I Used 20 Planning Apps. Here's The Honest Truth.

Spent $347 and 6 months testing planning apps. Most are overpriced garbage. Here's what actually works.

Notion, Asana, Trello, Todoist, ClickUp, Monday.com, Airtable, Coda, and 12 others. Tried them all.

The Problems

Too complex. Notion has infinite features. Takes 20 hours to learn. Most people quit after 2.

Expensive. $15-30/month each. If you actually need the features, you're paying $50+ total.

Overkill for simple tasks. Need a packing list? Don't need a full project management suite.

What I Learned

1. Simpler is better. A focused tool that does one thing well beats an "everything app."

2. Free tier matters. If the free version is useless, the paid version probably is too.

3. Speed matters. If setup takes more than 5 minutes, most people won't use it.