While Motion and Routine both fall into the daily planner category, they are quite different. Routine takes a manual approach to daily planning tasks on to your calendar while Motion uses AI to auto-schedule tasks and even full projects onto your calendar.
We recommend Motion for busy professionals and teams, and Routine more for those who want to dabble with the idea of daily planning since they have a basic free tier.
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. ⤵
Motion and Routine cater to different needs, making the choice between them quite straightforward.
Routine serves well as a daily planner for personal use and habit building while Motion, with its emphasis on functionality, caters to users with numerous tasks and constantly evolving schedules.
Routine, with its beautiful and minimal design, is ideal for personal use and habit formation. It allows for time-blocking tasks on your calendar but makes adjusting your schedule for sudden changes quite manual and tedious.
For instance, if you need to insert a new task between two existing ones, it requires a manual reshuffle of your calendar, which can be a bit cumbersome.
That said, Routine is great for anyone aiming to establish consistent habits—be it hydration, fitness routines, family commitments, or even weekly grocery shopping, complete with the ability to make notes, such as jotting down your grocery list for example.
Routine also has a 'free forever' tier, which adds to its appeal for personal task management without any financial commitment.
Motion, in contrast, is better suited for professionals with dynamic workloads.
Its AI feature prioritizes and rearranges tasks based on urgency. It also includes a meeting scheduler and project management tool, making it more aligned with professional use.
When you add a task in Motion, you can assign it a priority level (low, medium, high), and the app intelligently rearranges your schedule to accommodate this new task. For example, if you add a high-priority task amongst existing ones, Motion will automatically adjust your schedule, ensuring that your most critical tasks are addressed first. This dynamic scheduling is a game-changer for professionals with evolving workloads.
In short, choose Routine for a structured approach to personal habits and tasks, and Motion for managing a changing professional workload with AI-assisted scheduling.
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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.
The all-in-one work platform Routine is the next-generation platform for professionals and teams to get things done faster!
Routine app falls into the daily planner + productivity tools category. If you are looking for a habit tracking app to help with daily routine planning, task management and, time blocking for personal use, Routine is an app to consider.
Compared to Motion, Sunsama, and Akiflow which are all task management tools, Routine is the newest kid on the block in the category and aimed for more personal use, while the others are more professionally focused.
Routine is for individuals who are looking for a personal app to help with habit building, daily planning, task management and time blocking. It has a beautiful and thoughtful user interface that makes it very aesthetically pleasing. You can also use it as your main calendar (as it integrates with Google Calendar) and take personal notes within Routine. Routine is a great introduction to using a productivity tool to help form good daily habits and manage your daily schedule.
Motion, Sunsama and Akiflow were built to be tools that can help you better manage your workload, while Routine is something we'd consider using as a "light" version of task management. For example, if you want to time block in more or less static blocks of time and want to build a routine (without much regular rearranging of tasks) then Routine is a great app to consider. Tasks that should go in Routine are healthy habits (e.g. drinking water or tasks to help manage mental health like meditation).
Routine is very much for individuals at the moment, not professionals. Their integrations with project management tools are limited (Notion is currently available while Asana and ClickUp are coming soon, according to the Routine app website). So if you are looking to centralize your tasks from other tools, tools like Akiflow or Sunsama would be much better choices for you.
If you are looking for a comprehensive project management tool, Routine would not be a choice to consider as it is very much a personal routine planner, habit tracking app and task management tool. If your team is not yet using a project management tool (or you individually know you need to manage larger projects), then considering something like Motion might be best as it would eliminate your need for a project management tool + a daily planning tool (it offers daily planning, time blocking, and calendar scheduling capabilities in addition to full project management capabilities).
Rating: C
When comparing Routine app to it's two closest competitors, Sunsama and Akiflow, Routine doesn't have too much differentiation with key features. It feels several steps behind the two apps and while it allows you to have note-taking capabilities (differentiating the tool), we much rather recommend people use proper note taking tools instead like Slite or Notion. The reason is because all your notes end up getting stuck within Routine and you can forget ever being able to collaborate on notes with others. The only share feature Routine has with notes is "exporting" which essentially copies the entire text. Depending on where you send the notes, all formatting can be lost which makes for a very frustrating experience. If you take notes in Routine, we'd recommend making sure they are just for yourself and you won't plan on needing them anywhere else!
Beyond that, Routine is much more a tool to use if you want to plan out your morning routine, or are craving a habit tracking tool with the ability to use free time slots to schedule daily tasks.
Rating: A-
This is where Routine shines. It is the most beautiful task management productivity tools on the market in terms of design. Aesthetically it is very pleasing to use, a gorgeous interface with minimalistic design.
Rating: C-
While Routine is gorgeous to use, we found the user experience limiting and frustrating quite quickly. Initially, integrating with Google Calendar, adding tasks, and dropping them on your calendar is easy.
But what if a task will take you two hours to do, and you urgently need to get it done and you have other tasks on your calendar? You'd imagine that dropping in a task at a specific time would automatically move your other tasks to accommodate for the new task, right? This isn't the case with Routine. You can drag the task to be as long as the free time slot, and beyond that you need to manually rearrange your entire schedule to accommodate the new task 😬😬😬
When you compare Routine vs Motion, Motion uses AI capabilities to arrange your day. Simply making a task low, medium or high priority will auto-schedule it for you based on importance, rearranging all your other tasks. This makes it way easier to arrange your schedule instead of spending time fighting with the tool to get your schedule right. This is why we say Routine app is much better for habit building and planning your daily routine rather than granular tasks.
Because of this, we'd say Routine might be helpful for static tasks like "Mental Health Check-In" or "Cook Dinner" but it's difficult to get super granular with tasks and time blocking as you would need for professional work.
Rating: B-
Routine only has an iOS app which is relatively new (only 4 reviews on the app store to date), with Android is coming soon. Routine can be used as your main calendar app on your phone (instead of Google Calendar) and it is much more beautiful than the others on the market.
Rating: C-
Routine currently doesn't integrate with very much beyond your Google Workspace tools and Notion. You can add tasks in from your email, Notion or manually enter tasks into the app. According to Routine's website, Slack, Asana and ClickUp integrations are coming soon. Although, even with these integrations, the tool doesn't appear to have an API coming in the near future which would make it difficult to build workflows with Routine. If you are using Asana or ClickUp and are looking for a time management tool with deep integrations and powerful workflows, consider Motion or Akiflow.
Is Routine app worth it? Routine currently has a free plan for hobbyists and students and this is where we think the tool probably fits best (not professional use). If you are looking for a productivity tool to help you track new habits, healthy habits, banish bad habits, and plan your daily routine then we think it can be a great app for that. The premium version is very much still under construction (coming soon).
If you're a business, we'd say it's probably best skipping Routine and opting in for something like Motion that along with their AI capabilities, will make you feel like you have a personal assistant helping you plan your projects, tasks and day. Alternatively, if you still enjoy manually planning your day, perhaps Sunsama would be the next best alternative for a workplace app.
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