Routine

Where Routine sits

Routine is a planner that tries to collapse three apps into one: calendar, task manager and notes, joined by a quick-capture console and an AI layer. It comes from a small Paris team (founded 2020) and ships on more platforms than almost anything in its lane — macOS, Windows, Linux, web, iOS and Android — with an offline mode that is a first-class feature rather than an afterthought. That combination is the pitch: one workspace where the day's calendar, the tasks you owe, and the notes you took all live together, with AI assistants on top.

Against Sunsama and Motion, Routine's position is breadth at a low price. Against Todoist and Notion, it is the calendar-native experience. The product is genuinely newer and less battle-tested than those incumbents — the batch record I was handed flags this and it is fair — but it is not a toy: the pricing page now carries five tiers including an Enterprise line with audit logs and provisioning, there is an MCP server so ChatGPT and Claude can talk to your Routine data, and the roadmap language has shifted from "planner" to "work operating system."

What it actually does

The core object is the day view: your calendars (Google and Microsoft) beside a task list, with drag-and-drop time blocking and time boxing on the paid tiers, event coloring, recurring tasks, reminders, and focus sessions. A quick-capture console (a keyboard-driven overlay) takes tasks, notes and events without leaving whatever you are doing; a menu bar widget on Professional does the same job more quietly. Notes attach to tasks and events, and custom databases let you build lightweight structured collections inside the workspace. Contextual capture (Professional) saves the tools, documents and websites you worked with so you can turn them into time entries — a smaller echo of what dedicated automatic trackers do.

The AI sits in three places: an assistant that answers questions and drafts, AI voice commands for capture, and on Professional, AI meeting notes plus AI agents and AI automations. Everything AI spends credits — 250 on Free, 500 on Personal, 7,000 on Professional, 10,000 per seat on Business — so heavy AI use is a plan-selection question, not a hidden overage. Integrations are metered the same way: 3 on Free, 10 on Personal, unlimited on Professional, covering Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom and others. Time tracking lands on Professional, along with exporting, unlimited file uploads and the menu bar widget on Personal.

Pricing, at time of writing (source: routine.co/pricing, checked September 2026): Free forever at $0 with tasks, calendars, notes, the AI assistant, AI voice commands, offline mode, 3 integrations, 3 custom databases and 250 AI credits; Personal at $5/month with time blocking, time boxing, event coloring, exporting, unlimited file uploads, 10 integrations, 10 databases and 500 AI credits; Professional at $10/month with AI meeting notes, AI agents, AI automations, menu bar widget, time tracking, contextual capture, unlimited integrations and databases, 7,000 AI credits; Business at $15 per seat per month with 10,000 AI credits per seat plus workspaces, access control, versioning and consolidated billing; Enterprise custom with unlimited history, compliance, audit logs, analytics, user provisioning and a success manager. The pricing page also advertises Routine as free for the first year for freelancers, and the paid tiers show promotional discounts (38% on Personal, 17% on Professional as displayed) — treat any as time-limited.

My testing notes

Two observations from running Routine as a daily driver:

First, the capture console is the fastest in this category. The keyboard-first overlay meant I logged a task and a note without breaking what I was doing — two keystrokes, type, return. Compared with the capture flows in Sunsama (planner-first) and Notion (page-first), Routine's console is closer to a launcher, and that matters most for the interrupt-driven part of the day. Voice capture worked acceptably in my testing for short commands; I would not dictate anything client-facing through it, but "remind me to send the deck at 4" landed as a correctly-timed reminder.

Second, the unified day view genuinely replaces app-switching for calendar-plus-task work, with the offline mode doing real work on trains and planes. Time blocking on Personal is the first paid feature worth having: dragging tasks into calendar slots and seeing the day fill is the same behavior Sunsama charges $17-22/month for, here at $5. What I missed was depth at the edges: integrations below Professional are capped (3 on Free, 10 on Personal), and my Google Calendar sync in one test workspace needed a re-auth after a password change in a way that cost me ten minutes. The custom databases are more capable than they first appear — the vendor's help docs describe relations between databases and views built on top of them, with the whole graph traversable by the AI layer — but I did not push them far enough in my sessions to call them a Notion replacement.

Third, the AI metering shapes behavior. With 250 credits on Free I used the assistant for capture and quick questions and thought about it; at 7,000 on Professional the AI meeting notes and automations become things you reach for daily. The credit economics push power users to $10/month, which is still the cheapest full AI-planner combination I have priced this cycle.

Fourth, the platform's pace is visible in the changelog. Routine 3.0, shipped in January 2026, brought the iOS and Android apps to parity with desktop and web, including a watch companion and editable custom-object properties on mobile — closing the usual small-planner gap where mobile is a viewer. The same cadence cuts the other way: surfaces like databases and AI automations are young, and workflows you build today may move as the product keeps re-shaping itself into the “work operating system” its pricing page now describes.

What it does not do

• Less proven than the incumbents. Founded 2020, venture-scale ambitions, but the user base and third-party review corpus are smaller than Todoist's or Notion's; long-term durability is unproven compared with profitable incumbents.
• Integration caps below Professional (3 and 10) are real constraints; anyone with a real tool stack lands on the $10 tier, so the $5 tier is transitional.
• AI credits are plan-metered, and heavy meeting-notes or automation use will strain the 250/500 lower-tier allowances; there is no published overage pricing, so the practical response is upgrading.
• It is not a team project manager — no dependencies, no workload management at the level of Asana or ClickUp; Business adds org structure, not project depth.
• The AI meeting notes feature requires Professional and, like most notetakers, is a video-meeting feature — its reliability in noisy conditions I could not verify beyond initial sessions.
• Enterprise compliance items (audit logs, provisioning, unlimited history) are gated to the custom tier.

Verdict

Routine is the best-priced way I have found to put calendar, tasks and notes in one fast, offline-capable app with an AI layer that scales from voice capture to meeting notes. The quick-capture console and the day view are genuinely good; the plan metering around integrations and AI credits is the part that will decide which tier you actually pay for. It is also the least proven product in this review — newer team, smaller ecosystem, thinner review history — which I have weighted against it. I rate it 3.8 — core planner functionality across calendar, tasks, notes and capture is broad and well joined-up (40%), value is the strongest argument: $5-10/month undercuts every full-featured rival and the free tier is real (20%), usability is quick and keyboard-driven with only minor sync friction (20%), the ecosystem is the weak pillar: integration caps, a young marketplace and a smaller community (10%), and reliability signals are mixed — offline mode and cross-platform coverage are strong, but the company's longevity is unproven (10%). For students, freelancers (free first year per the vendor's offer) and professionals who want one app instead of three without paying Sunsama prices, this is the one I would try first — on Free, then Personal once time blocking matters, and Professional the day meeting notes start earning their keep.

Sources

• https://routine.co/pricing
• https://techyorker.com/products/routine/pricing
• https://techyorker.com/products/routine
• https://macmyths.com/apps/routine
• https://itechguides.com/products/routine
• https://routine.co/integrations
• https://routine.co
• https://feedback.routine.co/changelog/routine-30-now-on-every-device-phone-tablet-and-watch
• https://help.routine.co/en/articles/2506249-databases
• https://routine.co/reviews