Motion vs Calendly

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.

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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.

Try Calendly for free here.

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).

Try Calendly for free here.

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.

Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.