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A no-code automation platform for small + mid-size teams. You can use Zapier to pass data from one app to another.
Zapier is the most popular integration and automation platform on the market. While they've had competitors arise over the years like Make, Tray, and Workato, they've managed to build one of the most user-friendly interfaces of them all, along with the largest number of deeply supported apps. Not a small feat whatsoever.
If you're using a modern software (take any app listed on our site for the most part), and there's sure to be a Zapier connector. This is pretty baffling when you really think about it.
When comparing Zapier vs Make for example, Make may look more user-friendly and accessible, but we're here to tell you that isn't the case. Make is more powerful with some inline formulas and other logic power features, but that definitely does not make it easier to use. If anything, it's easy to feel quite overwhelmed when first using Make.
Time and time again, in trying Make, we have found ourselves coming back to Zapier. It really can be bent and molded into what it needs to be.
In recent months, Zapier has gone incredibly deep into leveraging AI like OpenAI to rethink and evolve the integration space as a whole. This is something we applaud, and have been quite impressed by.
We're seeing Zapier slowly outgrow even just the integration world, and actually evolve into one of the best no code tools on the market. At the rate they are going with AI, alongside Tables and Interfaces, we wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing Airtable vs Zapier actually come up in the conversation in the future in the No-Code Builder space along with the Database space. For right now though, we'll have to award the winner to Airtable, but that doesn't mean we're not keeping a close eye on what Zapier has up its sleeve.
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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 (also often referred to as Use Motion and Motion App) is in a category of it's own that we've been referring to as time management…
Let me explain:
Motion's main goal is to take care of all of your team's needs revolving around time. If you're someone that wakes up in the morning and looks at their calendar app to see what you have on for the day, Motion App will fit in like a glove.
It connects in deeply with your Google Calendar, Microsoft Calendar, and even Apple Calendar, allowing you to build out project management and task management for yourself and team members. The best part is that all of these tasks automatically organize themselves based on priority right onto your calendar (and your team's) to ensure the most important (and blocking) tasks get done.
If you've heard of the productivity app terminology of "time blocking", well Motion does that automatically using AI, no manual time blocking needed.
It even goes to the degree of allowing you to share meeting scheduler links with others, all while respecting your existing events across all of your calendars (and even your team's calendars), along with automatically inviting team members into the appointment once booked.
With your entire team using Motion, it's like you have a full-time personal assistant shared across the company, ensuring that everyone is getting deep work done all while focusing on what is most important (at the most ideal time), all while making sure that no one is ever double-booked.
All of this makes for an incredibly powerful tool for individuals, but exponentially more valuable with every additional team member you add. No other project management or daily planner tool on the market seems to go to this degree.
As compared to some of the best project management software on the market often mentioned like Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Motion has taken their sights on slightly smaller teams of between 1–50 people.
This team size target is based on their current feature-set, from what we've seen. For example, the larger teams that we work with who have many layers of management often require reporting capabilities over everything else. And with Motion, that's not something you're going to get, because they are currently focused on giving the only AI project management tool on the market focused on helping the individual and teams, over the needs of upper-management.
So if you and your team are used to spending a lot of time planning deadlines, and rearranging your "My Task" view in the existing tools on the market, Motion flips this on it's head with the use of AI. Something to consider if you're fed up with the manual work involved with traditional project management tools.
Compared to the best daily planner apps on the market like Sunsama and Akiflow, Motion is the only daily planner we've seen that actually leverages AI to plan your day for you. With all of the other apps in the category, you need to manually drag in tasks to time block and plan each day. This is an incredibly time consuming process, that some justify as being "more mindful", but once you actually have AI schedule your day for you, you realize how much time is actually wasted "mindfully planning your day".
Compared to the best calendar schedulers on the market like Calendly and Chili Piper, Motion bakes in the core functionality of these tools, with the added visibility of team tasks and urgent deadlines, actually booking off availability for you and your team if high priority work needs to get done by a quickly approaching deadline.
Large teams (100–500) with other enterprise software implemented will find integrating Motion more involved than other enterprise tools. When using an enterprise software stack like that of Salesforce, it's common for other project management tools to have native integrations.
With Motion, it will require a custom integration approach (something that we actually help teams do). But while it's possible, one might ask if it's worth making the large investment in a custom integration when you might be able to get something more native out of the box with the other tools focused on larger teams.
(This of course depends on the actual integration needs of your team, as native doesn't always do exactly what you'd like it to do).
Motion currently lacks advanced reporting and dashboard functionality. So while you can see at a top-level the status of projects and tasks in Kanban and Listviews, even a team workload view, that's about where reporting dashboards end, making it less suitable for large teams requiring extensive project analytics.
If all of that connects with you and you think it might fit your needs, they have a 7 day free trial that you can use along with your team to see what it's like having a personalized AI assistant.
A powerful launcher (spotlight replacement) for MacOS that bakes in deep integration and collaboration (for teams of all sizes)
Most people use the native Spotlight search within MacOS, and most are totally happy with it. If that's you, you probably don't care much about this space, but I'm here to tell you that you should.
Search is the main way to navigate the OS, and imagine this search box with superpowers. Do you open up the calculator? Raycast has that built in. Have a separate window resizing/manager tool like Rectangles? Yeah, Raycast does that too.
Just about anything you can think of, Raycast can do, or they have an app/integration for it. I'm not kidding—I literally compressed the image to the Arc + Raycast integration using a Raycast plugin:
Never again do you need to navigate to a sketchy "image conversion" website again—you can now do it all through your favorite ⌘ + Space shortcut via Raycast.
Now for the more technical crowd... I'm here to tell you that it's better than Alfred in every way. It's beautiful, free, has deeper native integrations, and the developer community is next-level.
Skeptical? I hear you—so much in-fact that I've debated (for hours) with just about every single one of my power-user friends about why Raycast is far-and-above better than Alfred. They didn't believe me, fought me tooth-and-nail on it.
And guess what? Every single one of them are now using Raycast (and Arc 😉). They just needed to download it and give it a genuine shot. It does everything better, and looks 10x as good (UI/UX).
It's free, just give it a shot yourself. If you're skeptical, come debate me on Twitter—happy to convince you as well 🦾
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Slite is a shared team knowledge-base platform for teams of all sizes—document, communicate, make decisions, and work asynchronously.
You're probably just learning about Slite after having heard of the all-in-one tools like Notion and Coda (amongst the many other team "knowledge base" apps on the market), and wondering which is right for you.
If you're truly looking for the knowledge base "category defining" app—there's no one better than Slite. They are actually moving this category forward in what it traditionally has meant to be a shared team knowledge base/documentation tool.
What we actually love most about Slite is their simplicity and focus. They have the cleanest UI/UX of all the tools we've tried in the space. And while you can still modify the design, your team will never get lost in the formatting, nor can you actually make a document look bad in Slite (unlike competitors).
It's pretty heavily focused on being your team's shared knowledge-base and asynchronous collaboration tool. Think: finding information across your shared team's brain, making decisions, and being able to easily reference how and why decisions were made with Slite Discussions:
Think of a Discussion as a referenceable email thread with key stakeholders that ultimately has a decision. Imagine new team members could not only see what your internal processes are, but even how the decision was ultimately made to get there? Yeah, that stuff currently gets lost in old Slack and email threads. What if it it didn't have to be that way?
Working on large internal projects? Notes are in Slite. Brainstorming marketing ideas? That's in Slite too. Important discussions being had? Move those from Slack to Slite. You can even invite external stakeholders (e.g. customers/contractors), and they can easily collaborate with your team without much of any friction.
Notion and Coda have developed over the years more and more into database tools (similar to the likes of Airtable), evolving outside of the documentation side of things. Some people love these tools for that reason—we do not. People report Notion and Coda becoming too complex and slow to load in time. The question becomes more of "should we use Notion for this"? Because while it can be used for many things, rarely is it the actual right tool for the job. As they are trying to be all things to all people, it results in them being "not great" at most things.
A team using Slite on the other-hand know exactly when they should and shouldn't use Slite. While the use-case can extend out a bit more than just team documentation (e.g. we even use Slite for quick proposals—as it's a super quick to template and to throw thoughts together—before sending them off to a potential customer). Although it becomes quite apparent when you should instead use a more structured Proposal / eSignature tool like PandaDoc—which is a good thing.
Slite actually had one of the first true examples of how AI will evolve a category for the better. While Notion went the direction of "now you can generate content using AI!", Slite was more of the mindset of "hold on, the actual problem is that we, as a shared team, already have so much information. Some outdated and requires updating, some entirely outdated and should be ignored. What if we could help you sort through all of this information to help your team find the actual answers they are looking for?
Here's an example of the Ask by Slite product in action, notice how it writes an answer based on the various sources of information in the knowledge base while showing which part has come from each document?
The only downside currently is that Slite does not have an developer API (so you can't build custom integrations with it)—and while we'd love to have these capabilities to integrate Slite a bit deeper into our other tools, we haven't found that to be too large an issue for the way we recommend teams use Slite.
I mean it's what we ultimately chose for our internal team knowledge base after using all of the competitors on the market for years.
What ultimately made the decision for us? Well, we had Slite set up alongside Notion and Coda, and we just naturally gravitated toward Slite, whether it was building out a collaborative work environment for our customers, or just internal blog posts and documentation.
We just found that we could get in, get work done, and get out. Whereas accessing internal documentation in Coda was super kludgy as you're jumping between documents, almost like using Google Docs as a knowledge base, which made things quite disjointed.
Slite just got out of the way while enabling us to get our work done in an enjoyable way. So if you're feeling overwhelmed in Notion, maybe the answer for your team is actually opinionation and simplicity? 🤷
Get through your inbox 2x as fast (for teams of all sizes).
Superhuman is the best email client made for busy professionals who want to enhance their email experience. If checking your emails is often an overwhelming, dreadful feat and wish there was a way you could spend less time on email, then Superhuman will almost certainly make your day better.
We've been using Superhuman for over 5 years as our email app and couldn't see life without it! And trust me, I used to bet the person that said "would never pay for email" but after trying it for the first month...I couldn't imagine going back, and here I am now 5+ years later, still a paying customer and am happier for it, it's that good.
Superhuman has a beautiful, minimal design and will help you get through your email faster. If you get more than 10 emails a week, we recommend trying Superhuman for at least 30 days (it's free) before committing to another solution.
Sign up here for a free month of Superhuman.
Superhuman is a layer atop of Gmail or Outlook. You no longer have to even log into Outlook or Gmail as when using Superhuman, you navigate your emails straight from the Superhuman web app, desktop app, or mobile app.
On the computer, you can use Superhuman without even touching your mouse, navigating email super fast through keyboard shortcuts alone (you can still use your mouse if you wish though!). If this sounds intimidating, don't let it! When you sign up for Superhuman, a specialist will take you through a 30-minute onboarding call, teaching you in the in's and out's of the tool.
With Superhuman you get through your emails super fast. Easily snooze emails for later, answer quickly using Superhuman's AI feature, and create Inbox Splits to help triage through specific types of emails in chunks. After using Superhuman for 2 weeks, our bet is you won't want to go back to life without it, it's a killer productivity app.
Get a free month of Superhuman.
Not only can you use AI to help you draft responses or write an email "in your tone" (it learns from your previous emails!), but their AI search is also fantastic.
AI search allows you to ask any question about your inbox in natural language, and Superhuman will return with an answer based on your inbox and provide the emails that it is referencing.
I can't tell you how much time I used to spend searching my inbox with "exact keywords". This is now totally elimintated with the AI search feature.
You can share email threads with others (whether they are on your team or not) so you can collaborate under email.
This has come super handy for us when we've had sales negotiations (very helpful to @mention each other and check-in if what is proposed makes sense), or to more thoughtfully respond to a customer. Read our entire Superhuman Team Comments review here.
If you share this link with your entire team, you will all get a free 30 days to test it out together.
There is no discount on annual pricing for Superhuman, although if you sign up using this link you will get your first-month free.
Your meeting insights automated—the meeting recorder to understand & champion your users’ needs.
What we love most about tl;dv is that you can take all of your meeting notes directly from a floating pop-up right within the meeting you're in.
As you type the notes, tl;dv automatically timestamps your message and your entire team can also see the notes as they are being written.
No more do we need to find where to take collaborative call notes of which would otherwise not even be connected to the call recording itself.
All of the most important notes and timestamps are automatically sent to everyone on the call (or just your team), and they even have a nifty Slack integration as well.
We do wish it natively integrated with more CRMs though, but know the team is working on opening up the API to allow for it.
For teams of all sizes looking for a modern AI-powered work phone (call + SMS) that can be integrated with other tools.
Having used just about every single VoIP on the market over the past decade, Dialpad is the clear innovator in the space.
So much in-fact that I personally use Dialpad as my professional relationships number (work/angel investing/networking). This is because the mobile app actually feels like a modern SMS app, and is the most stable of the bunch.
The added perk is that I've integrated Dialpad with our CRM (Copper) so all texts and calls automatically log into the CRM (and even automatically create new leads in the CRM if the number doesn't yet exist in our CRM).
You'll see software like RingCentral (the 800lb gorilla in the space) claims to "integrate" with everything, but it doesn't integrate as you'd actually like it to (it's just marketing-speak), and the desktop + mobile apps are incredibly outdated on all fronts.
There's more modern VoIP solutions on the market like Aircall and JustCall, which do have better "native integrations", although they pale in comparison to the UI/UX of Dialpad + have no AI intelligence features like Dialpad does (sentiment analysis, AI call review, etc.).
If you're unable to justify the investment into a custom integration with Dialpad, you'll probably be better off with Aircall or JustCall. Although, if you're interested in using the best tool in the space (clear leader) and are open to investing in a proper integration with your CRM, Dialpad won't let you down.
Rating: B
Dialpad has invested a lot in the AI and sentiment analysis side of things, which makes it really stand of when comparing the top VoIP tools on the market.
When you move into the meeting side of things though, that's where Dialpad Meetings makes itself shown. The truth of the matter is that it's pretty great, and it's included in your subscription. The thing is, actually getting your team (and those you're meeting with) to all switch to Dialpad Meetings is the tough part. So when comparing Dialpad Meetings vs Google Meet for example, there's a ton of trade-offs.
In an odd way, Dialpad Meetings is a positive and negative to the "Features & Differentiation" category. In one part it's cool! In another part, it introduces confusion to anyone who is simply using Dialpad as their company VoIP. Should we also switch over our meetings? Well, the answer is probably no 😅 that said, we got into this more on the Dialpad Meetings page.
Rating: B-
Dialpad is in a bit of an odd boat here. They are quite selective about what apps they choose to build native integrations with, and you can't completely trust their site in determining if the integration exists. This at times makes us feel like they initially built the integration as an MVP v1 more for marketing purposes than anything (to be able to say "we integrate with this software" to check the box for a new buyer).
What we've seen though, is that integrations like their native Copper + Dialpad integration, while technically exists, it's incredibly buggy, doesn't do what you'd expect it to do (e.g. doesn't sync texts over to the CRM, just phone calls—any only sometimes). It also just doesn't work consistently.
So as much as Dialpad is our top pick when it comes to the best VoIP software category, we can't exactly recommend it when customers being asking us deeply about integration. Unless of course they are open to investing in the custom integration path, like the custom Copper + Dialpad integration that we built for ourselves and use.
Their API is decent, and they even have a Zapier connector (which we always appreciate), although it's quite complicated to get it to actually function how you'd like it to work.
Also, if you're hoping to trigger automatic SMS or MMS messages to send out via the API, look elsewhere. Dialpad is not trying to go down that path.
With all of that said, we recommend you check out Aircall if native integration is important to you, and more specifically checking out our Dialpad vs Aircall write-up to better understand the difference.
I will note that A2P (Application to Person) messaging is starting to get worse and worse. Dialpad and other VoIP services used to function more like P2P (Person to Person) messaging, but because businesses have taken advantage of this, carriers and the government have stepped in.
The result? A worse experience and higher costs for everyone. Dialpad now charges on-top of your monthly fee for sending messages (although they will cover the first 250 per user/mo), with stipulations (e.g. local SMS, not international or messaging an application—think Google 2FA codes, yep, those now charge you $0.01.
At the end of the day, SMS/MMS and traditional calling services suck, and are somehow just getting worse. How we're now moving backward to paying per SMS sent, when using just about any other messaging platform is free, is just baffling (not to mention the 30%+ in additional regulatory fees everything costs).
With all the regulatory frustrations, this does seem like it's hitting every business (A2P) VoIP provider, so we need to put this to the side when simply evaluating Dialpad vs the others mentioned.
If you need a VoIP in your business (you're calling customers/receiving calls or texts), then Dialpad is definitely one of the best solutions on the market.
With the regulatory downsides and paying per SMS sent, the upside is that using an A2P business VoIP tool, it enables API access, which allows you to do things like automatically logging SMS and calls + recordings into your CRM—something that will never exist when using a traditional P2P phone number.
We still continue using Dialpad here at Efficient App, as it is helpful to have a more work/business focused number for the occasional call with a customer and business-focused relationship tracking.
So if that's important to you, we recommend you give a business VoIP like Dialpad a shot. If you can get away with not using a phone service at your company, even better! Just don't let that happen if the alternative is your employees using their personal phone number at work. That is a regrettable decision 100% of the time.
Teams of all sizes can use GPT to automate content creation, improve customer interactions, and streamline data analysis.
What really is there to say? Everyone is trying to build a OpenAI (ChatGPT) into their product right now. It's the closest thing we've seen to magic in an incredibly long time.
OpenAI is general artificial intelligence. You can ask it questions, and it'll answer them, like a human. You can ask it to write code for you, and it'll build it, all while explaining the why and how.
Engineering friends of mine are worried that it'll replace their job, and yet they are using it to become a better engineer (using it to teach them different coding languages).
It's amazing as to what will be made possible with it, and the demo video below between Slack + OpenAI + Motion is just a tiny glimpse into where you can see it intelligently improving our every-day processes.
The craziest thing of it all, anyone can use it, and you don't even need to be technical to use it. Just visit ChatGPT here and start asking it questions. You'll be amazed by what it can do. If you're more technical, then be sure to check out the actual API and see where you can fit it into what you're building (I mean everyone else is).
Fireflies helps your team transcribe, summarize, search, and analyze voice conversations.
Fireflies was actually one of the first meeting recorder solutions on the market. They managed to build remote tooling that would actually join in existing meetings, like in Google Meet or Zoom, act like a guest, and record the audio.
This was super impressive, back when online video conferencing software was more restrictive, and Google Meet for example didn't even have native video meeting recorder functionality.
We actually used Fireflies almost exclusively for years, super early days back in 2017, and it has come a long way since, moving more into that of a AI meeting assistant.
This is an area where Fireflies really excels, although is the core piece that we think also bites them a bit. Fireflies has a lot of features. Especially with the launch of AI (OpenAI) being integrated with everything, came a whole myriad of features.
When every meeting recorder on the market is flocking to AI, Fireflies is like:
"How can we add that and many different spins on it to differentiate?"
While we appreciate that in theory, it does come at a point of overwhelm. What we find actually missing from Fireflies is actually simplicity. Do more with less. So while we are rating them high in this category, we don't necessarily mean it in a good way per-say.
They've built out a unique feature-set around being able to create snippets of calls, and tag them to a specific playlist, to then reference later or share with your team or others:
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It's a really cool idea, it's just in practice, how often will you really be using it? I could see this being more useful for very specific industry verticals or teams, but not most, and not in the way we use a meeting recorder tool in our day-to-day.
All-in-all, they give you a lot of tools to organize your online meetings. But that's where I sorta wish I could just do less. I'm already organizing so many other facets to my life, from file storage in Google Drive, to channels and notes in Slite. I really just want to record meetings, have them log to my CRM, and forget about them unless I need to reference them.
Thing is, if you aren't staying on-top of organizing your calls though, it almost feels like you're just not taking full advantage of what Fireflies has built, which honestly stresses me out. 😅
Fireflies is pretty clean overall—it looks decently nice, it's just that there's a lot vying for your attention even just on the call review page:
Do you view the AI summary? Create Soundbites? Maybe AskFred? Or a Smart Search? Maybe you just want to make a comment? 🤷
It's just a bit overwhelming until you get used to the interface, but overall design-wise, it is clean.
This is actually what frustrates us most about Fireflies. There's a lot going on. With all of their features, they have a lot vying for your attention, and with many features, also comes miscellaneous bugs.
Even in just trying to create a soundbite clip, I couldn't for the life of me get it to actually play the sound when selecting a small 2 minute clip in the middle of a 2 hour call:
Will they fix this? Of course, although point being—build some stability into your core features before introducing new ones.
This is the recurring theme that we've experienced with Fireflies over the years. I'm saying 5–6 years now. So it's not just a one-off thing, it's pretty core, meaning there's likely a bit of tech debt and feature rushing which is affecting their end-user UX. They just keep adding more, but when simply trying to do the basic things, we find ourselves fighting with the software to make things happen.
This is an area that we really have to hand it to Fireflies—they have focused on integrations quite deeply out of the gate. For example, they integrate with most of the best CRM tools on the market.
They integrated with the usual suspects out of the gate back in the day, from HubSpot to Salesforce, and when reaching out and asking about integrating with Copper, they said "sure!" and a week later, it was built 🤯
So while we counted earlier in the UX area, feature bulk as a negative, this is the area that the speed at which the team does release features is appreciated. They aren't afraid to push a feature or integration live, even if it's only 70% there, which sometimes is okay. 🤷
Their pricing tiers are pretty standard when compared to the best meeting recorder software on the market. If you're looking for free meeting recording software, Fireflies does have that, although what you'll get is incredibly limited at just 3 transcription credits, and 800 total minutes of storage per seat, and audio only at that.
Want any integrations at all, and you'll have to move to the paid Pro tier at $18/user/mo, for which has a pre-set 8,000 minutes of storage, and still no video recording functionality.
So if you do the math and are recording about 30 calls per month (assuming that some days are 0 while others are 3–4), the middle tier will get you about 4–5 months of storage before you're forced to move to the highest tier without losing historical recordings.
This is where they really ultimately force you to move to the highest tier with any meaningful usage. Not to mention, if you, like us, need video recording (which genuinely feels table-stakes when it comes to software that can record online meetings), well, you're going to be immediately on the highest tier right out of the gate. A bit steep with a lot of pressure to upgrade to the annual tier due to the discount on that.
When comparing Fireflies vs tl;dv for example, you'll see that you actually get full video recording and storage for free, you're just giving up some of the summarization features unless you pay. Fireflies, gate keeps not only the AI features, but also video recording features, allowing you to only get basic audio recording on the free tier, and super limited at that.
This is just where we feel like Fireflies has one of the more strict usage models as it relates to pricing. If you use Fireflies over time, you're going to be on their highest tier, guaranteed.
While Fireflies was quick on the scene when it came to recording the audio to meetings, they were laggards when it came to actually recording the video as well. This is actually the main reason that we left Fireflies and moved to tl;dv ourselves a couple years back.
tl;dv on the other hand started out of the gate focusing on being video recording software out of the gate. And for a company like ours, where we're often screensharing important information over video calls with customers and others, and needing to reference the screen recordings at a later time, that's where other tools excelled over Fireflies.
You genuinely can't go wrong here—the only wrong solution is probably not using a video meeting recorder tool. You have your pick from tl;dv, Fireflies, Grain, and others.
The only other thought is to probably select a recording option that allows you to record Google Meet and Zoom calls. Other online meeting recording software like Dialpad Meetings for example have similar functionality, although it actually requires that you fully switch all of your internal and external meetings to that of Dialpad Meetings. This is a complete operational change that may introduce a bit too much friction for your team or clients, so just be forewarned.
If you want video conference recording software that goes to the depths of sentiment analysis, allows for deep organization of snippets, and has focused most of their resources on the audio side of things, Fireflies definitely wouldn't be a bad option.
Clockwise optimizes your team’s schedules to create more time in everyone’s day.
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.
The piece that is most confusing to me when using Clockwise is that they have a "planner", which looks like a calendar:
But when you actually dive in to use it, you realize that it has no actual calendaring functionality. While it allows you to create a one-off event, you can't even edit after creating it—it's literally read only. So there's no editing the title/description, adding additional guests, etc. you'll have to go to a separate calendar app like Google Calendar to make any of these changes.
What it does allow you to do is tag existing events (sort of like an over-encompassing category of the event), update internal meetings as "flexible"—AKA you're allowing Clockwise to reschedule them automatically, and manually reschedule meetings to others based on some recommended schedule times:
This is all fine, it's just something that I continually get frustrated by when using these time management tools. Just like Reclaim, it's essentially requiring you to either keep Clockwise open in another tab, or you're restricted to using Google Calendar along with the Clockwise Chrome extension.
So this is where you need to essentially forego using a modern calendar app in favor of using Clockwise properly (or you need to have both apps open side-by-side).
Clockwise touts AI for time management/scheduling, and it seems they've actually gone a bit more true to this than that of Reclaim. They've done this by incorporating a ChatGPT-like interface for which you can speak to in-place of a scheduling assistant.
They claim you can use it for things like "I need to meet with our CTO immediately", which will then suggest some shifts in both your calendars, and then you can move forward with it.
The only question I have here is, should everyone at the company really be able to have that level of control? To be able to switch around team member's calendar to prioritize a meeting with you? There's definitely areas where this would be cool and impressive, I'll admit, it's just I wonder how much actual usage this will get on the day-to-day, versus it just being a really cool AI demo type of feature.
To be crystal clear (as many don't seem to understand this point at first glance), if you primarily have external attendees in your meetings, you cannot mark events as "flexible meetings" and thus, they cannot take advantage of the automatic rescheduling and focus time optimization that Clockwise allows for.
Clockwise is also not a calendar replacement. So you'll still want to use an improved 3rd party calendar like Cron, Motion, or if you must, Google Calendar (which is actually suggested because of the Google Calendar Chromium extension for Clockwise):
While it has scheduler options, replacing the need for tools like Calendly in most cases, and unlike Reclaim, it actually allows for booking questions, they are just a bit barebones in terms of options:
Clockwise fits in as the most focused specifically on re-arranging internal team meetings, to optimize chunks of focus time for teams. This means, if you're using Clockwise solo, or with a small team (or just don't have that many internal meetings), the value in which you'll get from it won't be all that high.
This is where we're more a fan of time management tools that also have task management baked in at the core, because really, what is time management without tasks?
While a tool like Motion will actually fit in tasks that need to be done during your focus blocks of time, Clockwise is more about trying to find you and your team focus blocks of time.
Clockwise also just reschedules meetings and focused time blocks once a day, whereas both Motion and Reclaim react to changes on your calendar immediately.
We find it generally difficult to recommend Clockwise if customers actually have any meaningful scheduler needs though, as something like Motion or Calendly allows for far greater control in adding more opinionated parameters around the booking link. Like in Motion, since it also manager your tasks, you can set a scheduler link to be higher priority in that it'll actually book over scheduled tasks, and even over scheduled events (if you wanted a high-priority link set).
If you have a large team along with frequent internal meetings and you want to optimize everyone's calendars (why wouldn't you want to at that point?), then Clockwise is great!
If you're more looking for a modern time management platform that covers scheduling links, improves your calendar experience (desktop & mobile), and helps you get work done in the focus blocks of time created, that's where Motion is more of the top pick of the category.
We're seeing with Clockwise, just like with Reclaim, that they are trying to hand off the actual task management of getting work done to a proper project manager, which is what makes Clockwise and Reclaim both in a powerful yet narrow sliver to the time management space as a whole.
For teams of all sizes looking for a modern AI-powered work phone (call + SMS) that can be integrated with other tools.
I was actually one of a few people back in the day that tried to make the pivot from Google Meet and Zoom to Dialpad Meetings (formerly UberConference) happen.
The thing is, at the time, there was just too much friction trying to get people to use and accept Dialpad Meetings, because it's just different from what they are used to using (thank you inertia /sarcasm).
Dialpad Meetings is quite clean—we've always appreciated the simplicity it brings with it. I appreciate them coming at it with a more modern approach, but with that, comes more difficult user-adoption (unless you just copy Google Meet and Zoom identically).
This is where we've ran into the most struggles with Dialpad Meetings. It's just not familiar with most people when joining. They don't know where the screensharing icon is, along with everything else. It's just different from what people are used to. While this is normally fine and we don't want to be too negative on Dialpad Meetings for this point, the truth of the matter is they are just battling inertia (familiarity), and people just hate change when it comes to something they also dislike (Meetings) 😅
Dialpad Meetings doesn't have an API that we can connect into, so there's no current way to create custom integrations outside of what they list on their site (native integrations).
So say you want to create a meeting activity within your CRM (e.g. Copper), you can't do that without a meeting recorder tool that can join your meeting, like Fireflies. So the only way to really do this is to hand off the integration side of things to a meeting recorder tool that has deep integrations with CRMs.
What I did back in the day to get this working actually, was relying on Fireflies to join the call and be the native integration with the CRM. They do have a dedicated landing page for their integration with Dialpad Meetings, although it is still has the URL "uberconference". 😅
There are positives and negatives that come with this approach though.
So all-in-all, we know this isn't the most ideal thing to hear. Without Dialpad Meetings having a proper API though (or a native CRM integration), that's all we can really do here.
If the above is you, all I can say is we hear you... It's overwhelming, confusing, and we were going down this exact same rabbit hole 6+ years ago.
At the end of the day, we ultimately just decided to use Google Meet alongside tl;dv, as the native integration they have between eachother, alongside no longer having to fight the inertia (of people not wanting to try a "new" meeting tool), is where we ultimately found ourselves.
It's also more likely that tools will integrate natively with Google Meet and Zoom, especially because for some reason Dialpad Meetings is choosing to highly restrict their API for internal use only. 🤷
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A shared documentation and note taking tool that tip-toes the line of a flexible no-code platform (for teams of all sizes).
Notion positions itself as an "all-in-one" workspace tool, but that doesn't mean it's ideal for "everything."
At its core, Notion is a knowledge base or wiki, designed for documenting company processes and notes. Over time, Notion has expanded its capabilities, allowing users to link notes, create databases with formulas, and more.
Notion's versatility allows you to customize it into almost anything you need. This flexibility has led teams to use Notion as a CRM, project management tool, task manager, knowledge base, and more. However, just because Notion can be adapted for various purposes doesn't always mean it should be. We often receive feedback from teams who've tried using "Notion for everything", only to find it becoming overwhelming and messy.
If you want to use Notion, use it as a knowledge base/company wiki (or use Slite, our top pick and what we use 😉). For specific business functions like project and task management or CRM, it's usually better to opt for dedicated tools built for the job.
A huge drawback of using Notion for CRM or project management is that you're now building your system from scratch. Even with available templates, you'll find yourself investing a lot of time in learning to configure Notion and tailoring it to your processes.
In contrast, a project management tool that is developed by a team focused solely on creating the best product in that niche, will much more quickly set you up for success.
Just think about it: when you're using a project manager that was built for that function, this means that their entire team focused on building the best project manager out there. So you're already getting a tool with project management features that are useful to thousands of other businesses. While with Notion... well guess who is going to be building said features? YOU 😅
The reality is, we often hear people say "but my business is unique so I need a custom solution, which is why Notion is appealing".
After helping teams of all sizes and in many industries for over a decade, we promise you that business processes are not that unique and 95% of the time can be (and should be) mapped to the structure of existing tools.
Oh and if you're considering using Notion as a CRM, make sure to read this dedicated article as to why we don't recommend that either.
Notion offers a free tier for up to 10 guests, making it accessible if you're curious about its capabilities. Notion has a free tier for up to 10 guests, so if you're curious as to what the hype is about, you can easily sign up and start playing with it yourself. If after a day you start feeling overwhelmed, you're not alone, it's more or less a blank slate after all.
Never take meeting notes again. Get transcripts, automated summaries, action items, and chat with Otter to get answers from your meetings.
An intelligent habit and task time-blocking and event scheduling layer atop your calendar.
Reclaim AI is a unique tool sitting in a bit of an in-between product category. It's a lay on top of a calendar that utilizes AI to help you better manage your time by finding the ideal times for your daily habits, meetings, and focus work.
It's a layer on top of your Google Calendar, but it's not a replacement for a project or task manager (you'd integrate your existing task manager or project manager in with Reclaim).
You enter in your habits into Reclaim, like "lunch" and you tell it to schedule your lunch between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Using AI, Reclaim will make sure to schedule your lunch break everyday between those hours, depending what you have to get done. If your schedule shifts, Reclaim will make sure you still get a lunch break.
If you're working a corporate job, are in constant meetings and want to protect your time from getting pulled into meetings, then Reclaim can help you get more focus time and, well, simple things like a lunch break. Engineering, product, or marketing teams that need heads down focus time will benefit the most from Reclaim.
You've probably heard people comparing Motion vs Reclaim, but to be honest, Reclaim is competing more with something like Clockwise, not really Motion. Reclaim isn't your go-to for project management or even for detailed task management (while Motion excels at both these aspects).
You might like Reclaim if you fit into one or all of the below categories:
Using Reclaim as your scheduler leaves a lot to be desired—you can't add basic questions for someone to answer upon filling out the booking link. This makes it impossible to replace other scheduling tools like Calendly and Motion (learn more in the full Motion App Review) unless your booking needs are quite simple (e.g. internal meetings or meeting with friends).
If you're thinking of using Reclaim for task management, be prepared for something pretty basic. Reclaim more so wants you to integrate your project management tool. It's going to allow you to set task priority and deadline, but it won't let you manage greater projects, collaborate with your team, or get a bigger picture of all of your tasks at hand. Read our full Reclaim AI review.
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