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. ⤵
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This is somewhat of a newer category, some refer to it as "daily planners", others "time blocking". All-in-all, it's traditionally a calendar app that has put some thought into how tasks, meetings, and event scheduling all affect your day-to-day.
At the end of the day, everyone is on an equal playing field in that we all only have 24 hours in a day. Some people fill that time with meetings, others tasks, and this category asks the question:
How much time do you actually have free in your day? And what work should we prioritize getting done during those free blocks of time?
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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.
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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".
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.
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.
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