8 Best Scheduler Software & Tools 2023

Reclaim is in a bit of a non-standard category. It's sort of a scheduler and basic task manager with a "sprinkle of AI"—the best way to describe them is as an intelligent scheduling layer atop your calendar.

You may have stumbled upon it when looking for a time blocking tool, which is what Reclaim does quite well.

In-fact, we used Reclaim for nearly a year, evaluating it alongside Motion for our team. The main distinction between the two is that Reclaim is trying to be a smart layer atop your calendar, whereas with Motion, you no longer need to visit Google Calendar (although mind you, both of these tools require Google or Microsoft as your calendar's foundation).

Feature Focus

Reclaim's main focus is trying to help you fit in the the things that you want to do from day-to-day, whether that be tasks, smart internal 1-on-1 meetings, or even habits.

This is what leaves them in a bit of an odd spot though, want to use their task management features? Well they are incredibly barebones and things will get quite overwhelming with any meaningful number of tasks because of this. There's no thoughtful prioritization, deadlines, or dependencies.

Rather, they have gone the path of "we aren't going to be a full project manager, we'll just have a basic integration with your existing project management tool".

While this might sound great to some—it starts falling apart quite quickly (for which I'll cover in the competition and final thoughts sections).

Reclaim allows for super basic calendar scheduling (externally and with team members), similar to that of Calendly and Motion although it lacks in scheduler features.

They also give reporting stats on how your time has been spent between work and personal. Another feature that seems cool on the surface, but in actually reporting in on a weekly basis to check it out, it doesn't really allow you to take anything meaningful from it:

Competition

The strange thing here is that while we feel like many people are talking about Motion vs Reclaim, Reclaim feels to be more of a competitor to that of something like Clockwise than it is to Motion directly.

This is because Reclaim is in no way a proper individual or team project manager. Even their task management capabilities are incredibly basic. There's no organization/categorization, recurrence functionality, deadlines, or priority setting.

This is where they've chosen the integration path with other Project Managers on the market versus attempting to build it themselves (unlike Motion).

The interesting part of this is exactly what Motion actually tried doing in the early days, a deep integration with Asana was actually the first attempt at task management.

Believe it or not, they decided to deprecate the integration entirely and just build a full task/project management tool themselves, because they realized true AI task blocking required that you have very specific prioritization metrics in order to get optimal results.

For example, you don't have to set a priority or task duration in Asana, so how is an AI algorithm supposed to truly prioritize what is most important.

There's no way to set a task as "personal" or "work", which is important for when it should schedule the task on your calendar—during work hours or on the weekend?

So what Motion realized (and what Reclaim is going to realize real soon), is that the project management integration path is always going to give sub-optimal results, because too much critical context is missing.

This results in Reclaim just throwing random tasks at you from a day-to-day basis that rarely actually fit into what is most important to get done.

Final Thoughts

We find Reclaim interesting in what they are trying to accomplish top-level, but we find that they go too broad and shallow in terms of feature depth.

What do I mean? Well, using Reclaim as your scheduler has a lot to be desired—you can't even add basic questions for someone to answer upon filling out the booking link.

This makes it impossible to replace other scheduling tools like Calendly and Motion unless your booking needs are quite simple.

Their tasks functionality is more around basic to-do's and there's no way that prioritization logic can be done with just a task name and duration. Doing the laundry may take me 1 hour, but invoicing customers on the 1st of the month, 30 minutes—which is more important though? The shorter one, right 😅

That's the reoccurring theme we're getting with Reclaim—they have a bunch of time management/blocking features, and tout "AI" at the core, but we just don't see it. AI works when you have more data-points around dependencies, priority, deadlines, etc.

And that's where time and time again, we'll recommend Motion if you're interested in all the time blocking features, but want actually meaningful task/project management capabilities.

We initially loved the idea of Vimcal, as they are trying to portray themselves as the "Superhuman of calendar"—and we love Superhuman.

The thing is, they missed the mark on what actually makes Superhuman special in our eyes.

Vimcal confuses "productivity" with having keyboard shortcuts for everything (talking every single UI component).

This is at the cost of simplicity, making Vimcal feel quite a bit more overwhelming and over-engineered than it needs to be.

And when you're dealing with the monthly cost, we've found that Motion has a far superior scheduler and calendar (all for a similar monthly price), which even includes a time-blocking task/project management for individuals and teams.

Vimcal does have a nice mobile iOS app, although Cron takes the cake in that area (iOS only for both). Motion on the other hand has both an iOS and Android app.