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This is one of our top picks in the category so we recommend it over others (you're on the right page), read below to learn why we love and recommend it! ⤵
This is one of the better tools in its category, see below if this tool is right for you! ⤵
Motion is an innovative AI tool that is completely disrupting the project management space, taking our "Top Pick" spot in the Project Management, Daily Planner, Calendar, Time Management, and Scheduler categories.
The magic is, it uses AI to take all of your team's projects, tasks, priorities, deadlines, and dependencies, and uses that to build the perfect day for you and your team, time blocking right on your calendar.
If you're looking for a daily planner, calendar, and scheduler tool (replacing Calendly as well), Motion will do all of these things and more. It's the closest tool we've experienced as to feeling like a true personal assistant.
We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what they do well, and what they could do better. ⤵
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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.
Juggling tasks, projects, and meetings while trying to stay productive can be an overwhelming. We all have 24 hours a day, and we're all often pulled in many different directions— changing tabs on our software apps, meetings, and personal events.
Motion aims to solve this problem. It's a calendar, task manager, project management software, and meeting scheduler in one powerful app.
Using artificial intelligence, Motion analyzes your workload and automatically optimizes your daily schedule to help you/your team get more work done.
In this guide, learn how Motion can boost productivity through:
Motion isn't just a calendar app, scheduler, task manager or project manager. It's really an AI assistant (artificial intelligence) 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.
We believe that Motion is creating a new software category entirely. While you'll see us compare it with the best project management software on the market, you'll see that it isn't just a traditional project manager, nor is it just a daily planner app.
In this complete Motion App review, we'll take a closer look at the features, user experience and pricing to help you decide if it’s the right fit for you and your team.
Start a 7-day trial to follow along and let's dive in ⤵:
If you notice that you're spending more time managing your work than actually getting work done, Motion might be the solution you've been looking for.
After 7 years of using Asana, we actually switched entirely to Motion App because of the drastic time-saving component of helping us get our work done more efficiently. Motion is designed to help teams get more work done instead of just helping to manage work.
Motion is ideal for:
If you've tried Asana, Jira, ClickUp, or Monday and found that you were spending way more time managing your work than, well, working, then Motion might be a breath of fresh air.
Let's look closer at the features that make Motion stand out from other productivity tools.
Here are some of the key features that make Motion stand out:
Other project planning software requires you to spend chunks of your day re-evaluating deadlines and shifting back work. Not to mention, they have no actual reference of your calendar, so actual deep work and focus time available isn't even taken into account when you're in meetings... 😅
That's where Motion is different, and in some ways, in a category of its own. What they are doing is unmatched in the project management software space, and when you compare Motion alternatives like Motion vs Asana amongst others in the category, you see how outdated traditional task management tools and truly are.
They've also taken this whole time management category and leveled up your project management software with a baked in calendar scheduler that takes into account your task list and hard deadlines, along with time blocking to only recommend the best times for you to meet with others, ensuring that you can still get your work done on time. Something that no other project management software can do.
Oh, and whenever things don’t go according to plan (which they never do), Motion automatically re-prioritizes everyone’s tasks and calendar so that everything gets done, on time. Helping de-stress teammates by offloading all of the cognitive processing surrounding what should be done next.
Just like other project management tools, you can use Motion to organize projects in different workspaces then view your to-dos as a list view or kanban board, set task dependencies, track task lists, and collaborate with team members.
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
If you are a busy professional that is more so looking for one of the best daily planner apps to help manage your task list instead of a full project management tool, Motion is also an excellent choice.
Compared to other daily planner alternatives Motion is pulling this entire category forward by leveraging artificial intelligence, tasks mixed with calendar events, time blocking, and prioritization, to build an app that feels like more you have a personal assistant helping you manage your time. Motion is a great productivity tool for soloprenuers, freelancers, contractors and students.
Motion also adds in many quality of life features that makes it stand out when comparing Motion vs Google Calendar for example, like Travel Time which you can add with the click of a button to any event:
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This is where Motion excels when comparing it to the best calendar schedulers on the market. You can generate meeting scheduler pages and embed them on your website (that take into consideration your specific meeting times for that given event, e.g. we only do meetings on Tuesday/Thursday between 1–4pm, so that's reflected on the page). You can even have it check against team calendar availability (as well as your own work and personal calendar availability of course), allowing you to even generate the meeting request in plain text if that makes you feel better than sending someone to a meeting page:
Motion isn't just a calendar app, scheduler, or task manager. It's really an AI assistant that takes all of this unique information, and uses it to build your perfect day:
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
With Motion, you create tasks and group them into projects. From there, you simply set the deadline, priority, and any blockers. That's where Motion uses AI to automatically schedule the tasks required to complete the project on each team member's calendars, all while taking into account any meetings and calendar schedules. No other project management tool on the market does this!
User Interface (UI)
Motion has a functional calendar/task interface. The task manager is off to the side of your AI calendar, with those tasks scheduled on your day in time blocks. They've gone as far as actually showing the task status on the calendar based on the color, so even if you have a more robust task status flow, you can quickly see what you have going on for the week, what hasn't been started, what's in progress, and even what specific stage each task is in. Everything is where you'd expect it to be and Motion has become one of the nicest looking calendars on the market, standing up there when comparing Motion and Cron even.
Their new project management area is filled with a modern Kanban and list view, in addition to a super flexible "My Tasks" and "Team Tasks" view, making understanding your team's work and your own a breeze. We're big fans of the design especially when comparing Motion vs Asana.
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
The main benefit of Motion, and how it differentiates from every other project management tool on the market is it's AI features and intuitive interface: you add your tasks to it, then you forget about it. It will automatically schedule your tasks into your Motion calendar to ensure that you get them done by the time they need to be completed. You don't have to constantly manually plan your day, you just show up, look at your daily schedule and get to work 💪 it's build to be your intelligent calendar and uses a pretty sophisticated ai algorithm to accomplish just this.
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
In terms of your project management features, you'll get unlimited projects, a fully featured task management tool, equipped with the main task views you need, including list views and kanban boards. There's highly customizable task priority, deadline, and task dependencies.
What makes it a fully featured project management tool is the ability to track tasks and assign them across team members, making for a powerful team management system along with team collaboration features. You can set custom personalized or team-wide filtered views so if you want a certain workspace to display tasks in a kanban board, while another showing it in list view, you can do both.
With other tools like Asana, you need to manually reschedule your tasks manually on a daily basis, wasting anywhere from 20–60 minutes per day—something you rarely need to think about with Motion. Team members that use Motion app report getting more done and worrying less about "figuring out what to do next".
Motion has time tracking as one of its core features. Every task has a duration and a "completed time" (so tasks can be partially completed), and you can even break longer tasks into smaller tasks by enabling chunks. Pair that with the automatic scheduling and you'll see first-hand the secret weapon of Motion—the AI technology at the core that organizes your schedule like an executive assistant.
Many competing daily planner tools treat time tracking more like pomodoro timers instead of a more full-fledged time tracking tool to which Motion allows for.
Mix the task time tracking functionality with Motion being able to see team member's actual calendar events and availability and what you have is an actual team workload view unlike any other. The big miss with most project management software is that calendar is an afterthought, and yet if someone on your team is tied up in meetings all week and then they have critical tasks assigned to them, do you think they'll be able to get to them?
With Motion, this is made abundantly clear (even flagged automatically), whereas other project management tools literally require an executive assistant or full-time project manager to be monitoring in order to find these issues as they arise.
Some capacity planning, but Motion is the first tool we're actually seeing doing it.
Motion is always a keyboard shortcut away (OPT + C to view the calendar, OPT + A to quickly access your meeting scheduler, and finally OPT + SPACE to quick-add a task from anywhere on your computer. These shortcuts are one of the reasons we love using Motion. Whether you're in the browser and need to check your availability quickly, are curious if you have any upcoming meetings and then want to get right back where you left off, or simply think of a task you need added (for yourself or your team member), it's all just one keyboard shortcut away.
With Motion app, not only do you get project and task management, a calendar and AI scheduling features, but you also get a meeting scheduling tool. What makes Motion's scheduler tool superior to the alternatives, is that it functions more like an AI scheduling meeting assistant, by taking into consideration all of your meetings (personal and work), along with all of your team members that would also be involved in that meeting.
It doesn't stop there though, the secret weapon of Motion is that the meeting assistant, it takes into consideration your entire team's work hours and high priority tasks along with deadlines in order to only allow people to book in when it works best for you and your team. It's a level of AI scheduling that can't be felt in even the best meeting scheduler tools in the market, because they don't take into consideration tasks and work hours.
In addition to the web app desktop app, Motion has an iOS and Android app that is fully-featured, including the full calendar functionality, along with your complete project task lists, and quick access to booking links while on-the-go.
Calendar
Things we'd love to see to bring Motion up to an A is a proper widget to replace the need for Google Calendar entirely. Some quality UX improvements could be made with having a way to more easily create tasks from other apps, by say sharing a screenshot to Motion, or highlighting text and sharing it with Motion.
Task management
A fun feature Motion recently added to the iOS app is being able to use Siri to create tasks while on-the-go. Simply ask Siri to "create a task in Motion to review that presentation ASAP" and it will pop it on our calendar, rearranging all your other tasks. Now they just need to bring the feature to Google Assistant users too!
Project Management
The Motion project management tool on the mobile app is still in it's early phases. You can see your tasks in list view, but not on your kanban board for example. For this reason, we prefer to use the mobile app for tasks on the go but we prefer to use the desktop app and web app for project management and actually organizing projects/tasks and for getting work done.
We have to hand it to the team at Motion on this one—they launched an API, and then almost immediately spun up a Zapier integration to make their API even more accessible to others, something that newer tools in the space haven't invested in which makes Motion stand out, and something we greatly appreciate.
The API is surely to improve with time, adding in more functionality, although it does allow for the major things you'd want to use it for already, like create/find/update of tasks, and most importantly, creating the magic auto-scheduled task.
When comparing Motion's API with some of the leaders in project management like Asana, Motion does about 85% of what it needs to do for most integrations. We also know it'll get closer to 90–95% once they allow for custom fields, as functionality around "search tasks by custom field value" is surely to come with it.
The one thing to note though is that the API does not currently work with the appointment scheduling feature. For example, it does not allow for the same API functionality that a standalone scheduler tool like Calendly will give you on that front. That said, you can build some of this functionality by getting creative using a tool like Mailparser alongside Zapier (e.g. logging new appointments into your CRM upon booking), although I will say, it's not all that straightforward. 😅
All-in-all, Motion's API is getting there, and is likely to do what you'd need it to do on the project management front. We'd only say be aware if you're planning on building robust integrations based on their meeting scheduler, because if so, you might be better off using one of the best appointment scheduler apps in that case instead.
Native Integrations
Motion just released two native integrations, an email integration and Siri integration for the iOS mobile app.
Email Integration
The email integration allows you to easily forward your emails to Motion, and Motion will turn your email into a task and schedule it on your calendar. When forwarding your email to Motion, you can easily type in natural language the due date and priority. Motion will then find the best time to schedule the task using their AI schedular.
Motion Siri Integration
On the go? Try this new way of scheduling tasks. Simply tell Siri to create a task in Motion for you! Motion will find the best time to schedule the task on your calendar. This is super useful when on-the-go.
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
Motion pricing is totally reasonable for all that it can do. Priced at $19 per month for individuals (on the annual plan), or $12 per user (team plan). Keep in mind the fact that the tool also includes a project management tool, calendar and meeting scheduler which makes Motion worth it.
You can also pay monthly on either the individual plan ($34/m) or team plan ($20/m), but in general if you do, consider upgrading to the annual tier after 2-3 months of use as you'll save nearly 40% on the price by doing so.
While some Motion app reviews mention that Motion pricing is expensive, it's actually comparable to Asana (for small teams, Motion and Asana are nearly identical per seat (paid annual). If comparing it to other daily planner apps, Motion is the only tool that has AI scheduling capabilities for tasks, and even with that it's priced nearly the same as it's competitors on the annual tier making it one of the more unique productivity tools on the market.
Whether you're a busy professional or a team, we think Motion is worth the price—we actually purchased the annual plan after just a week of using it.
You can view the full pricing tiers on Motion's site.
Our overall Motion app review? Well hopefully this says it all: we've actually fully switched to Motion from Asana after using Asana for 7+ years 😄
Motion app has been a game changer for our team and has allowed us to remember tasks we would have otherwise forgotten, manage projects and better collaborate as a team. Motion is definitely worth giving a try, especially if you have under 50 or so employees and are looking for a tool that is simple to use for everyone. Motion solidifies itself as a productivity tool that once you start using, it's hard to imagine life without it—the AI algorithm is something you feel missing from every other Motion alternative on the market.
If you're looking for a deeper dive comparison on the Motion project management tool, you can check out a deep dive project management comparison that covers all of that here.
Motion as a project management solution works well for teamwork projects, busy professionals, creative teams, remote teams, professional services and development teams. They don't have a free plan available but definitely give the free trial a shot before committing to a Motion alternative.
That said, we finally found what we've been looking for in terms of the perfect tool for our team (Oh and there's actually quite a bit more to the story if you're interested in hearing more).
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
If you're looking for a Motion discount code or referral code, we've got you covered! For a limited time we're actually giving away our Motion course for free if you sign up using any link on this page and filling out our Motion deal form.
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There are a few times where you'd actually want to open back up Google Calendar for certain things, like proposing a new time for example, or editing a team's calendar event (even if you're invited to it), so fixing these things will greatly improve the UX.
It would be nice to be able to have all of the normal Google Calendar functionality within Motion. That said, it does 99% of what you need on a daily basis, and in comparing Motion with the best calendar apps on the market, they all have these same limitations at the moment.
Motion allows for task chunking, breaking down larger tasks into smaller tasks. So the way we handle that situation is we'll create sub tasks just as checklists in the task, set the task to be a larger chunk of time (e.g. 4 hours) and then "enable chunking" and selecting say 30 minute chunks or 1 hour chunks.
That'll put the task on your calendar in 30–60 minute blocks of time, to which you can work through completing the entire task, completing the task chunk will update the task completion time accordingly.
Gantt charts are coming to Motion soon! Want to see what they look like? We found some Figma Files with designs of what gantt charts are going to look like and we included them in this video (toward the end of the video). 🤫
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We don't know exactly when gantt charts will be released but the team has assured that it's coming next—you can see in the video that they put a lot of thought into the designs.
If you're looking at Motion to manage your tasks, it's an incredibly robust task management tool and has just about every full-fledged project management feature that you could need. That said, if you're a large team with many layers of management, then it might be missing a few of those milestones and goal type views (although this is coming, you can see a sneak peek in our recent Motion Tutorial video).
If you're looking for a project management tool that allows for heavy customization, you'll have to wait a tad bit longer for things like custom fields (which is also teased in the video mentioned above).
What you also won't get with Motion though is customizable reports, or any reporting dashboards for that matter. That's not to say this won't come in the future, but for now the Motion team is focused on improving productivity for small + medium sized businesses and often times reporting features are required more at the enterprise level.
Yes, Motion allows for tracking habits by simply using recurring tasks, as while other tools talk about habits as if they are a totally separate feature, when in reality, all they are is a reoccurring task within a schedule restriction (e.g. nights only, 3 days per week, weekends only, etc.)
Motion actually used to have habits as a standalone feature, but they rebranded it to recurring tasks to enable others to benefit from being able to have tasks reoccur as well.
We've tracked and verified the above companies are using this software in their team's stack.
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