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Use AI to plan your work, automatically. Be 137% more productive. Use the AI assistant for busy people and work teams.
Motion isn't just a calendar, scheduler, task manager or project manager. It's really an assistant that takes all of this unique information, and uses it to build your perfect day, making it one of the best productivity tools on the market.
Motion is a great alternative for those seeking a daily planner or a project management solution.
It's differentiation comes into play with their AI scheduler that helps you plan your day (one of Motion's best features). Entering a task with Motion is easy, whether you're on your desktop app or mobile app. Simply tell Motion the task, the length of time to complete the task, the priority, the start and due date and Motion will organize your day based on what you entered and schedule tasks on your calendar into time blocks. For example, say you have a jam packed day, but and urgent task comes up. Simply tell Motion it needs to be done ASAP and it will shift all your other tasks to make space for the new task.
We personally use Motion here at Efficient App after using a myriad of tools over the years, including Asana, Calendly and Chili Piper. We love it as a project management solution, daily planner for time blocking and a meeting scheduler.
For those seeking a project management tool that is simple (< 50 team members), we recommend Motion as an alternative to Asana, ClickUp and Monday. While with Motion, you won't get reporting or dashboards for your tasks, it's helpfulness comes into play with team collaboration as all team members have tasks auto-scheduled right on their calendar. Motion is more focused on helping teams "get more deep work done" rather than "managing the work that needs to get done".
In the daily planning app category, Motion app has the most differentiation as it leverages the AI scheduler. Other tools like Sunsama or Akiflow are for those who want to manually plan their tasks onto their calendar, while Motion is more for the "hands off" type of folks who just want to show up to start their work day and see what's on the agenda to get done.
Motion's meeting scheduler makes it easy to share your availability with others to allow others to book meetings with you. If a new meeting is booked in, your daily tasks will be automatically re-scheduled around your new meeting. Viola! ✨
Overall, Motion is our top choice for an alternative to consider.
The digital daily planner that helps you feel calm and stay focused.
Sunsama is a productivity tool that fits into the daily planning app category. It has a beautiful minimalist design, integrates with other software you may use (like Asana, ClickUp, Monday, Notion) and allows you to manually and mindfully plan your day.
All of Sunsama's best features are built around the thesis of helping you have more of a life balance and intentionality throughout your day. The app has specific features like planned time vs available workload time, that even warns you if you've over-extended yourself with tasks for the day. Sunsama also has a shut down routine that helps you intentionally plan your upcoming days with any uncompleted tasks.
Another point of differentiation is Sunsama's focus mode. Focus mode expands across your task list so that you only see the single task you are working on. You can also run a timer for time tracking against the task you are working on. This allows you to see the accurate actual time it took to complete a task, compared to your original planned time. The idea is that with using this feature frequently will help you estimate tasks more accurately and plan more reasonable workdays as a result.
Sunsama (similar to Akiflow) encourages you to plan your tasks manually into a kanban view. You can also drag and drop tasks onto your calendar for time blocking. The team has been vocal about not leveraging AI to help auto-schedule any tasks as they value the intentionality of planning and reflecting on your day.
If you are someone has been using pen and paper for your time management, Sunsama could be a great digital planner option as it's not too overwhelming to use. If you enjoy the idea of manually and intentionally planning your day, we'd encourage you to consider Sunsama.
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Amie is a calendar app that helps you manage tasks and easily add emails as tasks to your calendar.
Consider Amie as a calendar alternative if you are just looking for something that is beautifully designed and you want a better user experience than Google Calendar. With Amie Calendar, you can add basic tasks, integrate your emails, and have basic meeting scheduling links. Amie Calendar is best for individuals looking to manage their personal tasks and some simple work tasks/reminders.
Amie currently has a free tier so if you're just looking for a beautifully designed calendar with minimal task management, we'd say it's worth giving it a shot. Especially if the term "anesthetic software" resonates with you.
As a daily planner alternative, Amie is quite barebones compared to others on the market. We recommend using Morgen if you more so want to dabble with daily planning with basic tasks on your calendar to see if it's for you. If you're super serious about time blocking tasks on your calendar, consider another alternative.
A daily planner tool to help you centralize your schedule.
Akiflow is one of the top daily planner alternatives that most folks consider. Akiflow integrates with almost anything through their Zapier connector and allows you to pull your tasks into an universal inbox. Imagine tasks from your email, project management software, CRM and Slack all filtering into one inbox that you can triage through.
If you're juggling multiple tools like email, Google Calendar, Asana, ClickUp, and Slack, and want a daily planner to help you with time blocking, Akiflow could be a suitable option, as long as you're happy manually planning those tasks onto your calendar.
Akiflow's powerful command bar allows you to plan tasks into time blocks on your calendar, snooze tasks, mark as done or assign labels for categorizing tasks. You can do all this through keyboard shortcuts, without even touching your mouse.
Like with other daily planner apps, your tasks can be scheduled on your calendar into time blocks. You also get progress visualization to see how close a task is to being complete.
While other daily planners like Motion use AI to auto schedule your tasks onto your calendar (read our Motion app review), Akiflow along with Sunsama are the daily planners to use if you prefer to manually plan your day. We think Sunsama has a slightly more beautiful minimalistic design than Akiflow, although if that's not important to you, but integrations are, then Akiflow would be a better choice for you.
Akiflow along with Motion are the two daily planner apps that have meeting schedulers built in as a part of the tool. Akiflow's scheduler allows you to schedule and manage meetings, and share your availability with others.
Overall, if you're looking for a daily planner that can consolidate all your tasks from different tools in one place and integrations with numerous tools is important to you, then consider Akiflow.
A daily planner tool to help you centralize your schedule.
Routine is for individuals who are looking for a personal app to help with habit building, daily planning, task management and time blocking. It is an alternative for those looking for a personal task manager with time blocking capabilities, but less so an alternative for those looking for a daily planner for professional use.
The reason we categorized Routine for more personal use is because it's yet to integrate with other project management tools and has a less responsive time blocking experience than it's alternatives.
For instance, if you have a last minute task that arises, with other daily planner alternatives like Motion, Sunsama and Akiflow you can simply move around the task into a new time slot, shifting everything in a responsive fashion, with Routine would require you to manually shift all the other tasks around also which is time consuming.
If you're new to time blocking and daily planning, definitely consider signing up for Routine as they have a free forever tier. Their free plan will let you plan your daily habits and tasks and you can see if it keeps you more on track with your specific needs. If you feel like you wish Routine has more functionality for business needs as you're using the app, then perhaps try a free trial of the other daily planners mentioned to see if any can help you get work done faster.
Routine is a beautifully designed app. Both the desktop app along with the mobile app are simply beautiful. We applaud the team for their design decisions 👏
A daily planner tool to help you centralize your schedule.
Vimcal is a keyboard shortcut-heavy calendar alternative that is trying to be the "Superhuman of Google Calendar".
While we appreciate the approach and were super excited by the vision as we absolutely love Superhuman, we've found that other alternatives like Motion do a better job when comparing Vimcal vs Motion side-by-side.
If you're looking for just a simple yet beautiful calendar though, you might want to compare Cron vs Vimcal as Vimcal might be a bit overkill for you in that case.
Vimcal also has a basic meeting scheduler, which allows for quickly spinning up a plain-text meeting scheduler. The thing is, when comparing Vimcal vs Calendly for example, there's a lot of features missing. So it's best to compare Motion vs Vimcal as they are more similar in functionality.
That said, if you're only looking for a beautifully designed calendar that is fast at scheduling meetings (and you don't need any other capabilities), Vimcal is what you're looking for.
Todoist is a task management alternative for those who want an all around good-yet-basic task management app. With Todoist, you'll get task lists, kanban boards, and a calendar view (on the Pro tier). If you don't want all the bell's and whistles, yet want a modern task management app for personal tasks, then consider Todoist.
Consider Fantastical as a calendar alternative if you are using the Apple ecosystem and want something better than Apple Calendar. That said, Fantastical is one of the older calendar apps on the market and there are better options for iOS that are more modern (for example Morgen Calendar or Amie Calendar).
Notion Calendar is a free & beautiful calendar app alternative. If you just want a free, nicer looking calendar, that allows for basic meeting scheduling, then Notion Calendar is a great choice.
If you're considering Notion Calendar as daily planner alternative, that's where it falls apart. To use Notion Calendar for as a daily planner, you'd need to be using Notion for task management, which strongly advise against (Read our full Notion Review to understand why). While avid Notion users (who have built their own task management system) may benefit from using Notion + Notion Calendar, this is not recommended for the average person—don't start down this rabbit hole. Instead, use any other daily planner alternative listed and you'll be in a better spot 👌
Consider Reclaim AI as a scheduling/time management alternative if you have many meetings and want an automated way to allocate time for focus work, lunch, and other activities throughout the day.
Reclaim was designed for folks working in corporate who feel the stress that there are not enough hours in the day to get work done (or eat lunch for that matter), and their team members are constantly pulling them in for meetings because they see an empty calendar. Not anymore with Reclaim as you can set Habits that will automatically block off time in your calendar. Reclaim uses AI to find the perfect time for all your habits each day, therefore allowing you to literally "reclaim" your time.
Although we would recommend instead picking one of the best daily planner apps as you'll find a lot more innovation, we would recommend using Google Calendar as the foundation for most everyone.
Some of the best Google Calendar alternatives on the market are paid, so if you're using Google Calendar for work, we would recommend you check out Motion vs Vimcal.
There's even free alternatives like Cron or Routine that still use Google Calendar at the core, but are just a more modern calendar experience that we would recommend using daily instead of Google Calendar.
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