Motion and Reclaim might seem similar on the surface but they are two entirely different tools. Reclaim is not a calendar, it's a tool you use in addition to your calendar to schedule meetings, breaks, and habits. It's more so designed for those working at large companies who want to "defend" their time from getting pulled into endless meetings.
Motion on the other hand is a project management software that has a calendar at the core. You can fully use Motion to manage all of your projects, tasks, and meetings.
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. ⤵
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).
Start your 7 day free trial for Motion today.
Winner: Motion
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 vs Reclaim and Motion vs Clockwise, as neither of the competitors have invested into their tool actually replacing the calendar, which feels quite important to thrive in this category.
Start your 7 day free trial for Motion today.
Winner: Motion
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.
Start your 7 day free trial for Motion today.
Winner: Reclaim
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.
Start your free trial of Reclaim today.
Winner: Motion
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.
Start your 7 day free trial for Motion today.
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.
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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.
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 intelligent habit and task time-blocking and event scheduling layer atop your calendar.
Reclaim AI is a unique tool sitting in a bit of an in-between product category. It's a lay on top of a calendar that utilizes AI to help you better manage your time by finding the ideal times for your daily habits, meetings, and focus work.
It's a layer on top of your Google Calendar, but it's not a replacement for a project or task manager (you'd integrate your existing task manager or project manager in with Reclaim).
You enter in your habits into Reclaim, like "lunch" and you tell it to schedule your lunch between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Using AI, Reclaim will make sure to schedule your lunch break everyday between those hours, depending what you have to get done. If your schedule shifts, Reclaim will make sure you still get a lunch break.
If you're working a corporate job, are in constant meetings and want to protect your time from getting pulled into meetings, then Reclaim can help you get more focus time and, well, simple things like a lunch break. Engineering, product, or marketing teams that need heads down focus time will benefit the most from Reclaim.
You've probably heard people comparing Motion vs Reclaim, but to be honest, Reclaim is competing more with something like Clockwise, not really Motion. Reclaim isn't your go-to for project management or even for detailed task management (while Motion excels at both these aspects).
You might like Reclaim if you fit into one or all of the below categories:
Using Reclaim as your scheduler leaves a lot to be desired—you can't add basic questions for someone to answer upon filling out the booking link. This makes it impossible to replace other scheduling tools like Calendly and Motion (learn more in the full Motion App Review) unless your booking needs are quite simple (e.g. internal meetings or meeting with friends).
If you're thinking of using Reclaim for task management, be prepared for something pretty basic. Reclaim more so wants you to integrate your project management tool. It's going to allow you to set task priority and deadline, but it won't let you manage greater projects, collaborate with your team, or get a bigger picture of all of your tasks at hand. Read our full Reclaim AI review.
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