Motion is a full project management tool with daily planning capabilities (it actually uses AI to auto-schedule your tasks on your calendar). It's what we use here at Efficient App.
Sunsama is better suited for individuals who want to take a slower approach to daily planning and enjoy the process of manually planning what they'll work on each day.
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 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 also offers a meeting scheduling tool that replaces other meeting scheduler tools like Calendly. 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.
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 ⤵
Winner: Motion
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.
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
Winner: Sunsama
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.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Winner: Motion
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.
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
Winner: Motion
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.
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
Winner: Motion
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.
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
Winner: Motion
Motion for us replaced the need for tools like Calendly, Asana, and Cron, 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 Cron.
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
Start your 30 day free trial of Sunsama here.
Keep reading below for a deeper dive on both productivity tools ⤵️
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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.
The digital daily planner that helps you feel calm and stay focused.
Sunsama fits into the day planner app category, helping with task management and time blocking. Sunsama is one of the best planner apps for those who want to mindfully and manually plan their day.
Sunsama is great daily planning tool if you especially like physical (pen and paper) note taking/to-do lists and are looking for a way to bring tasks into the digital world. Sunsama definitely knows their target customer well as the software reflects a zen-like philosophy and ethos incredibly well. It has a calming minimal design and is super easy to use.
Sunsama's philosophy is centered around creating a healthy relationship with work, intentionally planning tasks and avoiding burning out. Those seeking more focus, calm, and harmony should try Sunsama.
Get Sunsama Extended 30 Day Trial.
When you open Sunsama each morning, the software asks "What do you want to get done today?". It shows your previously planned tasks and your calendar side-by-side, giving you an overview of your schedule. From there, you can either add or remove tasks from your day, and drag tasks onto your calendar for time blocking.
At the end of the day, you also participate in a daily shut down routine which shows you all the tasks you completed that day and how you spent your time.
While Sunsama is a daily planner, it is not a project manager. Users typically connect in other tools such as Monday, ClickUp, and Asana to pull in tasks from their project management software. Sunsama then takes care of the daily planning piece with your weekly view and calendar view.
When you compare Sunsama vs Akiflow, they are very similar. The differences more so lie within their marketing/philosophy. For instance, Sunsama has a stronger philosophy around taking a zen-like approach work, while Akiflow is more for those who just want a tool to triage through tasks. If "zen-like" approach doesn't sound like you, then check out Akiflow.
When comparing Sunsama vs Motion, you're going to get two very different experiences. Motion uses AI to intelligently plan your tasks onto your calendar, taking into account meetings and appointments, task priority and deadlines. Motion also is a full-fledged project management tool that teams can use.
Sunsama, on the other hand, has been very clear they don't intend to build AI auto-scheduling tools as they want to encourage their users to take the 10-15 minutes per day to plan their schedule (while Motion, for example, does this automatically).
If you've read to this point and phrases like "zen-like approach", "mindful planning" and "intentional scheduling" resonate, Sunsama is probably the right daily planner for you.
Make sure you use the link below for an extended 30 day trial (normally only 14 days, but with the link below you get a full month—and no credit card is required).
Get Sunsama Extended 30 Day Trial.
Sunsama's philosophy is built around taking the time each day to manually plan your tasks. With that, Sunsama doesn't plan on building any auto-scheduling features, like Motion for example, that uses AI to intelligently plan your day.
For some people, Motion's AI is overwhelming and they prefer having dedicated task planning sessions. For others, Sunsama feels a bit too manual therefore gets left by the wayside, wishing the app would help more with proactive planning.
Sunsama aggregates all of your tasks from the different tools that you use, like Monday, ClickUp, Asana, Trello, Gmail, and Slack. Using the native integrations available, you can drag tasks from the above tools into time blocks onto your calendar, and within a weekly planning view.
If you're a part of a team that is using any of the tools above and you're seeking a daily planner, Sunsama is a happy medium.
However, Sunsama does lack in task management functionality for multiple people and it also leaves much to be desired when it comes to planning and managing larger projects. With that, you'd need to use a project manager (e.g. Monday, Asana or ClickUp) to manage projects, and use Sunsama solely for daily planning.
Sunsama won't be building a project manager (likely ever) as they're clear they prefer you to integrate with third party tools to aggregate your tasks. If you're looking for a tool that can help with daily planning and project management and team collaboration, then we recommend checking out Motion.
Get Sunsama Extended 30 Day Trial. No Credit Card Required.
Is Sunsama worth it? If you are someone that thrives on daily task planning and enjoys the process of planning your day, give Sunsama a shot.
It might be the key to keeping you more organized, all while bringing you a bit more enjoyment in the day-to-day and with that, it's definitely worth it.
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