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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:
We see more often than not that teams actually jump into implementing a project management tool too early believe it or not.
The main question we'd ask is, does your team currently use a CRM? If so, is your project management/task needs actually simple enough to not require an entire standalone tool for it?
Believe it or not, pipelines within a CRM can actually be a great alternative to a project management tool for smaller teams. With the introduction of a standalone project manager comes with a lot of added work as mentioned above.
Now this is totally fine and possible, just trying to flag that many smaller teams and startups might be trying to create too much complexity and structure, when they really just need to move quickly, pivot, and figure out their process before actually implementing a proper project management tool.
Ok, let's get into your best project management software options + project planning platforms ⤵
The "Project Management" category is one that has been quite underwhelming for a while. Project management software was first created for engineering teams or large enterprise companies. If you've worked for an enterprise company, you'd be familiar with the software Smartsheet and/or Jira. Project management tools were reserved for highly complex technical projects and there weren't any tools available for the average small–medium sized teams.
That is, until 2008 when Dustin Moskovitz (Co-Founder of Facebook, now Meta) and Justin Rosenstein (former engineering lead at Facebook) co-founded Asana—which would go on to be the first project management tool accessible to the average business. Wild enough, Asana was actually built off of Facebook's internal task tool 🤯
At Asana, their mission was simple: create a software that anyone could use and to help teams collaborate better.
In 2010, after having just 15 beta users (oh, and just a small $9 Million in Funding from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz), they officially launched to the public. The response was incredibly positive, with many early users saying:
"Asana is one of the first project management tools that our team actually enjoys using."
One of their big differentiators was that they prioritized keyboard shortcuts from day one (which was super uncommon at the time), remember, we're still in the Adobe Flash era of the internet. And this was a huge productivity boost for a tool you'd be using sometimes many hours per day.
Today Asana is one of the main leaders in the project management space, with over 1,700 employees, for whom are still focusing on one thing: helping teams and companies to best manage their projects.
We actually used Asana for 7 years at Efficient App—in-fact, it was our favorite for a long time, but new innovation entering the market has caused us to switch to a new exciting contender in the space: Motion (more or on that later ⤵).
Shortly after Asana launched, Trello entered the market in 2011 with a project management tool with one key differentiation: kanban boards—different from that of the list-making style of managing tasks. Why was this a big deal? Well web technologies weren't anywhere near where they were now, and at the time, being able to visualize floating cards, dragging and dropping them between columns and statuses was a big deal that hadn't been seen outside of Flash.
Trello at the end of the day was incredibly simple to use, being geared more to individuals and small businesses that wanted a simple and visual tool to manage their tasks. While it was (and still is) a simple tool, it wasn't that powerful of a tool, as it was much like having a digital pen and paper as your task manager. The general attitude around Trello is:
Everyone has probably used Trello at some point
But it's hard to think of many teams that have stuck with it in the long-term. It's not a serious project management software that we'd recommend today as it stagnated a while back, and since Atlassian acquired them in 2017 for half a billion dollars—the stagnation sadly only continued as they tried repurposing it to more deeply integrate with their other tools (Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, etc.).
Then came others, like Monday.com (founded in 2012, previously known as Dapulse which rebranded to Monday.com in 2017):
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And ClickUp in 2017:
For a while, when you thought of project management software, you'd think of Asana or Monday.com. That was until 2019–2020 when ClickUp amped up their marketing. It felt like you couldn't go anywhere without seeing a billboard or advertisement with their software (in major US tech cities at least).
With all of that said, neither Monday or ClickUp actually re-thought project management—they just built the project management basics while focusing on expanding as quickly as possible to be the "now coveted" best all-in-one software on the market.
Their feature-set was similar to that of Asana, with just a slightly different interface. That and, well, way more features like embedding other apps, full note taking capabilities, and much more, because they wanted to be more of a "productivity suite" rather than just helping people with the task management involved with running large projects.
The truth of the matter is that since Asana in 2010, there hadn't been any true innovation in the project management space for nearly a decade, but rather just more tools competing for teams to manage projects.
More and more all-in-one tools entered the market, like Notion, which more recently is being pushed as a project manager (spoiler alert: it isn't).
With all of this came with it major frustrations. Many teams thought that Asana, Monday, and ClickUp would solve their productivity problems, saving them immense time as project managers, but people quickly found that adoption amongst other team members was quite poor, leading to large unexpected onboarding expenses and never-ending sinks of time.
As these tools moved up market, so came the enterprise team needs that Jira and Smartsheet had being so early on in the space (and focused on enterprises at the start). What this led to is Asana, ClickUp, and Monday.com focusing years on building these large team management features to try growing outside of the SMB space, hoping to expand.
These features ranged from gantt charts, to reporting dashboards, and just generally custom dashboards overall. Companies found that to have success with project management software, they needed to take a lesson out of the enterprise playbook by hiring dedicated team members as standalone "project managers" and/or consultants to help them set up the tools properly.
All the meanwhile, the average small–medium sized businesses got left in the rearview mirror as they didn't require these highly custom and advanced tooling, but rather finding themselves floundering somewhere in the middle of being overwhelmed with features and having perceived productivity (aka spending time setting up project management tools rather than actually working on projects).
Motion started out simply as a calendar and scheduler tool. Upon perfecting the time management component (with deep Google Calendar and Microsoft 365 integration), they moved into task management for individuals. Re-thinking what a task truly was—not just a line item in a list or kanban view, but rather blocks of time that could be scheduled onto your calendar, as a task. No longer requiring 2 separate tools to manage your tasks and time:
Then in 2022, their project management tool (for teams) was released. Motion's 2022 press release stated:
“Despite impressive advances in software and AI in the last decade, productivity tools still require massive overhead and manual coordination. We set out to solve this problem in a way that 'just works.'”
Motion found that:
Knowledge workers spend 58% of their day coordinating work instead of doing work.
So they knew the clear path to take forward. It wasn't about the project management format or features, but rather the work involved with actually managing a project that was leading to the complexity and low adoption of project management tools.
That's where they introduced AI planning and auto-scheduling, so that teams could dramatically increase their productivity. They essentially created this over-encompassing category of time management, daily planning, and project management, all while mixing in the newfound era of AI (for task/event prioritization). All of this with the goal of giving everyone the experience as if they had a personal assistant when using the tool.
After 7 years of using Asana, we switched entirely to Motion because of the drastic time-saving component. With Motion, you create tasks, grouping 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 more need for a standalone project manager to manage a project—Motion knows what tasks are blocking the rest of the team from getting the work done, and the capacity available for each team member, because your team's calendar is at the core.
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.
And that's why Motion holds the spot for the best project management software in the category. It has been the first tool to actually innovate the project management and time management/daily planner categories for over a decade.
That said, Motion is focused right now on small–mid-size teams, and individuals, so Asana still wins the category for larger teams over 100+ employees (as their features are more developed to accommodate complex projects and the reporting that is required for traditional project management needs).
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For Small + Mid-Market teams looking to for an AI-powerd time management platform (Calendar + Scheduling + Tasks & Projects).
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 ⤵:
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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:
Rating: B
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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) 😉
For medium + large teams looking for a task-based project management tool, where goals and reporting are important.
Asana is tried and true. We used it for 7 years before switching to Motion. Now, that's not because it's bad. Asana is fantastic... If you invest the time and resources to set it up well.
Asana has gone the approach of being less opinionated, allowing for team members to build it out specifically how they'd like. But with that, comes a super general task management tool, that your team isn't likely to adopt (without training) without first undergoing a steep learning curve.
It's a useful project management software for all types of businesses, from professional services to creative teams to development teams.
One important thing to note is that Asana is a publicly traded company, and when you get to that status, getting huge enterprise accounts (1,000+ seats) is the #1 focus. With that, comes enterprise features—so the updates you're likely to see coming to Asana aren't going to be geared toward the small business or startup segment.
Asana does offer a free tier for small teams just starting out with project planning and if we had to award a winner for the best free project management tool, it'd go to Asana. That said, their automated workflows (which we relied upon heavily when using Asana) are a part of their paid plans so we'd say to get the most out of Asana, upgrading would likely lead to more success with the tool.
Rating: C+
Asana is exactly what a comes to mind when you envision a traditional project manager tool. It has traditional lists view, tasks view, custom fields, kanban boards, calendar (which isn't even worthy of the name when you compare Asana vs Motion), files, and timeline views. It even has robust project management features like gantt charts, advanced reporting features.
And, well, there's nothing wrong with that at all 🤷 it's just there's nothing they are really doing that makes it particularly better than competitors to that end.
With Asana, you get stability, a solid API, basic reporting, and a task manager tool that you can trust.
Because of this, we're giving Asana a higher rating here for key features (they have a lot of them), but pulling them down a bit for differentiation. Don't let this rating fool you though, we particularly like that Asana isn't trying to differentiate, because it's making them better at the project management software category. When you compare Asana vs ClickUp or Asana vs Monday, you'll see that the other two differentiate more, but in our opinion, this is in a bad way. We applaud Asana for not trying to turn into the "all-in-one everything tool".
There's really nothing exciting to show someone about what Asana can do better than competitors. It has some cool workflow automation built in, and some interesting workload custom dashboard reports (which attempt to show how busy the team is based on the tasks they have assigned), but even that doesn't take into account meetings or anything of the sort, so it's just limited in even what it is trying to accomplish.
Rating: B
This is definitely a bit more subjective—some people love the look of Monday vs Asana, but when you actually rope in the UX of Asana, the myriad of the two together makes it feel slick and purposeful.
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Rating: B-
Asana has put a lot of thought into animations and the fluidity of their user experience. They have invested quite heavily into keyboard shortcuts, nice animations when clicking into tasks, and great visual state changes when dragging tasks between different stages.
They have natural keyboard shortcuts, and options like "hold down ⌘ + click to select multiple tasks at a time"—super intuitive:
The main difficulty with Asana comes from from how much manual work is required to actually stay atop of the work you're trying to get done. Unlike a tool like Motion, where you just throw in your tasks and AI intelligently auto-schedules them, even if you don't get to them for the day, Asana requires that you continually push back due dates manually in order to not fall too far behind or get too overwhelmed with your work.
While we appreciate the notification toasts that show when taking action (to undo and to alert you of workflow automations that trigger), we do at times feel a bit overwhelmed by them in the interface, as they quickly begin covering things up. With bulk edits especially, you have almost a never-ending train of toasts that continually pop-up covering up the interface:
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Rating: B
Asana has an iOS and Android app that has wide range of the functionality from the web app. You can view your Asana projects and task lists as kanban boards on mobile, a feature we don't see as often due to phone real estate—that said, they've implemented it well.
They have widget functionality, so you can see your open task lists without even opening up the app, a small feature which we quite appreciate.
The thing is, with a tool like Asana, you will still need a calendar tool as Asana's calendar view is nowhere where it needs to be to replace Google Calendar, unlike that of Motion.
Rating: A
Asana has one of the most robust and well-thought APIs of all the project manager tools on the market. This is in terms of functionality, stability, and even down to the thought that went into the naming of variables.
Their team communicates major changes proactively, and there's an external ecosystem of people building 3rd party tools with Asana's API, like backup systems, extended workflow systems, etc.
Overall, it's the gold standard in the category which is why we're giving it an "A" rating. They also have many native integrations that allow you to trigger messages in tools like Slack upon taking action within Asana. That said, you'll want to go custom if you want to do anything more powerful than that.
They've had a lot of time to get the API side of things right—having seen them re-architect core components of it over the years really shows that they've thought through it at scale which is a big plus.
We genuinely prefer Asana to that of ClickUp (trying to turn more and more into an all-in-one tool like Notion—no bueno) and Monday. Oh, and don't be trying to use Airtable as a task/project manager—please.
Think of Asana like Salesforce or Hubspot—they work great, if you invest the tens of thousands into getting it built out for your specific company needs. Highly recommend against trying to set it up yourself 😅
If you're a small or medium size team looking for more of a project manager that's a bit more opinionated (makes adoption way easier), that also bakes in time blocking and your calendar at the core, check out Motion instead.
Asana is an incredibly well oiled product. The API has evolved a lot over the years and everything is quite stable. It just hasn't evolved to take advantage of the time management/calendar space, which feels like a big miss for any project manager.
That said, we've just finally finished migrating off Asana over to Motion (after 7 years of Asana), which should tell you something, specifically if you are a small team (less than 100–200 employees).
As a free project management software (for small teams), it might be alluring to try, but to unlock key features like workflow automation you'd need to be on a paid tier, so we don't fall into the trap of comparing Asana as a free project management software to other paid tools.
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!
Free 30 day trial for any paid Asana Tier (Premium/Business). For a discount on paid seats, be sure to reach out to our friends at iDO (ido-clarity.com) and let them know Efficient App sent you 👌
A daily planner tool to help you centralize your schedule.
Akiflow falls into the daily planner app + productivity app category. It helps individuals that have tasks in multiple different tools (e.g. email, Asana, Slack, Google Calendar, Notion) and want task consolidation. Akiflow's integrations allow you to build workflows from various apps to add to-do list items in Akiflow, and within Akiflow you are able to arrange the tasks into a calendar view. It aims to be your personal task manager.
Akiflow as a task manager is great if you are using many different tools (Gmail, Outlook email, Google Calendar, Asana or ClickUp, Slack, etc.) and you want one tool to help with the task consolidation and daily planning of your tasks. If you are a part of a team that is using a project management tool and you feel like you are constantly consolidating your to-dos from different channels, with Akiflow's integrations you can automatically have a running list of all of your task list items which can be helpful.
Akiflow might be well suited for you if you're working at an organization where you have little say about the number of tools used for the team to communicate internally, and you want to have more control over organizing your tasks and planning your day.
Akiflow has a powerful command bar and keyboard shortcuts, so if you are more of a power user who enjoys this level of productivity it's worth giving a shot to help with time management and using it as a personal task manager.
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
If you are looking to reduce the number of of productivity apps you use, then there might be better tools out there for you. The whole problem Akiflow is trying to solve is that some teams have become reliant of using so many tools to manage projects that we now need another tool to have a central place for all of our tasks 😅 For example, if your team is not yet using a project management tool (or you individually know you need to manage larger projects), then considering something like Motion might be best as it would eliminate your need for a project management tool + a daily planning tool (it offers daily planning, time blocking, and calendar scheduling capabilities in addition to full project management capabilities).
On the other hand, if you don't need integrations with other tools and just want a task management app that can help you act as your personal task manager, then you can even consider something like Routine and Sunsama which are both beautiful more minimalistic time management apps.
Finally, if you are easily overwhelmed at the thought of spending 10-20 minutes per day organizing your tasks, then Akiflow won't be a great task management app as it requires you to manually drag tasks onto your calendar.
Rating: B
Akiflow was created as a response to the cognitive overload from using a lot of different tools to communicate and plan our work. They've invested a ton in their integrations with the goal to help you centralize your schedule and have one tool that answers the question of what you need to work on next. Their calendar experience allows you to drag tasks straight onto your calendar view so you can visualize your day.
You can label your tasks into categories like "personal" "marketing" "bugs" "school" so you can easily view groupings of your tasks. Their progress visualization is also great to keep track of how many more tasks you need to complete for the day. At the end of the day, their daily shutdown feature will show help you reflect on your current day and plan tasks for future days.
While Akiflow is impressive, there is a lot of Akiflow alternatives on the market with similar features. Sunsama and Routine are two of the main competitors along with Motion, although Motion stands out more as they have AI capabilities to help auto-schedule your tasks (including rescheduling your tasks for you if you don't complete them).
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
Rating: B-
While Akiflow's interface has improved time, compared to other daily planning tools, it's more clunky to use. It looks similar to your email inbox with a calendar on the left hand side where you can drag and drop tasks. But when viewing all your tasks that have come through from your integrations, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and cluttered.
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
Rating: C+
The truth of the matter is just because you can consolidate all of your tasks in one place, doesn't mean you should. For instance, just because you need to respond to 5 Slack messages and answer 3 emails, should you add it to Akiflow and then manually drag the items onto your calendar as a part of your daily tasks? We'd say probably no.
It can be easy to over engineer your schedule with Akiflow. When we used it, we found this is exactly what happened. We found ourselves slightly overwhelmed with the number of tasks in Akiflow. At the end of the day, you want to be more productive, not spend more time scheduling tasks and planning your day.
More than that, when you complete a task in Akiflow, it doesn't sync back to the app that sent over the task so you can end up having to check it off twice.
To get the best experience with Akiflow, we suggest being highly selective in terms of which tasks you want to be in Akiflow. If they are meaningful tasks that require some planning, then they are useful to add. If they are tasks that are not as substantial, then we say it's best to probably not clutter your Akiflow task list with them.
It also does feel like there's many missed opportunities to automate some of the things you need to do during your daily review (and yes, you need to review your Akiflow daily so that it doesn't fall behind). Why not have an option to automatically reschedule your day for you, why is it such a manual process? The same frustration that we have with a tool like Asana and Sunsama.
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
Rating: C
Akiflow's mobile app for Android and iOS is in beta, so it is still relatively new.
Rating: B
This is where Akiflow excels out of all the daily planner applications, with native integrations. They have a super barebones Zapier connector allowing you to build your own custom workflows with Akiflow (although be warned, they only allow for "create task", no search/update functionality, meaning the custom integration you can build will be quite barebones).
That said, you could have a simple integration like: do you want a new task in Akiflow when a new lead is added to your CRM? That is possible with Akiflow and other daily planning tools lack. Although we would recommend keeping CRM and relationship-focused tasks outside of your project manager and use your CRM task section instead.
All this being said, Akiflow is the best daily planner app if integrations with other tools is important to you.
If you use a ton of productivity apps and are craving one tool to help you with daily planning while continuing to use all the other tools for different reasons, then we'd recommend at least signing up for a Akiflow free trial to see it in action.
Start your 7 day free trial of Akiflow here.
Is Akiflow worth it? If you identify as a professional power user who wants one tool to help with task consolidation, then it's worth signing up for a free trial. Just remember you will still need to manually plan your tasks into your day and falling behind on this won't allow you to get the most out of the tool. That said, it's a much better daily planner alternative than using paper planners and certainly beats out Google tasks as well!
If you're not already using and loving another project management tool and would prefer one solution that offers daily planning, time blocking, meeting scheduling and project management capabilities, we'd recommend simply using Motion, as when you compare Motion vs Akiflow, you really need Akiflow and a project management together (2 separate tools) to get what Motion gives you out of the box.
Akiflow could be a good personal task manager with an improved calendar experience to reduce cognitive overload, but prepare to invest sometime in learning how to best use it to get the most out of it.
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!
7-day free trial + $10 off your next billing by using the link above.
The project manager for large teams looking for an all-in-one task and documentation tool.
ClickUp is probably best categorized as an "all-in-one tool", even though it started off as more of a project manager, and is quite task management focused at the core.
Rating: C-
While an "all-in-one" tool may sound appealing because it sounds simple, here are the red flags with using any tool that tries to do too many things:
The main complaint we hear with ClickUp is that it's too complicated for its main use, and that it can be easy to get overwhelmed by all the features that are included. And this is the exact problem we have with this category. It does many things well, but it's consistently missing the last 10-15% in every category, which might not seem like a big deal, but I assure you that it'll frustrate the team.
With that, ClickUp isn't a tool we'd give positive differentiation points to. They are trying to do too many things, and with that comes a buggy experience and often feeling like you can't rely on the tool. While it does a decent job for many businesses in helping them with managing projects, it wouldn't be a tool we'd be quick to recommend if you're just beginning your search.
ClickUp overall is a tool that we have consistently considered on almost a yearly basis (and again with their recent launch of "ClickUp 3.0"). The problem is, is that the promise of what it is, and what it actually is upon using it just doesn't quite meet expectations.
Rating: B
ClickUp has a decent user interface, it's relatively clean and nice to look at.
Rating: C-
About 20% of our closest friends that run businesses, use ClickUp, so the "why" is a regular discussion that comes up whenever we hang out. The main consensus we've heard is:
"It does a lot but it's also incredibly buggy"
ClickUp does a good job at marketing features and functionality to intrigue you—we've literally signed up to re-evaluate it at least once a year because of exactly that. But when you begin actually using it, you start noticing the drawbacks. They come out in the experience, between slowness, overwhelm of where to find things and how to organize the information at hand.
It's a blank canvas, it claims to be able to do everything for your business, and that's why one of our friends literally runs an agency that just sets up ClickUp for other agencies, and charges mid-5-figures per year to do just that. Being convinced to sign up for ClickUp is easy. Using it well is not.
In general, if you're considering between ClickUp and Asana, we'd say stick with Asana and supplement it with a proper team knowledge base tool like Slite, or give our top pick in the category a shot (Motion) to see if it might work for you. 🤷
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When viewing it more as an all-in-one tool, you're starting to compare it more with apps like Notion and Coda, but what's also a bit strange is both of those tools were built more as documentation software, and have evolved more into the "all-in-one" category.
This is where things get difficult to prescribe without deeply understanding your specific use-cases. We believe that rarely are the "all-in-one" tools best for companies, as we strongly believe in using the best tool for the job. That said, ClickUp is definitely the most "Task Management" focused tool of the bunch. Meaning, if you want to rely on getting timely alerts for getting work done and project completed, ClickUp will handle that better than Notion on Coda.
Although, if documentation and almost a form of "no-code app" building is more important to you, that's where Coda or Notion will shine.
And this is the exact problem we have with this category. It does many things well, but it's consistently missing the last 5–10% in every category, which might not seem like a big deal, but I assure you that it'll frustrate the team.
So with all of that said, that's where we typically recommend using a tool like Motion as your Project Manager, and then Slite as your documentation/shared team collaboration tool (I would also say Notion, but it suffers from the all-in-one syndrome as well, that I fear you'll start trying turning Notion into your team's project management tool given enough time using it—which is not ideal), versus trying to just fit them all into a single product.
ClickUp has done a *phenomenal job* at marketing itself (literally the CEO on stage wearing a ClickUp suit kinda marketing). In the last few years, they've invested millions of dollars in their advertising, everywhere you looked you saw a ClickUp billboard. They have consistently hit their growth goals because of that. But is it just hype? For some, ClickUp fulfills their business needs, for others they see through the marketing. In terms of your project management software options, is it the best? We think not.
ClickUp does have a free version although it's very much for personal use so we wouldn't say its a free project management tool.
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!
A better way to build products for product and engineering teams of all sizes.
Linear is in an interesting category. It's in one way a product tool (e.g. focusing on bugs, feature requests, and sprints/cycles), and another part project management (for managing the tasks around the cycles).
The thing is, Linear is very much built for your engineering and product team to tie in all of this information together. You'd be hard-pressed to use Linear as a replacement for the company's general project management tool.
If you're heavily a product-focused company, and most of your employees are engineers and product people though, you can probably get away with just using Linear as your team's project manager.
While some people may say that Asana is a main competitor, we'd probably say that your product/engineering team is trying to fit into the more general project management needs of the rest of the organization.
It's not uncommon for much larger companies to use a general project management tool like Motion or Asana, along with Linear. Heck, even the engineering/product team at Motion uses Linear internally (alongside Motion of course).
The main competitor in this area is really the Atlassian suite (mainly Jira), and, well... Linear is just better and more modern in just about every way. Teams that use Linear often greatly enjoy using it, and have an appreciation for it (hugely advocating it). Whereas teams that use Jira when asked what they think would typically respond with an "it's fine, I guess".
Linear also integrates quite well with modern software like Slack via Dispatch. Their API is a joy to work with, and we're actually starting to see modern teams integrate their software with Linear before even that of Jira. That said, most any enterprise tool will integrate with Jira more likely than Linear. So it really depends on the size of your team and the accompanying stack that you're using.
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!
An all-in-one project management tool and suite of products for teams.
Monday.com has done a really good job at giving Asana a run for their money. They built robust project management features that an enterprise can use, yet they also really hit the ground running with amazing marketing to appeal to the average business owner.
The appeal with Monday is that it has a pretty user interface, lots of vibrant colors which might make it seem like project management is fun. But in reality, similar to Asana it's not a super opinionated project management software tool, meaning that you can "set it up however you want" which can be confusing for an average business that doesn't have a dedicated project manager on their team.
That said, Monday started as a project manager and is now expanding into the "we're trying to do everything" space. I mean they're even claiming to be a CRM at this point 😱
While an "all-in-one" tool may sound appealing because it sounds simple, the problem is they are extremely overwhelming to use. Monday has too many features that end up being buggy due to missing the last 10-15% in every category, which might not seem like a big deal, but we assure you that it'll frustrate the team.
While they have a free version (for small teams of 2), their key features like workflow automation are only offered on the paid plans.
Rating: C-
Asana was the first project management software that helped improve team collaboration that just about any business could use (large or small). Monday.com came to the market later, and while they are giving Asana a good run for their money, they are lacking in differentiation.
With Monday (like Asana), you'll get all bells and whistles when it comes to project management. If you want RACI Charts, Gant charts, tasks, team collaboration, calendars, logs, advanced reporting features, file versions and more, you'll get it with Monday.
Where Monday has tried to differentiate themselves from Asana is with building more tools atop their platform: a sales CRM, lead capturing, docs and more. If you're looking to use a CRM, you should use one of these great CRM tools that were built specifically for managing relationships (not a project manager turned CRM).
Rating: B+
Monday has a nice and vibrant interface that adds a sprinkle of fun when managing projects. They have different ways to visualize data, like using a 5 star rating system (for priority for example) or a cool timeline view to see project progress. Dragging and dropping tasks in is relatively easy and intuitive.
Their custom dashboards take expertise to set up properly, but once you setup, having customizable reports on a nice interface could be highly helpful to view project progress and help with internal resource management.
Rating: C+
The appeal with Monday is most definitely that it's "pretty and colorful" interface that looks super simple to use. Upon setting it up, you're given endless options of columns you can add to your projects like status by the way of colorful buttons, priority by way of a star rating.
The first time you enter a task, it's like "cool, that was kind fun!" but when you actually start using it on a daily basis, you quickly find out that all these buttons are needy for your attention and you start wondering if they are are even needed, since now you're spending more time filling in the Monday task than getting work done.
Andra used Monday previously for client work and adoption of Monday was a struggle with the team. "We had to spend a lot of time setting up the right notifications for everyone as team members were left confused as to where they were actually needed or not. We ended up having a dedicated project manager that we decided should just solely update Monday on his own as there was too much confusion otherwise. There was a steep learning curve and ultimately Monday was phased out of the business."
What we've seen is that even those that like Monday's interface, still prefer using an alternative like Asana. There's even a chrome extension tab management company that actually built an internal Chromium extension for their team who's sole purpose is to make Asana's list view look like Monday. 😂
When I asked them why they didn't just use Monday at that point, they replied with: "Oh, yeah, Monday sucks, we just prefer how it looks!"
In the below reddit post (that has over 1,000 upvotes), a business owner discusses their experience with Monday—even after investing in an agency to help them set it up.
(tl;dr If you are willing to spend the money to hire an agency to setup a tool, go with something more reliable like Asana):
Monday has grown incredibly quickly and in that, is trying to expand their platform offerings to continue to grow. We don't think that's a good thing, because alternatives like Asana are much more well oiled at project management since they are focusing 100% of their resources internally to *only* build the best task management experience.
In terms of your project management software options, Monday might be suitable for large teams (but if we haven't made it clear yet, we still prefer Asana for larger teams due to increased reliability). For small teams, the alternative is Motion which doesn't have as much of a steep learning curve.
Monday does have a free plan available for small teams of 2 so to adequately compare it to other project management software, you'd should be considering their paid plans that include automation. The best free project management tool doesn't totally exist as each online project management tool will have guard rails on their best features.
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!
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