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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.
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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.
An all-in-one project management tool and suite of products for teams.
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).
The project manager for large teams looking for an all-in-one task and documentation tool.
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.
The project manager for large teams looking for an all-in-one task and documentation tool.
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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The project manager for large teams looking for an all-in-one task and documentation tool.
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.
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.
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).
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