Motion vs Reclaim AI

If you're exploring Motion and Reclaim you are likely looking for an AI calendar that has deep calendar sync, smart scheduling, and focus time/time blocking capabilities as you want to better manage your time, plan your day, and get more focus work in.

While both Motion and Reclaim deliver on these capabilities, they are actually completely different tools with different focuses. After reading this article, you should know exactly which tool is best suited for your needs! ⤵

Motion was built to be your team's project management software and AI calendar. So with Motion, you shouldn't need to be opening up Google Calendar, or using any of the top calendar software on the market, because Motion is on the top of that list as well.

Reclaim on the other hand was built to be more of a time management assistant, meaning it will work in the background to help your team find the best time slots to work together for internal meetings (similar to that of Reclaim vs Clockwise). Reclaim though has incredibly basic task management functionality, and was never meant to be the project management tool for your team.

Winner: Motion

If you're looking for a proper task/project management tool, Reclaim is sure to let you down. Of the two tools, Motion actually has an impressive prioritization algorithm, that helps you prioritize the most important work to get done every day.

Motion has a myriad of prioritization tools, like priority, deadline, and a special AI algorithm that takes all of that into account when planning your day.

Instead, Reclaim integrates with your project management tools like Asana, ClickUp, Linear, and Jira. While you can now add prioritization on tasks, and Reclaim will automatically schedule the tasks on your calendar, the functionality isn’t anywhere near as robust as Motion.

And because we've gotten this question before—yes, Motion has habits (one of Reclaim's popular features) as well, because when you really think about it, habits are just recurring tasks with additional schedule restrictions (mornings, weekends, etc).

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Motion allows you to integrate your personal and work calendar, so long as you're using Google Workspace/Gmail or Outlook for each. While Reclaim does the same, you aren't going to actually be using Reclaim as your calendar, you're still going to be using a separate calendar app in the day-to-day, just checking Reclaim when wanting to add in tasks or reschedule internal meetings with team members.

Motion and Reclaim both have a deep calendar sync, but Motion goes a layer deeper than Reclaim by syncing not only tasks from Motion onto your Google/Microsoft Calendar, but actually swapping the time blocking events (tasks) between free and busy depending on priority and deadline of the task at hand. Something we've found exceptionally useful to ensure we actually get work done on time.

We actually find it quite strange when comparing Motion to Reclaim and Clockwise, as neither of the competitors have invested into their tool actually replacing the calendar, which feels quite important to thrive in this category.

For individual and basic team usage, this is Motion's bread and butter. They were actually solely a calendar and appointment scheduler before they even moved into the time management and task management space. People report Motion as being a 50–100% better Calendly for individual usage in-fact. For a more in-depth breakdown, you can check out our Motion vs Calendly comparison if you'd like to see how they compare, as if you're looking for deeper team scheduling features or deep appointment booking integration, Calendly might be a better fit.

That said, Motion lets you go incredibly granular on all your scheduling preferences, in-fact, Motion has smart time blocking around tasks, putting them in your work calendar to ensure that you get them done at the best time to complete by the deadline. That's where their smart scheduling feature comes into play, preventing people using the meeting scheduler link from booking over the focus time scheduled for your most important work. They've truly thought about how to improve the scheduler category, and they've done an exceptional job on that front.

We found that Reclaim has a quite barebones appointment scheduler that has a lot to be desired. Want to have a scheduler link that prioritizes meetings over unimportant tasks, but not critical ones? Can't do that. Want to add more complex questions (e.g. dropdown select fields), when someone is booking? Can't do that either.

If you're instead someone that has tons of internal meetings on your calendar every day, and you need a tool that can help you find more focused time blocks, that's where Reclaim stands out.

This also gets into a slightly different category though, which introduces other competitors, so if team meeting optimization is something that you're looking for, you might want to refer to our Clockwise vs Reclaim comparison instead.‍

Reclaim doesn’t have a mobile app. With that, you can probably better understand why we say that Reclaim is limited in task management as adding tasks on the fly isn’t a super seamless experience (you can log-in through your phone browser, but it’s a pretty cumbersome experience).

With Motion, you have a full-fledged mobile app. If you’re an iOS user, you can even say to Siri “Add a task with medium priority by next Tuesday” and it will create the task in Motion for you.

In summary, when comparing Motion vs Reclaim, Motion is a full-fledged project management tool, a replacement for your calendar, helpful for team collaboration, and it auto-schedules tasks on your teams calendar. It works great for individuals, and you'll only get more out of it as your team grows.

Reclaim on the other hand is just a tool that can be added to your productivity suite, specifically if you're an employee at a larger company looking to defend more of your time.

So while on the surface Motion and Reclaim seem similar, they are targeting completely different people and needs.