Best Project Management Apps 2023

Motion is a tool that I've been looking for ever since Sunrise Calendar was acquired by Microsoft, more than a decade ago. Since that faithful day, I've been on the never-ending journey of evaluating every single calendar/scheduler/task manager on the market, in search for what I once had.

We believe that Motion is creating a new category entirely, and while you'll see us compare it with the best project management software on the market, you'll see that it isn't just a traditional project manager. And with that, let's dive in:

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:

Other project management tools require you spend chunks of your day re-evaluating deadlines and shifting back work. Not to mention, they have no actual reference of your calendar, so actual focus time available doesn't even take into account when you're in meetings... 😅

That's where Motion is different, and in some ways, in a category of its own. What they are doing is unmatched in the project management space, and when you compare Motion vs Asana amongst others in the category, you see how outdated traditional task management tools truly are.

They've also taken this whole time management category and leveled up your project management software with a baked in calendar scheduler that takes into account all of your tasks and hard deadlines, along with time blocking to only recommend the best times for you to meet with others, ensuring that you can still get your work done on time. Something that no other project manager can do.

User Interface (UI)

Rating: _B-

Motion has a functional calendar/task interface that has your most important tasks on the left, and a calendar on the right. When comparing Motion and Cron, you start to see where the UI could be improved:

The plus side here is that the UI could be improved with some pretty minor tweaks, like making it more obvious as to what the current day is, having less harsh and lighter color pallet for events and tasks (in both light and dark mode), displaying calendar text in a more useful/way (versus getting cut off sharply), amongst other modifications.

We have faith that the team will make the much needed improvements here, and since it would require such minor modifications, we can't weigh this section too heavily against Motion. With these modifications, we feel Motion can pretty easily get to a _B+ rating in this category.

User Experience (UX)

Rating: _B

The main benefit of Motion, and how it differentiates from every other project management tool on the market is you add your tasks to it, then you forget about it. It will automatically schedule your tasks into your calendar to ensure that you get them done by the time they need to be completed.

With other tools like Asana, you need to manually reschedule your tasks manually on a daily basis, wasting anywhere from 20–60 minutes per day—something you don't even need to think about with Motion.

We would have actually rated Motion as an _A in the UX area back when it was a Chromium extension, because it would do incredibly impressive things like automatically pulling up your calendar when visiting a calendly link within the browser, showing you in Motion what times work best for you.

The problem was, there's just too much limitation as a Chromium extension versus being a fully standalone app, so they made the right directional move, they just need to bring some of these super thoughtful experiences back to the desktop app.

Motion is always a keyboard shortcut away (OPT + C), and that's one of the things we love most about using it. Once you're in the app though, it would be nice to have less clicks to get to where you're trying to get.

There's also a few times where you'd actually want to open back up Google Calendar, in things like proposing a new time for example, or editing a team's calendar event (even if you're invited to it), so fixing these things will greatly improve the UX. We're confident that they can actually get this up to an _A in the next 6–18 months.

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.

Things we'd love to see to bring Motion up to an _A is a proper widget to replace the need for Google Calendar entirely. Some quality UX improvements could be made with having a way to more easily create tasks from other apps, by say sharing a screenshot to Motion, or highlighting text and sharing it with Motion (or even using Siri/Google Assistant to create tasks while on-the-go).

One little knit-pick is the time it takes for the mobile app to load, although this is something that the team is aware of, and we feel pretty confident that the mobile app will hit _B+ category in the months to come.

API & Integrations

Rating: _C+

We have to hand it to the team at Motion on this one—they launched an API, and then almost immediately spun up a Zapier integration to make their API even more accessible to others, something that newer tools in the space haven't invested in which makes Motion stand out, and something we greatly appreciate.

The API is surely to improve with time, adding in more functionality, although it does allow for the major things you'd want to use it for already, like create/find/update of tasks, and most importantly, creating the magic auto-scheduled task.

The one thing that the API is lacking though is on the appointment scheduling side of things. For example, you can't get the same type of API functionality that a tool like Calendly will give you on that front, although you can actually build some of the same functionality (like logging new appointments into your CRM upon booking) using a tool like Mailparser alongside Zapier (although I will say, it's not that straightforward). 😅

If Motion added in API functionality for their scheduler, we'd put Motion's API at a solid _B, which is all you'd really need it to be.

Competition

If you're anything like me and just starting the quest of your own (or in the middle of it), let me save you some time: you'll likely stumble upon calendar tools like Cron, Vimcal, Magical, Fantastical, Woven (acquired by Slack), and many more scheduler-focused tools like Calendly, ChiliPiper, and Cal.com (amongst many others), along with no shortage of all-in-one task management tools (e.g. Sunsama and Akiflow), heck, even "time management" tools like Clockwise and Reclaim.

Well I'm here to tell you that I've tried them all—extensively.

Each and every tool mentioned does some aspects to time management well, but fall apart when done together.

And that's where Motion is different. Motion is more than just a calendar, scheduler, or task/project manager—it is a platform for time management. Because at the end of the day, we're all just managing time—sometimes by way of projects and tasks, and at other times meetings and events. Motion understands this fact first-and-foremost, and with a small sprinkle of AI, you're given your perfect day planned out for you, no rescheduling or rearranging necessary.

Final Thoughts

We've actually fully switched to Motion from Asana after using Asana for 7+ years.

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

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

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).

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.

Features & Differentiation

Rating: _C+

Asana is exactly what a comes to mind when you envision a traditional project manager tool. It has the traditional lists view, board, calendar (which isn't even worthy of the name when you compare Asana vs Motion), files, and timeline views.

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 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 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.

User Interface (UI)

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.

User Experience (UX)

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 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:

Mobile App

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.

API & Integrations

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.

Competition

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.

Final Thoughts

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 smaller team (less than 100–200 employees).

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.

Competition

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.

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.

Competition

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".

API

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.

Andra: 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.

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.

This worked better than previously, however it wasn't a scalable solution. Eventually, Monday was phased out of the business.

Sunsama is an interesting category of tool, claiming to be more of a "daily planner", that toes the line of project management and time management.

You're going to get the most value using a tool like Sunsama if you use it alongside another project manager like Asana.

Features & Differentiation

Rating: _B

Sunsama is essentially a calendar app that integrates deeply with tools like Asana, allowing you to pull tasks from Asana and put them onto your calendar for daily planning.

It's a clever idea, especially if you're already using and loving Asana, but just frustrated by the lack of integration with a calendar. Something that Motion actually does out of the box as it's an all-in-one task and time management tool.

User Interface (UI)

Rating: _B+

User Experience (UX)

Rating: _B-

Mobile App

Rating: _B-

Sunsama has an iOS and Android app that is relatively basic, but gets across what you need it to do. Access your tasks and calendar all in one place.

API & Integrations

Rating: _C-

Sunsama does not currently have an API. As it's more focused on native integrations with tools like that of with Asana. So with that, you can see that their focus isn't actually on extending Sunsama into a flexible tool outside of what they've decided to integrate deeply with.

If you're using one of the main tools they integrate with, this might be a good thing, but for now, with no API, you cannot integrate it with your team's CRM for example, which leads us to feel they are more focused on being an individual daily planner instead of a team project manager.

Final Thoughts

If you're not already using and loving another project manager like Asana, we'd recommend simply using Motion, as when you compare Motion vs Sunsama, you really need Sunsama and Asana together (2 separate tools) to get what Motion gives you out of the box.