We've used both Monday and Motion at different points, and Motion is much easier to implement and adopt for small-medium sized teams. While Monday has great marketing, when it comes to it's product the UI/UX is quite underwhelming.
We prefer Motion because it has a calendar at the core and uses AI to automatically schedule tasks on you/your teams calendar to help you stay on track and hit deadlines.
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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Throughout our article below, we'll use the words overwhelming and overly complex a lot.
Many of the most popular project management tools are designed for large teams and organizations, and they can be overwhelming and complex to set up and use for smaller teams. Here's what to keep in mind:
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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.
Note: If you need 2 seats, you're pretty much better off getting the discount by purchasing 3 seats, as you're effectively getting a 3rd seat for free.
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.
An all-in-one project management tool and suite of products for teams.
Monday started off as a project management software, but in order to gain more market share, continued to build tools and expand their offering. They went from being a project management software, to an "all-in-one" tool. They now offer products such as Monday "Work Management" (aka project management), Monday sales CRM and Monday dev (for agile workflows).
When comparing Asana vs Monday Asana wins in the category of project management. Why? Because Monday is trying to be "all-in-one" tool, meaning they are trying to do everything rather than doing one thing super well. Asana is a project management software, through and through. They aren't trying to be anything more.
One area where Monday stands out is it's vibrant interface and bold colors that adds a sprinkle of fun when managing projects. They have different ways to visualize data, like using a 5 star rating system (for priority for example) or timeline views to see project progress. Dragging and dropping tasks in is relatively easy and intuitive. That said, users have reported Monday to be quite buggy in terms of functionality, so when comparing Monday vs Asana in terms of stability, Asana wins this category also.
While Monday offers tiers for small teams, we'd think there are better tools for teams with under 300 employees (like Asana or Motion). That's not to say that smaller teams don't use Monday (they do), it's just going to take quite a bit of work to set it up for success.
Here are the categories, we'd specifically recommend Monday for project management. You may fit into one or all of the below categories:
The main difficulty with Monday is actually getting it setup for success. Many folks create an account, invite their team, pop in some projects and then it sits there as an abandoned tool, with no one on the team actually feeling like its reliable. This comes from not doing a proper Monday implementation (often means working with a consultant). Mapping your processes to Monday and creating team documentation will lead to higher chances of success.
If the above sounds overkill for your business, consider something like Motion as that's more so a project management tool that you can get set up out of the gate and have your team using it fairly quickly (read full Motion review).
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