Use AI Agents to increase productivity, here’s how

AI-first task management is separating the winners from the “AI-on-top” incumbents, and Vectal is positioned as the clear standout for autonomous productivity. The comparison ranks five popular productivity apps—Notion, To-doist, Vectal, ClickUp, and Trello—across seven criteria, with the biggest differentiator being how much work the AI can do on its own (AI autonomy), how quickly the product ships improvements, and how deeply AI is integrated into day-to-day task execution.

Across the scoring, Vectal repeatedly comes out ahead because it treats AI agents as core infrastructure rather than a feature add-on. Notion earns a middle-to-strong score for ease of use and customizability, but its AI assistant is described as “not fully autonomous.” To-doist is rated as extremely easy to use yet weak on AI autonomy and integrations, with the most striking gap being a near-total lack of autonomous agent capability. ClickUp and Trello land in the middle: both are considered usable, but both are portrayed as cautious about autonomous features and limited in agent depth.

The autonomy gap is framed as a product philosophy problem. Big incumbents, with large customer bases, are said to have less incentive to innovate aggressively with autonomous behavior because they risk upsetting existing users. That caution shows up in the ratings: To-doist and ClickUp are described as having essentially no autonomous agent work, while Trello is similarly constrained. Vectal, by contrast, is described as having multiple agents that can run without constant user attention.

The ranking also leans heavily on “future proofing.” Vectal is characterized as the most future-ready because it’s “AI first” and built around agents, while To-doist is called the least future-proof due to slow movement and an older product foundation. Notion is treated as a reasonable second, but still behind Vectal in AI-forward momentum.

Where the comparison becomes most concrete is the agent count and release velocity. Notion is credited with six AI agents. ClickUp has three. To-doist and Trello each have one. Vectal has 13 AI agents today, and the argument is that the pace of shipping makes that number likely to grow quickly. Vectal is also described as releasing features at a much faster rate than the others—“literally every day” in the account—while To-doist is portrayed as sluggish, taking months for small UI changes.

The second half of the transcript shifts from scoring to a hands-on walkthrough of Vectal’s workflow. The onboarding is presented as critical because it feeds user context—work description, projects, goals, and extra details—into the system. After setup, Vectal’s task list and chat agent are tightly coupled: prompts can create tasks, adjust task importance, and reorganize priorities. A standout feature is the “background agent,” activated per task via a one-click button, which then performs a multi-stage process: reasoning, web search, and summarization into actionable steps. The app also includes an “ideas” inbox that can be converted into tasks or notes, plus “notes” that behave like mini documents and can be populated via web search. “Ultra search” is described as a context-aware web research tool that uses Perplexity deep research and can save results directly into notes.

Overall, the core claim is that AI-first design—agents that can autonomously plan, search, and update tasks—translates into real time savings, not just smarter text generation. The transcript also emphasizes that Vectal’s fast-moving startup model is expected to keep improving agent capability, speed, reliability, and integrations such as one-click imports and team plans.