Motion and Calendly are for entirely different scheduling needs. Motion is better if you have less than 10 meetings a week, and you also want a tool to help you manage projects, while Calendly is a better if scheduling is a part of your business processes (e.g. you need to accept payments, route leads to sales reps, etc).
That said, there is another tool that we recommend over Calendly if you fit into the latter category, and that tool is Cal.
We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what this software does well, and what they could do better. ⤵
Winner: Motion
I've tried a lot of calendar scheduling tools, have even changed our Efficient App software stack scheduler some 8 times over the past decade? And I must say that in terms of setting up Motion as a scheduler, having it check for team member (and personal calendar) conflicts, and just easily creating and sending over custom booking links to people, Motion has been the easiest to setup and maintain.
Even embedding booking pages onto your website is super seamless, and it just looks more modern and clean than that of even Calendly.
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
Winner: Calendly
While Motion has great individual event scheduling functionality (with the ability to check against other team member availability), they aren't currently focused on team scheduling functionality.
So if you're looking to have shared team booking links, and other team-focused scheduling functionality, you're probably better off using a tool that is focusing on that right now, which is Calendly.
That said, if you're looking for more of an internal team AI scheduling tool (where your internal team events optimize themselves to find the most focus time for you and your team), that's where you'll want to check out either Clockwise or Reclaim, which is in a slightly different category of Time Management.
Winner: Calendly
Calendly takes the cake when it comes to actual scheduling-related integrations, allowing you to do things like requiring payment via Stripe before an appointment can be booked, and native integrations with other tools on the market.
Even deep integrations with your CRM by using a tool like Outfunnel which works out-of-the-box to add leads to your CRM upon appointment booking, along with logging appointment bookings and changes as activities, and even triggering updated fields upon booking being scheduled.
That said, there are workarounds available for some of these things with Motion, but key word "workarounds". So take for example the requiring payment before booking example. With Motion, you can book in a paid consultation with us, which we simply take payment via Stripe Checkout, and then redirect you to our booking page. Worst case scenario, someone books in without paying, and we'd know and just cancel the appointment. So all-in-all, at our size, these things are not a huge deal.
But if you just want more things to work out of the box, no workarounds required, then you're probably better off using a tool like Calendly if you want to have super fine-grained control over your booking tool.
I will also note that currently, Motion does not have a scheduler API currently, so if you want to integrate the scheduler, you need to be clever using a tool like Mailparser and Zapier to accomplish some of this functionality (which we have done for some of our customers).
Winner: Motion
If you're on the free tier of Calendly, then they win on the value front, although you're getting quite limited functionality. So for this category, let's just assume you're actually on a paid tier of Calendly to keep things fair.
Motion for us replaced the need for Chili Piper, Asana, and Vimcal, so in terms of overall value, we're actually paying less overall for Motion, and getting 95% of what we needed from these other tools, all in a cohesive (yet purposeful) solution.
So if you're in a similar boat, and the Scheduler, Calendar, and Project Management solution that Motion offers can replace the other tools you use in the category, it's a no-brainer on overall value. Especially if you're looking for more than just a meeting scheduler, and you're looking to block time from things like important tasks you need to get done, and you'd like how the time blocks actually affect when people should be able to schedule in with you. Allowing you to actually get more focus work done in your day.
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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 or Motion App) is our top pick for project management for teams. The reason we love it (and why we switched after using Asana for 7 years!) is because it’s not just a tool to manage your work. It actually helps us get work done faster.
Let us explain:
You enter your projects and tasks, and Motion’s AI automatically schedules them on your calendar. More than that, it takes your entire schedule into account (meetings, personal appointments, etc) to accurately predict when work will get done (and if you’ll meet your deadlines as a team).
Recently, Motion even added AI Employees. You can assign tasks to AI Employees to handle things like writing blog posts, creating social content, drafting email responses, and even providing coaching on where you and your team can improve.
So with that, at its core, Motion is really an AI assistant. It pulls together all this unique information and uses it to build your most productive day, making it one of the best tools on the market for actually getting more done.
Compared to other top project management tools, Motion is far ahead when it comes to leveraging AI to help teams get ahead 🚀
If you've heard of the productivity app terminology of "time blocking", well Motion does that automatically using AI, no manual time blocking needed.
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 1–100 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.
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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".
At its core, Motion is a project management tool. That's the backbone. But they have AI Employees that pull context from your tasks, projects, AI notes, and meeting notes. The more you put in, the smarter it gets.
So if you're a team that has wanted to implement AI more, but haven't really been sure "how", Motion is making incredibly easy and accessible. It's giving all teams the opportunity to leverage AI and hire only for roles that AI can't handle.
We LOVE Motion's Meeting Recorder, and if you're already using Motion for your projects, there's really no reason to use another one. It automatically joins your meetings (you just have to let it in), records video and text, and then uses AI to organize the notes for you. It also automatically creates tasks from the meeting notes and all you need to do is approve or deny them.
Motion’s AI Docs are super handy for keeping processes and notes right inside your projects, perfect if you don’t already have a knowledge base. That said, don't expect them to be as powerful as Notion or Slite. They are more to be used for basic documentation and notes. The best part of Motion AI Docs is that you can quickly tag projects and tasks, so that everything is conneted and integrated.
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.
Annual Billing:
Monthly Billing (per user per month):
View full Motion pricing tiers & features on their site (to see which features are included in each tier)
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 simple calendar scheduling tool with a solid API for teams of all sizes.
We've implemented Calendly into many businesses over the years as it once was the market leader when it came to online meeting scheduling. But we recently evaluated a new tool called Cal.com and we found that they are much more modern than Calendly. It is are faster, and their workflows are so much more flexible for teams looking to add automated scheduling into their business processes.
Compared to Cal.com, Calendly are feels like the older tool that feels outdated.
So if you are looking for a new scheduler, skip Calendly and grab Cal.com instead, you'll thank us for it!
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