The "Project Management" category is one that has been quite underwhelming for a while. If you've been interested in this space for long enough, you probably saw the hype around Monday and ClickUp, only to see them both devolve into an all-in-one tool instead of re-thinking project management.
That's where we have to hand it to Motion. They started out as simply that of a calendar and scheduler tool, and upon perfecting the time management component, moved to task management (individual), perfected that, and then finally moved to the project management space (teams).
They walked before they ran, and focused more on how individuals manage their time, and how that affects the greater team around them.
They've essentially created this over-encompassing category of time management and daily planning, mixed in a bit of AI (for task/event prioritization), and it feels like you have a personal assistant.
For Small + Mid-Market teams looking to for an AI-powerd time management platform (Calendar + Scheduling + Tasks & Projects).
Motion is a tool that I've been looking for ever since Sunrise Calendar was acquired by Microsoft, more than a decade ago. Since that faithful day, I've been on the never-ending journey of evaluating every single calendar/scheduler/task manager on the market, in search for what I once had.
We believe that Motion is creating a new category entirely, and while you'll see us compare it with the best project management software on the market, you'll see that it isn't just a traditional project manager. And with that, let's dive in:
Rating: A+
Motion isn't just a calendar, scheduler, or task manager. It's really an AI assistant that takes all of this unique information, and uses it to build your perfect day:
Other project management tools require you spend chunks of your day re-evaluating deadlines and shifting back work. Not to mention, they have no actual reference of your calendar, so actual focus time available doesn't even take into account when you're in meetings... 😅
That's where Motion is different, and in some ways, in a category of its own. What they are doing is unmatched in the project management space, and when you compare Motion vs Asana amongst others in the category, you see how outdated traditional task management tools truly are.
They've also taken this whole time management category and leveled up your project management software with a baked in calendar scheduler that takes into account all of your tasks and hard deadlines, along with time blocking to only recommend the best times for you to meet with others, ensuring that you can still get your work done on time. Something that no other project manager can do.
Rating: B-
Motion has a functional calendar/task interface that has your most important tasks on the left, and a calendar on the right. When comparing Motion and Cron, you start to see where the UI could be improved:
The plus side here is that the UI could be improved with some pretty minor tweaks, like making it more obvious as to what the current day is, having less harsh and lighter color pallet for events and tasks (in both light and dark mode), displaying calendar text in a more useful/way (versus getting cut off sharply), amongst other modifications.
We have faith that the team will make the much needed improvements here, and since it would require such minor modifications, we can't weigh this section too heavily against Motion. With these modifications, we feel Motion can pretty easily get to a B+ rating in this category.
Rating: B
The main benefit of Motion, and how it differentiates from every other project management tool on the market is you add your tasks to it, then you forget about it. It will automatically schedule your tasks into your calendar to ensure that you get them done by the time they need to be completed.
With other tools like Asana, you need to manually reschedule your tasks manually on a daily basis, wasting anywhere from 20–60 minutes per day—something you don't even need to think about with Motion.
We would have actually rated Motion as an A in the UX area back when it was a Chromium extension, because it would do incredibly impressive things like automatically pulling up your calendar when visiting a calendly link within the browser, showing you in Motion what times work best for you.
The problem was, there's just too much limitation as a Chromium extension versus being a fully standalone app, so they made the right directional move, they just need to bring some of these super thoughtful experiences back to the desktop app.
Motion is always a keyboard shortcut away (OPT + C), and that's one of the things we love most about using it. Once you're in the app though, it would be nice to have less clicks to get to where you're trying to get.
There's also a few times where you'd actually want to open back up Google Calendar, in things like proposing a new time for example, or editing a team's calendar event (even if you're invited to it), so fixing these things will greatly improve the UX. We're confident that they can actually get this up to an A in the next 6–18 months.
Rating: B-
Motion has an iOS and Android app that is fully-featured, including the full calendar functionality, along with your complete project task lists, and quick access to booking links while on-the-go.
Things we'd love to see to bring Motion up to an A is a proper widget to replace the need for Google Calendar entirely. Some quality UX improvements could be made with having a way to more easily create tasks from other apps, by say sharing a screenshot to Motion, or highlighting text and sharing it with Motion (or even using Siri/Google Assistant to create tasks while on-the-go).
One little knit-pick is the time it takes for the mobile app to load, although this is something that the team is aware of, and we feel pretty confident that the mobile app will hit B+ category in the months to come.
Rating: C+
We have to hand it to the team at Motion on this one—they launched an API, and then almost immediately spun up a Zapier integration to make their API even more accessible to others, something that newer tools in the space haven't invested in which makes Motion stand out, and something we greatly appreciate.
The API is surely to improve with time, adding in more functionality, although it does allow for the major things you'd want to use it for already, like create/find/update of tasks, and most importantly, creating the magic auto-scheduled task.
The one thing that the API is lacking though is on the appointment scheduling side of things. For example, you can't get the same type of API functionality that a tool like Calendly will give you on that front, although you can actually build some of the same functionality (like logging new appointments into your CRM upon booking) using a tool like Mailparser alongside Zapier (although I will say, it's not that straightforward). 😅
If Motion added in API functionality for their scheduler, we'd put Motion's API at a solid B, which is all you'd really need it to be.
If you're anything like me and just starting the quest of your own (or in the middle of it), let me save you some time: you'll likely stumble upon calendar tools like Cron, Vimcal, Magical, Fantastical, Woven (acquired by Slack), and many more scheduler-focused tools like Calendly, ChiliPiper, and Cal.com (amongst many others), along with no shortage of all-in-one task management tools (e.g. Sunsama and Akiflow), heck, even "time management" tools like Clockwise and Reclaim.
Well I'm here to tell you that I've tried them all—extensively.
Each and every tool mentioned does some aspects to time management well, but fall apart when done together.
And that's where Motion is different. Motion is more than just a calendar, scheduler, or task/project manager—it is a platform for time management. Because at the end of the day, we're all just managing time—sometimes by way of projects and tasks, and at other times meetings and events. Motion understands this fact first-and-foremost, and with a small sprinkle of AI, you're given your perfect day planned out for you, no rescheduling or rearranging necessary.
We've actually fully switched to Motion from Asana after using Asana for 7+ years.
If you're looking for a deeper dive comparison on the project management of Motion, you can check out a deep dive project management comparison that covers all of that here.
That said, I've finally found what I've been looking for. (Oh and there's actually quite a bit more to the story if you're interested in hearing more)
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
While there's currently no promo code available, if you use the link above and you let their team know that we sent you, they might even extend your free trial (if you write into support) 😉
A cross-platform native collaborative task manager for small + mid-size teams.
Superlist is very much still in private beta, but we recently got access and have some initial thoughts. I do want to preface this with the following: I have been extremely excited to check this tool out. I've been on the waitlist for 2–3 years, checking in with them monthly about getting access.
The largest appeal is that it was created by the team behind Wunderlist (which is a task manager that was sold to Microsoft in 2015 for between $100–200m). So if there's a team that understands task management deeply, it's this team.
They've even teased Superlist at Google I/O 2022 on stage, as an example of a tool built in Flutter (an open source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase). This is important because this means everyone gets a native app—imagine having native MacOS + iOS + Android + Windows apps all generated from the same codebase.
This was the largest appeal, alongside the sheer beauty of their marketing site and in-app teaser screenshots:
They have this concept behind endless sub-tasks and collaboration, even tying in external tools like Gmail and Slack (as seen in the screenshot above).
In playing with it though, the allure of "how would some of the team that created one of the most successful task managers of our time re-think task/project management from scratch", is kind of a letdown so far to be honest.
They've been hyping up what they've been building for nearly 4 years now, to only just begin letting people in to use it, and it feels incredibly pretty—amazing UI/UX interactions. Heck, even marking a task as "complete" and "incomplete" plays the most relaxing noise (and it changes each time).
I think we're seeing what happens when you get tens of millions of dollars in venture backing and some of the best designers in the world to focus in the UI/UX. I mean heck, just go visit their website, it's incredibly beautiful.
I just fear that they spent too much time building in private, trying to get every UX interaction to be amazing, and not enough on actually being a useful and differentiated project. Genuinely trying to not be too hard on them since it is still in beta, but I also can't give them too much lax because they've been building in private alpha for so many years now. I think they should have launched way sooner and gotten product feedback from more teams using it. It's almost like they are afraid to launch and not be perfect because of all the eyes they have on them.
I even feel like the fact they have so many native integrations out of the gate (like Gmail/Slack/Google Calendar) is somewhat of a red flag... No products should wait until they've integrated with everything before releasing, because I'm willing to bet you a lot (as someone that literally builds integrations for teams of all sizes) that your end-users had a different idea of what "integration with XYZ software" means to them as compared to what you've put together.
I'm really struggling here with this one. Beautiful UI/UX is incredibly important (especially for a product person like myself), and yet here it is, and I'm just left wondering what it's trying to be.
They are sorta going for this task manager-focus meets Slite, Notion, and Coda but once you enter the documentation category, you're against big competition that has essentially outgrown that category and has evolved more into no-code tools.
I feel like modern day task/project managers have evolved over the past couple years more into this daily planner/calendar-focused time management platform space (e.g. Motion), they understand that getting meaningful work done is more complex than just building out beautiful task lists.
I just feel like the project management landscape has changed, and Superlist is still building for the older days of Todoist/Wunderlist/Trello/etc. and if this released back then, it'd have taken the world by storm! We just aren't in that world anymore though. To not have your team's calendar at the core of getting work done, I can't help but feel like you're missing a huge boat here.
With the task list approach, I do have concerns about how this will scale across large teams. I also have a bit of concern with how much focus they are putting on personal/work coinciding, because what makes a great personal task manager does not make a great team-focused task manager.
Personally, I prefer to use my project management tool like Motion/Asana for work only—and yes, with Motion being more tied to my calendar, and my calendar being my day (which is a mixture of personal/work), it does feel more natural to throw a personal task or two on there, but using it as my main note taking/task management app for personal would be a mistake. Also, what happens if you leave the company and all of your personal tasks/notes are in there?
I just have some concerns around the scalability of the UI/UX when you're trying to focus on personal (prosumer?) and work, but what I've seen is it's better to focus on one main persona first and foremost. Questions start coming up around how I can ensure that my work doesn't get access to my personal tasks/notes if I leave, and now Superlist has to invest all of this time into personal/work account security management, further pulling them away from the ideal customer profile (being teams at companies).
The truth of the matter is that I just had higher expectations with how long they've been working internally on this. They probably spent a lot of time on the last 20% polish and integrations side of things, and I just don't feel like that's enough to encourage a team to switch over from say Asana or ClickUp.
I genuinely feel like they need to think more about calendar at the center. Project management is just so much more than just tasks, notes, comments, and deadlines. People have meetings and so much more time complexity that actually affects getting work done. We're going to continue using and recommending Motion for that reason.
Although I genuinely hope to be proven wrong! I love this task management space and I'm always on the lookout for teams that are reinventing the space and thinking differently about what makes task management what it is currently today.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!