Motion vs Sunsama

If you're exploring Motion and Sunsama you are likely looking for a tool to help you better manage your time, plan your day, and get more focus work in. They are sometimes referred to as productivity apps, but the productivity apps category feels a bit too broad to really get across the value of each.

While both Motion and Sunsama provide time managing and blocking capabilities, a desktop app and mobile app, they are in-fact quite different in who they are for based on their capabilities. After reading this article, you will know exactly which tool better suits your needs! ⤵

Motion is for individuals and teams who are looking for more of an "assistant" to help manage their time. It's a full blown project manager with AI capabilities, that automatically re-arranges your tasks on your calendar based on priority and schedule. Didn't complete a task? No worries! Motion will automatically reschedule missed tasks for you during your next available timeslot.

Motion uses AI to plan your week

Motion also offers a meeting scheduling tool that replaces the best meeting scheduler tools. So if you're looking for meeting scheduling capabilities, Motion is the only one that will cover this area.

Sunsama on the other hand is more of a daily planner app and personal task management tool that requires you to manually drag tasks to arrange your day based on how you're feeling (not based on AI). You can only plan up-to 2–weeks in advance with Sunsama, so so think of it as more of a short-term focused planning tool, rather than a larger project management tool.

With Sunsama, you manually plan your day with tasks from other tools

If you are more so looking for a neat way to time block your tasks and organize your time, Sunsama is a excellent choice to help you do that. It has a beautiful user interface and strives to take a more mindful approach to helping manage your time. It also has third party integrations with project management tools like Asana, ClickUp, and Trello. So if you work for an organization that already uses these tools and you are yearning for time blocking capabilities, then Sunsama can be a great addition to your productivity suite!

Let's explore each category deeper below ⤵

Motion wins the project management category hands-down 🙌 Motion is a project manager with more advanced features while Sunsama is more of a daily planner app.

With Motion, you can manage full-fledged projects that are months in duration with a series of sub-tasks. You can assign tasks to different team members and indicate if there are blockers in the way of task completion and so forth. If you have large projects that you like to schedule way in advance, Motion would definitely be a better fit for you.

Sunsama was built more as a daily planner to help you focus on the work you want to get done for the day. Sunsama allows you to schedule your day up to about two weeks in advance, which is much more short-term focused. Need to get something done 2 months away on a specific day? You need to add the task to your backlog and remember to manually plan it into your day as the time approaches. With Sunsama, you would also need to use a project manager tool like Asana or ClickUp to use alongside it to get project management capabilities (requiring you to pay for multiple tools).

The scenario where we see Sunsama being helpful is if you work for an organization that uses Asana or ClickUp and you want a way to plan your day and time block outside of these tools. In this case, if you are up for manually spending the time to plan each week with tasks, then it can be a great tool to add to your suite of productivity tools.

Sunsama has many more native third party integrations that that of Motion. Sunsama has focused in this area, leaning on integrating with the best project management tools instead of building a project manager itself. So if you're using one of the third party integrations that Sunsama has, like their integration with Asana, you'll get a great integrated experience.

If you are already using a project management tool within your organization and just want the cherry-on-top abilities to time block and plan your day, then Sunsama is a great addition here. The native third party integrations will automatically pull your tasks from other tools into Sunsama, getting them ready for you to arrange into your daily plan.

Motion was built for individuals first and foremost, but their project manager was built for teams. A task can be set to the status of blocked, helping your team understand that a task assigned to a specific team member might be totally blocking your team from moving a project forward based on the deadline. The magic of this is that Motion knows when tasks are blocking team members from getting work done, so if you're ever a bottleneck, it'll automatically prioritize those tasks to get done to unblock your team.

Sunsama on the other hand is more of a daily planner. It relies more on a partnered project management tool like Asana or ClickUp to handle the actual team collaboration and managing of projects.

Motion isn't a daily planner, so much as it is an artificial intelligence daily planner. While Sunsama sets you up to put a lot of thought and care into what you want to work on for the day, Motion just takes all your task inputs (priority, deadline, availability, and even dependencies), and just does all the planning for you. So Motion actually evolves the daily planner space by introducing AI and automation into it.

Say your day is full of tasks and meetings, then something urgent comes up. You can quickly add a task to Motion and set the priority to ASAP and it will automatically rearrange your day, putting the urgent task at the top of your to-do list. This has saved our team SO MUCH TIME (we were previously using Asana and spent way too much time re-arranging tasks based on moving deadlines).

On the other hand, if you particularly prefer to organize your own day manually, then that's where Sunsama stands out as a daily planner app, almost putting more of a "zen-like" experience into planning your day. It can help you set reasonable goals for your tasks each day. That said, it is the manual path and relies completely on you to schedule your day.

With Motion, it automatically time blocks for you on your calendar when you simply set task priority and duration. If you don't get to the tasks for the current day, it'll automatically time block the following day and week for you.

With Sunsama, you have to manually plan your week and day, deciding what you'd like to time block for the current day.

The fear with Sunsama is that once you miss a few days of time blocking your day, it becomes quite overwhelming with tasks. Whereas with Motion, it takes into account all of your tasks and ensures your most important tasks are automatically time blocked for each day. Especially those that are blocking larger projects and team members from getting work done.

Motion for us replaced the need for tools like Cal, Asana, so in terms of overall value, we're actually paying less overall for Motion, and getting 95% of what we needed from these other tools, all in a cohesive (yet purposeful) solution. This makes it an excellent choice for our team.

So if you're in a similar boat, and are looking for more advanced features like the Scheduler, Calendar, and Project Management solution that Motion offers and it can replace other tools you use, it's a no-brainer on overall value. Especially if you're looking for more than just a daily planner app and would enjoy a sprinkle of artificial intelligence working with you as an assistant to help you manage your day!

If you're considering Sunsama as a task management tool, you should also be using a proper project manager like Asana, and scheduling tool like Calendly. Although it has calendar functionality, you might still want to use a proper calendar tool alongside Sunsama like that of Notion Calendar.