By 
Zinnia is a planning and journaling app by Pixite Inc. available on iPad, iPhone, and Mac. While it offers in-app subscriptions, including weekly, monthly, and yearly options, it may not be the ideal choice for everyone. Sharing a subscription with family can make it more affordable, but at $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year, it’s pricier than most PDF digital planners. So, can Zinnia truly replace your digital planner?
The app offers 45 different planners, covering all the types you might need. While the covers of these planners are visually appealing, they don’t add much value. It would be more useful if the app provided a preview of the page templates inside each planner, saving users the hassle of clicking through each one to find something suitable. This can make creating custom templates a tedious process, especially for those looking for a smooth digital workflow.
The concept behind Zinnia is to build your planner one page at a time, but this can be cumbersome. You’ll need to search through templates to piece together your perfect planner, which can feel more like a chore than a creative process. Alternatively, you can add all the monthly, weekly, and daily spreads you’ll need for the year in one go, but even that requires patience.
If you’re someone who enjoys piecing together different planner elements, Zinnia could be a good fit, but if you prefer a ready-to-use planner, this app might not be for you. PDF planners are simpler if you’re not particular about custom designs.
Zinnia’s page templates are editable PDFs, allowing for some customization. You can change elements like color, size, and rotation, offering more flexibility than most PDF planners. However, the customization options are still somewhat limited.
While minimalism is generally a good design approach, Zinnia’s decision to exclude the iPad’s status bar is a downside. The status bar provides important information like time, battery level, and date, which many users appreciate having accessible.
One unique feature is the ability to rotate individual pages, allowing you to write at an angle. However, this only applies to single pages, and you’ll need to straighten them before navigating to other pages, which can be frustrating.
Once you’ve built your planner, Zinnia lets you add stickers, photos, text, and handwriting. The app includes a collection of stickers for various occasions, but it falls short compared to other apps, especially considering its cost. What’s more frustrating is that you must use your fingers to move and resize stickers, which isn’t very intuitive when you’re holding an Apple Pencil.
On the plus side, you can create custom stickers or purchase additional ones and save them in the app. However, if you’re particular about your stickers, you might find the selection limited.
Zinnia also allows you to add images from your Photos library, but not from the Files app. The app does make it easy to resize multiple photos at once and rotate stickers and photos, which is a nice touch.
The text fields in Zinnia’s templates are ideal for users on Mac or iPhone, allowing you to type anywhere you would normally handwrite. You can adjust font type, size, line spacing, and color, though selecting text with your finger can be frustrating. The app also offers basic text formatting options like bold, italic, underline, and strike-through, as well as checklists, though the latter aren’t interactive.
The handwriting tools in Zinnia are interesting, with a technical brush, a paint pen, and a pencil tool, among others. While these tools are fun to use, they all produce raster ink, which pixelates when you zoom in, limiting how much you can zoom in on your pages. This makes the app less suitable for serious digital handwriting tasks.
The toolbar can only hold three pen types at a time, which can be limiting if you frequently switch between tools. The eraser tool is smooth but slow, and the app’s lasso tool is not selective, making it difficult to quickly delete or move items on the page.
Zinnia also allows you to link pages, though this becomes cumbersome as your planner grows. The app would benefit from a search feature to make navigating links easier, but unfortunately, it lacks this functionality.
When it comes to digital planning, Zinnia’s integration with Apple Calendar is lacking. Creating new events is clunky, and there’s no support for data detection or Apple Reminders. The app’s hyperlinks and calendar events look the same, which can be confusing.
Zinnia allows you to edit almost everything in your planner, but selecting items becomes harder as you add more to the page. The app’s lack of selectivity in the lasso tool can ruin the user experience, making it easy to accidentally move or change the wrong elements.
Navigating through your planner pages is not intuitive, and the large thumbnails make it difficult to quickly move through a lot of pages. You can delete, duplicate, or export multiple pages, and move them between planners, but doing so breaks any hyperlinks.
While Zinnia does support importing PDFs and adding empty pages, it offers a strange range of page sizes. The app’s setup is better suited for bullet journaling than for digital planning.
Searching in Zinnia is limited to stickers, with no way to search through your planner’s content. This is a significant drawback for a productivity app.
On the security front, Zinnia allows you to lock your planners with a passcode, though setting up a recovery plan is essential to avoid losing your information.
You can sync your planners across devices, but the app lacks backup options, which are critical for any productivity tool.
While Zinnia is an interesting concept, it’s not yet ready to replace PDF digital planners. At $59.99 per year, it’s an additional expense that might not be worth it, especially if you already purchase digital planners annually. The app is better suited for bullet journaling, but even then, its price is hard to justify given the complexities and limitations it presents.
In summary, Zinnia is not well-equipped for digital planning, and it’s overkill for bullet journaling. If you’ve tried Zinnia, what’s your experience been like?
