16 Best Productivity Software & Tools 2023

We believe that Motion is creating a new software category entirely. 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, nor is it just a daily planner app. By the end of reading this Motion App review, you'll know for certain if it's a tool worth trying out for your team. And with that, let's dive in ⤵:

Who is Motion For?

Project Management

Motion is for small to medium sized teams looking for an innovative way to manage their projects and time (think 1-50 employees).

If you've tried Asana, Jira, ClickUp, or Monday and found that you were spending way more time managing your work than, well, working, then Motion might be a breath of fresh air. Motion's mission is to help teams get more work done instead of just helping to manage work.

After 7 years of using Asana, we actually switched entirely to Motion App because of the drastic time-saving component. With Motion, you create tasks and group them into projects. From there, you simply set the deadline, priority, and any blockers. That's where Motion uses AI to automatically schedule the tasks required to complete the project on each team member's calendars, all while taking into account any meetings and calendar schedules. No other project management tool on the market does this!

Oh, and whenever things don’t go according to plan (which they never do), Motion automatically re-prioritizes everyone’s tasks and calendar so that everything gets done, on time. Helping de-stress teammates by offloading all of the cognitive processing surrounding what should be done next.

Just like other project management tools, you can use Motion to organize projects in different workspaces then view your to-dos as a list view or kanban board, set task dependencies, track tasks and collaborate with team members.

So if you are wanting an innovative tool to help you manage projects, get more done and help you plan your day, Motion is an excellent choice 🙌

Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.

Daily Planner

If you are a busy professional that is more so looking for a daily planner instead of a full project management tool, Motion is also an excellent choice.

Compared to other daily planner alternatives Motion is pulling this entire category forward by leveraging artificial intelligence, tasks mixed with calendar events, time blocking, and prioritization, to build an app that feels like more you have a personal assistant helping you manage your time. Motion is great for soloprenuers, freelancers, contractors and students.

Who Shouldn't Use Motion?

Already Using Project Management Tool

If you're working for a large company that's already using a dedicated project management tool (e.g. Asana, ClickUp, or Jira), then you might be seeking Motion as a more simple tool to help you manage your workload (since those tools don't allow for tasks to be scheduled on your calendar). While you could technically integrate your project management tool with Motion for the AI scheduling component (we know many individuals who have done this), you'd need to know how to use Zapier to do so and can end up being a bit much to manage since you're now using two project management tools.

Instead, you might want to consider a tool like Akiflow or Sunsama that are both simply daily planning tools. Both Akiflow and Sunsama have native integrations with most of the main project management tools that will make it easy for your to pull your tasks in and schedule them onto your calendar for the day. That said, both Akiflow and Sunama lack AI capabilities to help you plan your day and reschedule tasks and would require more of a manual planning process.

Reporting & Dashboards

One of the Motion cons is that the tool lacks "upper management reporting features".

Why? Motion project management is a new tool on the market and their current focus is developing their AI features for task prioritization and scheduling, therefore reporting and dashboards are on the back burner.

If you're a team who places a lot of importance on project management reporting, dashboards, timeline views, progress reports and more, then Motion won't be suitable as they aren't currently building these features (yet!). In this case, consider Asana who offers top of the line project management reporting and might be a better project ma

Habits and Routines

If you're an individual that is price sensitive and is wanting to use Motion for general low-value daily tasks like reminders to do the laundry, to take supplements, or practice your latest habit for the week, you'd might be hard-pressed to find Motion worth the price. While Motion does work for this (and quite well at that), it's primarily a tool to help you manage work and complex projects and that's where individuals and teams see the most value.

In this case, a more personal–focused tool like TickTick, Todoist, or even Reclaim might fit better for your non-professional use-cases.

Features & Differentiation

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:

Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here

Other project planning software requires you to 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 software space, and when you compare Motion alternatives like 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 management software can do.

Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.

User Interface (UI)

Rating: _B-

Motion has a functional calendar/task interface that has your most important tasks on the side, and your calendar events along with your tasks in the main area. It might not be the prettiest tool on the market *yet* but that's because the team is focused out on building out the AI functionality of the tool to help with managing your work. While we love tools with a beautiful UI, in this case we find that with how much time we save with Motion, it's worth the trade-off.

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 some modifications to their UI, we feel Motion can pretty easily get to a _B+ rating in this category.

Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.

When comparing the calendar view of Motion and Cron, you start to see where the UI could be improved:

User Experience (UX)

Rating: _B

Automatically Plans Day

The main benefit of Motion, and how it differentiates from every other project management tool on the market is it's AI features: you add your tasks to it, then you forget about it. It will automatically schedule your tasks into your Motion calendar to ensure that you get them done by the time they need to be completed. You don't have to constantly manually plan your day, you just show up, look at your daily schedule and get to work 💪

Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.

Scheduling Feature

With Motion app, not only do you get project and task management, a calendar and AI scheduling features, but you also get a meeting scheduling feature. This meeting assistant easily allows you to share your availability with others and will indicate "Preferred" scheduling times around your other meetings so you can have larger times of focus-time instead of being in and out of meetings.

Project Manager

In terms of your project management features, you'll get unlimited projects, task management, task views, list views, kanban boards, task dependencies, the ability to track tasks and team collaboration features. You can set custom filtered views so if you want to see your tasks in a kanban board or list view, both are options.

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 rarely need to think about with Motion.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Motion is always a keyboard shortcut away (_OPT + _C to view the calendar, _OPT + _A to quickly access your meeting scheduler, and finally _OPT + _SPACE to quick-add a task from anywhere on your computer. These shortcuts are one of the reasons we love using Motion. Whether you're in the browser and need to check your availability quickly, are curious if you have any upcoming meetings and then want to get right back where you left off, or simply think of a task you need added (for yourself or your team member), it's all just one keyboard shortcut away.

Improvements

Calendar: There are a few times where you'd actually want to open back up Google Calendar for certain 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. It would be nice to be able to have all of the normal Google Calendar functionality within Motion. We're confident that they can actually get this up to an in the next 6–18 months.

Project Management Features: At the the time of writing this Motion review, Motion still has a bit more to go on some core functionality for the project management side of things like super robust searching functionality and custom fields, but this is something that is definitely coming in time.

Reporting: What you also won't get with Motion though is customizable reports, or any reporting dashboards for that matter. That's not to say this won't come in the future, but for now the Motion team is focused on improving productivity for small + medium sized businesses and often times reporting features are required more at the enterprise level.

Mobile App

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.

Calendar

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.

Task management

A fun feature Motion recently added to the iOS app is being able to use Siri to create tasks while on-the-go. Simply ask Siri to "create a task in Motion to review that presentation ASAP" and it will pop it on our calendar, rearranging all your other tasks. Now they just need to bring the feature to Google Assistant users too!

Project Management

The Motion project management tool on the mobile app is still in it's early phases. You can see your tasks in list view, but not on your kanban board for example. For this reason, we prefer to use the mobile app for tasks on the go but we prefer to use the desktop app and web app for project management and actually organizing projects/tasks and for getting work done.

Improvements

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.

Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.

API & Integrations

Rating: _B-

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.

When comparing Motion's API with some of the leaders in project management like Asana, Motion does about 85% of what it needs to do for most integrations. We also know it'll get closer to 90–95% once they allow for custom fields, as functionality around "search tasks by custom field value" is surely to come with it.

The one thing to note though is that the API does not currently work with the appointment scheduling side of things. For example, it does not allow for the same API functionality that a standalone scheduler tool like Calendly will give you on that front. That said, you can build some of this functionality by getting creative using a tool like Mailparser alongside Zapier (e.g. logging new appointments into your CRM upon booking), although I will say, it's not all that straightforward. 😅

All-in-all, Motion's API is getting there, and is likely to do what you'd need it to do on the project management front. We'd only say be aware if you're planning on building robust integrations based on their meeting scheduler, because if so, you might be better off using one of the best appointment scheduler apps in that case instead.

Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.

Competition

If you're anything like us and are just starting the quest of your own (or in the middle of it), let us 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. Not to mention extensive project management tools like ClickUp, Asana and Monday.

Well we're here to tell you that we'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.

Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.

Pricing

Motion pricing is totally reasonable for all that it can do. Priced at $19 per month for individuals (on the annual plan), or $12 per user (team plan). Keep in mind the fact that the tool also includes a project management tool, calendar and meeting scheduler which makes Motion worth it.

You can also pay monthly on either the individual plan ($34/m) or team plan ($20/m), but in general if you do, consider upgrading to the annual tier after 2-3 months of use as you'll save nearly 40% on the price by doing so.

Whether you're a busy professional or a team, we think Motion is worth the price.

Final Thoughts

Our overall Motion app review? Well hopefully this says it all: we've actually fully switched to Motion from Asana after using Asana for 7+ years 😄

Motion app has been a game changer for our team and has allowed us to remember tasks we would have otherwise forgotten, manage projects and better collaborate as a team. Motion is definitely worth giving a try, especially if you have under 50 or so employees and are looking for a tool that is simple to use for everyone.

If you're looking for a deeper dive comparison on the Motion project management tool, you can check out a deep dive project management comparison that covers all of that here.

Motion as a project management solution works well for teamwork projects, busy professionals, creative teams, remote teams, professional services and development teams. They don't have a free plan available but definitely give the free trial a shot before committing to a Motion alternative.

That said, we finally found what we've been looking for in terms of the perfect tool for our team (Oh and there's actually quite a bit more to the story if you're interested in hearing more).

Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.

Arc is a web browser. In simple terms, it's a replacement to Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, but oh, also so much more... A big part of what makes Arc great is actually the fluidity and experience when using it. It feels more core to the operating system than any other browser on the market.

If you try it out, you'll know what I mean.

Your browser has mainly just been in the background, right? You don't think that much about it, it's more just a tool to access the internet. Yeah, that's where Arc changes that—what if a browser could give you moments of micro-delight in the day-to-day usage? In fact, why don't other browsers?

Who is Arc Browser For?

If you're like most people and have just been using Chrome or Safari and not thinking much about your browser experience, Arc by The Browser Company is probably for you—let me explain...

There's no shortage of productivity-focused browsers out there like SigmaOS, Sidekick, Shift, amongst many others, and I'm willing to bet that if you're reading this, you probably haven't even checked them out or have heard of them. But you're here because you've heard of Arc. Great! That's because Arc is trying to just be a better browser, one that people don't even realize they need or want.

Whether you've tried a new browser in the past (e.g. Firefox, Vivaldi, Opera) or feel like switching is too much work. We're here to tell you that it's worth it to try out Arc. It's not like other web browsers on the market.

The best way to describe it is it's as if Apple re-thought web browsers from the ground up, and built it natively as if it was something more, like an internet browser, or rather an internet machine. What if your browser could actually feel as native and fluid as your operating system? Yeah, that's Arc browser. It was built for everyone, by people that really care. In a space that most people stopped "caring" about 6+ years ago.

Best of all, it's built with the Chromium engine as the backbone, so all your favorite browser extensions will work right out of the box!

Who Shouldn't Use Arc Browser?

For starters, it's currently only available for MacOS and iOS, so if you're not at-least using MacOS, then Arc probably isn't for you. That said, they've been hard at work on the Windows version which should be shipping later this year.

I, for example, use Android (Chrome on mobile), and Arc on desktop, and I'm totally fine with that—you don't need both together to benefit from Arc. But if you're someone that want's the exact same browser as their mobile app as well, Arc might not be for you.

At the end of the day, Arc is not just for the productivity-minded or the early adopters. It was built for everyone, whether you're a student, a stay-at-home parent, a CEO, or retired, there's something in Arc for you, that will make your day-to-day browsing experience just that much better.

Features

Rating: _A-

Arc's team have totally rethought the bookmarks and the "tab experience" with a powerful vertical tab bar (don't worry, it can be hidden if you prefer that), along with an incredibly powerful profile workspace feature called "Spaces".

Spaces

Spaces allow you to stay focused and easily segment your work while easily organizing tabs are important to you in folders.

For example, set up a personal space, favorite your YouTube, Spotify, WhatsApp, and Gmail tabs—from there, they function like mini apps. Now, with the swipe of 2 fingers, you're in your work space. All of your favorite apps are swapped out with your work apps, and you're logged into all of your work accounts:

No other browser lets you segment work to this degree. It's so powerful, yet such a simple implementation. Tough to truly explain without experiencing it yourself.

What clicked for me, is when someone explained the following to me (when I was at the time an avid user of Chrome): With Chrome, Google is in the business of ads, so they are actually incentivized to give you a crummy tab management experience. Why? Because what happens if finding the tab you're looking for is difficult? You open up a new tab and search Google again (and you're shown more ads).

So it's more that the UI/UX in many ways by the industry leader is built in such a way to optimize for displaying ads. Arc on the other hand is building features that give you a better experience, first-and-foremost.

Split Screen

Are you like us and like to have your CRM open when you're going through your email inbox via Superhuman? Bookmark a split screen for that. Like to take notes in Notion while watching YouTube videos? Save a split screen for that too.

Imagine for a moment that a bookmark was more than just a bookmark—with Arc, it is. Is gives you powerful split view functionality to group together commonly used websites together, making it so that it's only a click away.

Little Arc

While it sounds like a cute name, it's quite the powerful feature. How many times have you wanted to quickly peek into a web page from Slack or other programs, only to be thrown into another tab in a sea of tabs within your main browser? Little Arc is where clicking on links from other programs starts, with the quick option to open it into the full browser experience. Might seem small, but it makes for a super enjoyable and light experience.

Competition

Every single person that uses a computer, uses a browser. It's probably the most competitive software market in the world, and Google pays Apple some $20bn per year just to have Google set as the default search engine in Apple products.

Because of that, this can't be covered in just a single section in a post. Here's a full write-up on how Arc compares to the top browsers on the market.

If you're curious as to Arc vs Chrome or Arc vs Brave, you can see our thoughts there.

Learn More

If you're intrigued, want to know more, and see more of the features/benefits in GIF format, go check out this article where we've done a deep dive on why we think Arc is the future of the internet.

Is Arc Worth It?

Well, there's no more waiting list, so you can go ahead and give it a shot today if you're on MacOS, with a Windows version coming later this year, so we'd say yes, Arc is worth it.

Get Arc for free here.

Andra: For years, I used the native Mac screenshot tool (which saves your screenshots to your desktop, and then you need to drag the image into your email or wherever you're trying to get it). I didn't think there was a better option out there.

Then I met Alex and he introduced me to CleanShot X that auto-copies the screenshot you take so you can paste it directly where you want. Whaaat? Let me tell you, this saves me so.much.time on a daily basis.

Want to screenshot a few images? No problem. All the images will auto-appear on the side of your screen and you can pick and choose which ones you want.

It's also super easy to annotate and draw on each image if you want to point something out, or blur out important information.

In summary, if you screenshot often this will make you MUCH more productive. Try it for a week and you won't be able to go back, I promise you!

I'll preface this by saying that I've used LastPass, 1Password, Bitwarden, and even—only IT companies would recognize—IT Glue & MyGlue (a premium solution starting at $150/mo).

I first started using LastPass over a decade ago, got most of my family/friends on it, and eventually even customers as well (as a way to securely share passwords between companies).

The thing is, LastPass got acquired by LogMeIn and started becoming stagnant. It also went through what felt like a never-ending series of major data breaches over the years to follow.

This was when I started seriously evaluating alternatives (like Dashlane), as I knew it was going to be a heavy lift to switch—consisting of migrating myself (personal + work), family, friends, and even some customers all over to it from LastPass and MyGlue respectivel

For those more technical (or running an IT company) and considering IT Glue/MyGlue—it's great, but as a password manager, it's overkill. It's more of an IT infrastructure documentation tool, which they acquired a password manager, and rolled it into the mix. So you're paying a huge premium if you're planning on only using it as a password manager (as I was during the later years of pivoting away from the MSP side of the business).

Differentiation

Dashlane started as a password manager for consumers (B2C)—as at the end of the day, people need to manage passwords their many passwords across personal/work—and in the past few years, they've been focusing their efforts in building out the B2B (team management) component of Dashlane.

This is important because having used password managers built for companies, not people (e.g. IT Glue/MyGlue), you see first-hand that a powerful password manager is nothing if the end-user doesn't actually, well, use it... User-adoption is the most critical factor for a password manager to be successful.

That's where Dashlane stands out, because they were first-and-foremost a B2C company that built an exceptional end-user experience for everyday people, and have moved to the B2B market. This gives them a unique advantage in the space.

Take the mobile app (for iOS and Android), it's far and above the most modern and visually appealing of all the other password managers I've listed here.

That said, there is one area that lacking a bit with Dashlane (likely because they haven't been in B2B as long), and that's their API.

API

The clear winner in this category seems to be 1Password from what I've been seeing. For example, if you try using a tool like Raycast that has a 1Password app on their store, you'll see that it's a native integration (looks like Raycast). But then the same app made for Dashlane is really just a shortcut to open up the Dashlane app.

So that makes it pretty clear that 1Password has a proper API, while Dashlane hasn't quite gotten there yet. To be fair, it is a bit uneasy trusting a third-party developer with API access to your password manager, although I'm sure it's fine, especially in the Raycast example because all of the code is open-source and can be audited.

Security

Once you're using a password manager like Dashlane, you can also set up 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) from right within the existing password that you save for a site. So instead of using the insecure SMS 2FA (which won't work if you're without or in spotty cell connection, which also brings with it sending delays of up to 5 minutes. Not to mention being prone to spoofing, phishing, and social engineering attacks), you can instead set up a time-based code, which will even autofill when logging into a website while still adding a second layer of security (e.g. if your password leaks, someone still cannot login to your account without the additionally changing code). From over a decade in the IT space, I know all too well that never does higher security also mean higher convenience, but with Dashlane, it actually does:

Final Verdict

If a powerful API is important to you, 1Password is probably where it's at. If you care more about having the most modern UI/UX and a team that is constantly evolving the product, Dashlane is our top pick.

Link shorteners are something that most people don't even realize that they are interacting with on a daily basis. That said, most everyone has at some point used Bit.ly to create a short link at one time or another.

I've been using link shorteners for over a decade at this point (back when we were called "CyberBytes", I had even registered the short link cyberbyt.es by pretending I lived in Spain 😅).

Having used self-hosted (open-source) short link services like shlink, to paid solutions like Short.io, I've never actually had a good experience with what's out there.

Short was the most recent solution we used, but it just feels like it was built by an engineer with little front-end chops. The UI/UX is clunky, basic features like search are super convoluted and kludgy + rarely work.

Enter Dub. It's both open-source as well as a hosted solution, built by Steven Tay, a crazy talented open-source focused individual who has taken to the same frustrations as I've had in the space. Difference is, he's a full-stack developer with amazing product chops.

There's no actual enjoyable, or impressive link shortener on the market, until now. If anyone is familiar with the story of Fathom Analytics, I'm willing to bet that Steven does to the Link Shortener world with Dub what Fathom did to the Analytics space.

Tech Stack

Dub is built using the most modern software tooling, leveraging Vercel Edge Functions + Upstash Redis.