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. ⤵
Throughout our article below, we'll use the words overwhelming and overly complex a lot.
Many of the most popular project management tools are designed for large teams and organizations, and they can be overwhelming and complex to set up and use for smaller teams. Here's what to keep in mind:
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.
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.
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.
Collaborative task manager and note taking tool for personal and small team use.
We'll be honest, when we first got a chance to check out and use Superlist, we were a bit thrown off—while it was one of the most beautiful productivity apps we've seen, we didn't quite know what it was trying to be, to that's where we reviewed it to compete in the best project management software space.
After reviewing it longer, seeing their feature roadmap a bit, and talking with the team, we realize now that Superlist is not trying to compete with Motion, Asana, Monday, or ClickUp, but rather, they're looking to compete in the more personal and small team task and note taking space.
So for those of you who are using Notion, Obsidian, Google Keep, Apple Notes, or even Bear, as your personal note taking tool, and a personal task management tool like Todoist, TickTick, Google Tasks, Superlist might be able to consolidate all of those tools for you in one place. Now that is something I can connect on the pain-point with.
If you're looking for a full-fledged team project management tool like Motion or Asana, you won't get what you're looking for here with Superlist.
The same goes if you're looking for one of the best daily planner apps or best calendar app like that of Motion, Amie, Sunsama, Akiflow, Vimcal, and others, you're going to left a bit disappointed using Superlist for those things.
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 and it's finally available to the public.
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:
What's cool is that with Superlist, you can assign to-dos to one another and due dates, which let's be honest, there are endless personal tasks any married couple needs to collaborate on.
Superlist is probably one the of most thoughtful/beautiful personal task managers out there. It has amazing UI/UX interactions. Heck, even marking a task as "complete" and "incomplete" plays the most relaxing noise (and it changes each time!). I was using TickTick for years and I'm seeing Superlist as a great alternative.
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.
Being able to also take notes and assign tasks to different individuals is also super cool as there aren't really a ton of good personal collaboration tools out there.
While Superlist is marketing itself for both personal and professional, we're more open to recommending it for personal use. Perhaps Soloprenuers and super small teams may be able to collaborate in a barebones way with Superlist, but we're still apt to recommend professional project management tools instead like Motion (what we use).
Keeping this in mind, we do want to point out that the Superlist team is has built the tool in a way that encourages you to use it for both work and personal. So much so that you can toggle on/off your "work" or "personal" notes/to-dos so that you can disconnect from work for example on the weekend.
Check out our full Superlist review here.
Curious how this app compares to others?