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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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.
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.
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