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Many praise Motion for it's AI features to help you with task and time management. But just like any app, it's not for everyone. This article will cover the best motion alternatives so you can find the best app for you.
Motion is a project and task manger that uses AI to help you plan your workload, schedule your meetings and automatically build your to-do list based on your projects. It's great for teams 1-50 that are looking for an effective way to manage their projects and get more done faster (and spend less time planning their day).
If you're comparing the best Motion alternatives, you first want to ask yourself which category you're looking to replace. Is it project management? Task management? A meeting scheduler? Since Motion does all of these things, it's important to categorize what features are most important to you that your replacement tool needs to have.
Here are some common reasons why you may be looking for Motion alternatives:
The thing is, if you're looking for something more like a daily planner that automatically schedules tasks on your calendar for you, your best bet is going to be Motion. That said, if you're here, you're specifically asking for an alternative. That's where things are tough because well, not many Motion alternatives actually schedule tasks automatically on your calendar.
The problem with daily planner apps (talking about having tasks on your calendar) are all going the path of "mindful time-blocking", AKA: manually drag tasks on your calendar from other apps.
Or then there's a tool like Reclaim that auto-schedules tasks, but it's incredibly barebones for actually managing your tasks (it's not a proper project manager or task management tool), and you need to still continue using Google Calendar as it doesn't actually have full calendar functionality, it's really more read-only.
So if you're looking for automatic task scheduling, you're going to be stuck with Motion as the front-runner, if you don't mind not having auto-scheduling tasks, keep reading to dive in deeper and learn about all the best Motion alternatives!
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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.
Sunsama: Best Motion Alternative For Time Blocking And Mindful Task Management
If Motion's real time AI auto-scheduling task feature stresses you out, and you thrive in the ability of taking 15-20 minutes a day to mindfully plan your tasks onto your calendar, then Sunsama is the best Motion alternative. Sunsama will help you with daily and weekly planning, time blocking and scheduling tasks onto your calendar.
Sunsama has opted to take a lighter touch than Motion when it comes to automatically scheduling tasks on your calendar. Sunsama takes a more life balance approach to scheduling tasks as they argue that they want their uses to take a more intentional approach with their time, believing that relying too much on automation takes away that ability to be intentional.
Sunsama has foundational keyboard shortcuts that help you triage through tasks quickly, especially when taking repetitive actions like snoozing tasks or starting or stopping your timer. Some users enjoy using Sunsama simply through the keyboard shortcuts alone.
Sunsama is also a great productivity tool if you're already using a project management software at work and you are looking for a daily planning tool to help schedule your work day tasks into time slots on your calendar (as if they are calendar events).
Sunsama natively integrates in with project management tools such as Asana, Monday, ClickUp or Notion, allowing you to easily pull tasks from other tools into time blocks on your calendar using Sunsama.
A quick note that Sunsama doesn't have appointment scheduling like Motion app does, so if this feature is important to you, you may want to consider other calendar tools (such as Calendly) that have meeting scheduler capabilities.
Overall, if you're looking for the best daily planner app that allows for manual daily planning, Sunsama is our top recommendation.
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.
Akiflow: Motion Alternative For A Task Management App
If you're looking for a Motion alternative as you don't enjoy the Motion app AI smart scheduling features, and would much prefer to manually plan your day with all the tasks that come into your calendar then Akiflow is a great Motion alternative.
With Akiflow, you can integrate your email, any project management tools like Asana, Monday, ClickUp or Notion, and even Slack so that all tasks are unified in a central inbox within Akilow and see all your tasks in list view in real time. From there, you can manually plan your work day into time slots onto your calendar as time blocks.
Akiflow has a natural language command bar where you can easily triage through tasks. Easily plan a task on your calendar, snooze task, mark it as done or assign a label. Prefer keyboard shortcuts? Akiflow also a wide range of shortcuts to help you navigate.
If you like the idea of a productivity tool that allows for time blocking, calendar events, task management, and helps with daily planning and managing work across timezones, but you think Motion is too expensive, then Akiflow could be the best Motion alternative due to its more affordable plans.
Once you've tried Akiflow's free version for 7 days, you can upgrade to their 5-year pro plan so that the subscription ends up only costing $8.33 per month.
Similar to Motion app, Akiflow has a built-in meeting scheduler that allows you to quickly share your availability and create a bookable link for others to schedule meetings and calendar events.
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For medium + large teams looking for a task-based project management tool, where goals and reporting are important.
If you're looking for a full-fledged project management solution, then consider Asana.
Asana is exactly what a comes to mind when you envision a traditional project manager tool. It has traditional lists view, tasks view, custom fields, kanban boards, files, and timeline views. It even has robust project management features like gantt charts, advanced reporting features. Asana is one of the best project management tools on the market as is our top pick for those looking for a fully featured project management software.
Asana is first-and-foremost a project management software. With that, they don't take care of any of the daily planning or time blocking business needs that you may have. This is where tools like Motion, Sunsama or Akiflow are complimentary to Asana.
Asana is very much for larger teams that have the resources to properly invest in setting up the project management tool for complex projects.
Typically, teams that have success using Asana have a dedicated project manager and a consultancy that helped them to set it up. If you have complex projects, or have over 100+ team members using Asana, then it can be worth the investment to set it up and manage. Asana is also great if you have upper management who want reporting on project progress or milestones.
If you have simple projects though, keep in mind that Asana might be overkill for your team.
Asana is tried and true, and we actually used it for 7 years before switching to Motion.
Asana: Best Motion Alternative For Project Management Software
Asana is the best Motion alternative for larger teams (200 employees +) looking for a project management software with robust project management features.
In the more traditional project management software catagory, Asana is our top pick, while Motion is our top pick for smaller teams (<100 employees) who are wanting to focus more on "getting work done" instead of spending time "managing projects in a project management software".
We used Asana as our project management software for 7-8 years before switching to Motion. That said, if Motion were to disappear tomorrow, we'd go back to using Asana which is why we're rating Asana the best Motion alternative for project management.
Asana is a great, stable project management software. It has all the project management features you would expect it to have like team collaboration, Kanban boards, lists, timelines, calendars, or Gantt chart views so if your team has multiple projects that are complex, Asana is a great choice.
With more advanced features, Asana requires more expertise to set up than Motion. Teams have the most success using Asana when they work with a dedicated consultant to help them set it up. Once Asana is configured to match a teams processes, having a dedicated person on the team to manage Asana projects is paramount to success and getting the most out of all the features.
If your upper-management team values features such as such as deep reporting, dashboards, timeline views, and progress reports then Asana is a great Motion alternative, as Motion doesn't have any reporting features at the moment.
While Asana has a free version, their pro plan is where you'll get the most value so you can't really compare Asana's free tier with Motion's paid plans. Their free tier is super bare bones and doesn't allow for automated actions which is one of the main core Asana features.
An intelligent habit and task time-blocking and event scheduling layer atop your calendar.
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.
Reclaim: Best Motion Alternative For Smart Meetings
While you might have read about Reclaim being a Motion alternative, we're here to tell you that's not really true.
Motion is a full-fledged project management tool, a replacement for your calendar, helpful for team collaboration, and it auto-schedules tasks on your teams calendar. Motion works great for individuals, and you'll only get more out of it as your team grows.
Reclaim on the other hand is a tool that you'd use to integrate with your Google Calendar or project management tool. It's designed for individuals working as a part of larger teams, who are often pulled into meetings, often spending their entire days in meetings leaving little focus time for work. With Reclaim you can set flexible tasks and habits on your calendar so your team see's you're busy and are unable to schedule meetings with you as often.
While you can auto-schedule tasks on your calendar in Reclaim, the experience is quite cumbersome. It's best used if you integrate it with your project management tool like Asana, ClickUp, Linear, or Jira and you manage your tasks in there and let it sync over to Reclaim via the integration.
Reclaim's best feature is Smart 1:1's, soon to be Smart Meetings. This key feature automatically finds the best time for you to meet with your team members, optimizing everyone's calendar. If you're a small team, individual, or don't often have internal meetings (like us), Reclaim won't be of much help as it can't optimize for external meetings.
With all that, if you've used Motion for auto-scheduling and expect Reclaim to have the same functionality, we'll spare you the time and disappointment. Reclaim's biggest competitor is Clockwise, rather than Motion.
An intelligent habit and task time-blocking and event scheduling layer atop your calendar.
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 👏
Routine: Best Free Motion Alternative
If you are looking for a Motion alternative that is free, then check out Routine. Routine is a beautifully designed desktop app and mobile app for daily planning and managing tasks.
It's great for managing a work life balance and plugging in any daily habits you want to enrich (such as exercise, reading, drinking water).
They have a free forever plan ideal for students and hobbyists on their way to becoming more productive. However, because of it's focus on habits and some of the functionality (aka no smart scheduling features) it's better used for personal use rather than work.
If you are looking for a free daily planner app, sign up for Routine here.
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An intelligent habit and task time-blocking and event scheduling layer atop your calendar.
Notion is part of a category of apps often referred to as an "all-in-one", for which we aren't particularly fans of.
The main problem we have with this is it feels more like a cop-out when asked to define what you are—we do everything.
Notion is first and foremost a knowledge base app, or a more simply put, a more advanced note taking app.
Start your free trial of Notion here.
Because of Notion's flexibility, you are technically able to use it for task management or project management but in terms of functionality, it doesn't compete with the likes of Motion, Sunsama, Akiflow, Asana, Monday, ClickUp, etc.
Those who tend to lean towards using Notion for any sort of task management or project management tend to be more technical and like "building tools". This means that the majority of time spent is building the task management tool, rather than...you know, just getting your work done 😄 Therefore, it takes the productivity out of productivity app for most teams.
We'd say you're better off with any other alternative listed other than Notion in this category.
Because Notion can technically be customized to "be anything", some use it as a CRM—although we don't recommend it for this category either. While Notion can be used for basic contact management, it lacks proper CRM features like email integration (one of the main features of a proper CRM). A CRM should ingest all your teams emails, so that anyone at the company can view communication history, making it useful for sales and customer support teams especially.
Further, trying to use Notion as a CRM will likely lead to poor adoption for the team, especially since it has little guardrails and the setup and configuration of how it use it falls on one person at the company (typically someone with little product experience).
All this being said, if you're tempted to use Notion as a CRM, check out folk instead. It offers a minimal learning curve and you can likely be up and running, using it within the day.
Notion: The Motion Alternative to Skip
We don't personally encourage Notion as an Motion alternative for project management, though we wanted to include a mention of it on this list as we know many people have questions about Motion vs Notion.
Notion is a knowledge base, not a project management software—but it appeals to many because of it's flexible ability to be "just about anything". There are some people that love Notion because of it's flexibility, but the problem with Notion is that it doesn't scale well with a team and often has poor adoption.
Notion as a Motion alternative for project management may be considered for more technical folks, perhaps engineers, who love building their own product, are comfortable using automation and writing formulas within Notion.
But beware: if you decide to use Notion as an alternative to Motion for project management, you will end up going down a rabbit hole of building your own variation of a project management tool. You may end up spending 10-50 hours simply configuring Notion before it even starts to be useful as a project management tool.
Training your team on how to use Notion for project management doesn't often end well. There are no guardrails or manuals (unless you write support docs of course — do you see why we say you'll end up building your own product?) Team members will be looking to you for direction on how to use the process you set up in Notion and often times, it leads to poor adoption as team members are confused and overwhelmed.
The only time we'd encourage you to consider Notion as a task management tool is if you're an individual working alone, if you have a very small team (2-3 members maximum). While Notion is often praised for being one of the ultimate productivity apps, it lacks key features out of the box that helps with daily planning or task management.
ClickUp positions itself as one of the best all-in-one tools for productivity, integrating project management with document creation, goal tracking, time tracking, and even an email inbox. This comprehensive approach is more extensive compared to it's alternatives, Monday.com and Asana.
Instead of just focusing on project management, ClickUp tries to offer all the features that a small/medium business may need to manage projects. This includes a built-in document and knowledge base system (ClickUp Docs), time tracking, mind maps (giving you the ability to map projects visually which helps with brainstorming), and even a screenshot or recording feature. While all these features may seem appealing initially, because it does so many things, it doesn't do any of these one things particularly well, or at least no where near as well as a tool built for the job.
For instance, for docs we'd recommend Slite, while for time tracking we recommend Harvest. Looking for a screen recording feature? There is nothing better on the market than CleanShotX (the ClickUp screen recorder doesn't even come close). So while at first you may be stoked to have all these tools in one place, within time you'll see their limitations and we assure you it will frustrate the team.
ClickUp allows a highly customizable hierarchy of tasks, subtasks, nested subtasks, lists, projects, folders, lists, checklists and workspaces. This gives you an infinite amount of ways to set up your projects. While this may be a good thing for some, others complain that ClickUp is overwhelming to use, with too many options and features available making it confusing.
Overall, you can consider ClickUp as an alternative to Monday or Asana. Monday is more feature rich for complex projects that require a lot of reporting, while Asana is generally a more stable project management tool, with better API/Integrations.
Monday.com markets itself as one of the best all-in-one project management tools. Monday has done a good job at giving Asana a run for their money when comparing Monday vs Asana head-to-head. Monday.com has built robust project management features that an enterprise can use, yet they also really hit the ground running with amazing marketing to appeal to the average business owner.
Many folks are drawn to Monday because of their great marketing, pretty user interface with lots of vibrant colors that seem to make project management more fun. But in reality, like Asana, it's not a super opinionated project management software tool, meaning that you can "set it up however you want" which can be confusing for an average business that doesn't have a dedicated project manager on their team.
Monday has highly customizable workspaces and dashboards and because of this can accommodate super complex projects. For example, teams that want advanced project management features like risk registers, RACI charts, retro logs, submittal/RFI/ASI logs, dashboards for PMO-Level, and file versions would enjoy Monday. Monday also has a ton of native integrations with third party tools like Slack, Google Sheets, Jira, and Salesforce among many others.
With Monday, you'll get all your typical task list views that other project management tools offer, including gantt charts, and calendar views. Also, dashboards can be customized with various widgets for more dynamic reporting and data visualization, offering a more comprehensive overview of project metrics and insights.
Monday and ClickUp are the two project management tools that offer native time tracking. While we prefer dedicated apps for time tracking, (like Harvest), if you're looking for a project management tool with time tracking, Monday would be an Asana alternative to consider.
If you're looking for a more traditional project management tool as an Asana alternative, check out Monday.
Get started with Monday for free.
Monday is first and foremost a project management software, but in their efforts to gain more market share, they expanded into the CRM category. The main reason someone may want to use Monday as a CRM is if they are already using Monday for project management, and want to stay within the Monday ecosystem. Because the CRM + project management software are built by the same company, they integrate seamlessly which is the main benefit.
In general, we don't recommend Monday as a CRM as you're going to get a much better experience with a tool that was built primarily to be a CRM (not an after thought). You'd be much better with the other CRM alternatives listed here, including Copper, Pipedrive, HubSpot or Salesforce (enterprise).
If you are looking for a meeting scheduler alternative (instead of a task management app and calendar) then consider Calendly.
Calendly is one of the top calendar tools on the market, helps account for different time zones, and will help provide available meeting times to your guests. It also seamlessly integrates in with Google Calendar.
Calendy also has a free forever plan for those who only need one meeting event type.
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.
Trello is known for it's signature use of kanban boards, lists and cards which provides a visual way to organize tasks. Because of it's simplicity, it's one of the most well-known task/project management tools on the market.
Trello is what we'd consider a "project management tool for beginners" due to it's gentle learning curve. It might be useful if you are just wanting a free tool that can help quickly help you start to visualize your process. But you'll likely outgrow it very quickly.
While Trello was the first app to visualize your projects in a kanban view, this feature is now widely adopted among almost every project management tool on the market. We used Trello here at Efficient App for years, before ultimately switching to Asana, when they too added kanban functionality, as we felt that Trello sort of got a bit stuck, while their competitors were evolving and working to further innovate in the project management space.
Because Trello's stagnation, it's not an alternative we'd highly recommend, simply because there are much more innovative tools on the market now (most of which are listed in this article).
Clockwise is clear in their focus on helping teams find focus time. This means that if you're an individual, or a small team that doesn't have many internal meetings, Clockwise is not right for you.
If the main goal that you have is getting your team to have all of their internal meetings optimized to give everyone a calendar that is optimized for focused time blocks, that's exactly where Clockwise excels.
If your team has ample meetings per day, and there are complaints of "never being able to get focus work done" then that's when you might want to introduce Clockwise. But don't count on Clockwise for task or project management—you'll need another tool for that.
Airtable is a database (you can use it as a replacement to Google Sheets for example). Because of it's versatility, some folks get excited about the idea of what Airtable can do since it is almost endlessly customizable.
Because of Airtable's flexibility, you are technically able to use it for task management or project management but in terms of functionality, it doesn't compete with the likes of Motion, Sunsama, Akiflow, Asana, Monday, ClickUp, etc.
Airtable won't work well as a project management for complex projects, it will easily become confusing to navigate. While Airtable might work for very basic project management if you're a super small team (1-3), the time you spend setting it up and figuring out "how to best use it" is better spent on actually getting your work done. With that, using another alternative on this list that is more opinionated in terms of project management and has more features pre-built for managing projects, will be a much better choice long-term.
Airtable is not a traditional CRM software, it's first and foremost a database (you can use it as a replacement to Google Sheets for example). Just like some people use Google Sheets as a CRM, you can also "technically" use Airtable as a CRM—though it's not something we ever recommend.
The reason is because Airtable lacks the main features of a CRM, like ingesting all your teams emails in one place. Further, because there is unlimited flexibility with Airtable, you can get stuck spending dozens, if not hundreds of hours, configuring Airtable to function as a CRM. And more likely than not, the tool will lack proper adoption as there are little guardrails when using the tool for CRM purposes and everyone can kind of use it "how they want".
In general, while Airtable tries to position itself as a contender in the CRM space due to it's customization abilities, it's the main reason why we advise teams not to go down this path. It will likely lead to overwhelm and sunken time that could have gone into setting up a proper CRM that will scale with time.
If you're tempted to use Airtable as a CRM, we'd recommend folk instead as it will still give you a similar database like structure, all while providing CRM features at the core.
Out of all the Wrike alternatives for project management, Wrike is often the tool favored by larger organizations or teams with complex, multi-faceted projects requiring advanced project management features and deep customization. Wrike is more of an enterprise-level project management tool (think similar to the Salesforce of project management).
While Monday and Asana are more user-friendly in terms of their user interface, Wrike's interface has a steeper learning curve due to its extensive features.
Wrike’s integrations are particularly beneficial for enterprise-level software ecosystems, think Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, Jira, SAP, ServiceNow, and Tableau.
Wrike has an edge in advanced reporting and analytics compared to Asana and Monday.com, offering detailed insights that are crucial for large teams and complex projects.
In summary, unless you're an enterprise company, do not consider Wrike. If you're a team with under 1000 employees, Wrike alternatives like Asana or Monday will be much better suited for your team.
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