Apple, and Outlook calendars, along with Notion, Zapier, and Siri shortcuts. The app is listed for iOS, macOS, web, and Windows. The free plan includes unlimited tasks, Brain Dump, and access on iPhone, iPad, and web. Pro costs $9.99 a month and adds timebox mode, Google and Apple Calendar, recurring tasks, labels, subtasks, due dates, reminders, and an AI assistant. A Lifetime option is listed at $299.99 a month, with the plan described as one payment and no recurring bill. Ellie says it does not sell user data or run ads, and users can export their data or delete their account. Google calendar access is optional.