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Open scheduling infrastructure for everyone.
Cal.com has changed the meaning and expectations when it comes to the scheduler app category as it's the most impressive, flexible, and modern scheduling software on the market.
While Calendly was the leader the the meeting scheduling space for the past decade, over the past few years Cal.com has given them a run for their money, and in our opinion, has has overtaken them.
Cal.com is by far the best meeting scheduler for individuals, SMBs, startups, sales & customer support teams, and even enterprises because they are incredibly flexible. Schedule meetings & appointments (checking multiple team members calendars), set up recurring appointments, take payments with scheduling, and create custom workflows.
Cal.com also has the most robust round robin functionality on the market so that leads can be directed to the right team members each time (automatically). You can also set up workflows to automate any communication pre-and-post calls.
Where meeting schedulers have become more of a feature of a product, like that of Motion, amongst others in the best calendar apps space, Cal has doubled down on that fact by not only making their tool open source core, but by also giving a robust API, allowing you to use their scheduling infrastructure for your own product. This makes it ideal for our more technical friends, enterprises, educational institutions, or even doctors offices.
We can't recommend it enough! Read our full Cal.com Review for our full thoughts.
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Use AI to plan your work, automatically. Be 137% more productive. Use the AI assistant for busy people and work teams.
Motion (also often referred to as Use Motion and Motion App) is in a category of it's own that we've been referring to as time management…
Let me explain:
Motion's main goal is to take care of all of your team's needs revolving around time. If you're someone that wakes up in the morning and looks at their calendar app to see what you have on for the day, Motion App will fit in like a glove.
It connects in deeply with your Google Calendar, Microsoft Calendar, and even Apple Calendar, allowing you to build out project management and task management for yourself and team members. The best part is that all of these tasks automatically organize themselves based on priority right onto your calendar (and your team's) to ensure the most important (and blocking) tasks get done.
If you've heard of the productivity app terminology of "time blocking", well Motion does that automatically using AI, no manual time blocking needed.
It even goes to the degree of allowing you to share meeting scheduler links with others, all while respecting your existing events across all of your calendars (and even your team's calendars), along with automatically inviting team members into the appointment once booked.
With your entire team using Motion, it's like you have a full-time personal assistant shared across the company, ensuring that everyone is getting deep work done all while focusing on what is most important (at the most ideal time), all while making sure that no one is ever double-booked.
All of this makes for an incredibly powerful tool for individuals, but exponentially more valuable with every additional team member you add. No other project management or daily planner tool on the market seems to go to this degree.
As compared to some of the best project management software on the market often mentioned like Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Motion has taken their sights on slightly smaller teams of between 1–50 people.
This team size target is based on their current feature-set, from what we've seen. For example, the larger teams that we work with who have many layers of management often require reporting capabilities over everything else. And with Motion, that's not something you're going to get, because they are currently focused on giving the only AI project management tool on the market focused on helping the individual and teams, over the needs of upper-management.
So if you and your team are used to spending a lot of time planning deadlines, and rearranging your "My Task" view in the existing tools on the market, Motion flips this on it's head with the use of AI. Something to consider if you're fed up with the manual work involved with traditional project management tools.
Compared to the best daily planner apps on the market like Sunsama and Akiflow, Motion is the only daily planner we've seen that actually leverages AI to plan your day for you. With all of the other apps in the category, you need to manually drag in tasks to time block and plan each day. This is an incredibly time consuming process, that some justify as being "more mindful", but once you actually have AI schedule your day for you, you realize how much time is actually wasted "mindfully planning your day".
Compared to the best calendar schedulers on the market like Calendly and Chili Piper, Motion bakes in the core functionality of these tools, with the added visibility of team tasks and urgent deadlines, actually booking off availability for you and your team if high priority work needs to get done by a quickly approaching deadline.
Large teams (100–500) with other enterprise software implemented will find integrating Motion more involved than other enterprise tools. When using an enterprise software stack like that of Salesforce, it's common for other project management tools to have native integrations.
With Motion, it will require a custom integration approach (something that we actually help teams do). But while it's possible, one might ask if it's worth making the large investment in a custom integration when you might be able to get something more native out of the box with the other tools focused on larger teams.
(This of course depends on the actual integration needs of your team, as native doesn't always do exactly what you'd like it to do).
Motion currently lacks advanced reporting and dashboard functionality. So while you can see at a top-level the status of projects and tasks in Kanban and Listviews, even a team workload view, that's about where reporting dashboards end, making it less suitable for large teams requiring extensive project analytics.
Note: If you need 2 seats, you're pretty much better off getting the discount by purchasing 3 seats, as you're effectively getting a 3rd seat for free.
If all of that connects with you and you think it might fit your needs, they have a 7 day free trial that you can use along with your team to see what it's like having a personalized AI assistant.
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A beautiful and simple calendar for individuals.
Notion Calendar integrates with Google Calendar, offering Notion users the ability to view their Notion database items within Notion Calendar. It also allows users to link calendar events with Notion documents, making note taking accessible from your Notion Calendar.
Notion Calendar is a better Google Calendar, especially for Notion users, although it is not comparable to other daily planner apps like Motion, Akiflow, or Sunsama.
Notion Calendar is barebones in it's functionality, here is what you can do with Notion Calendar:
Despite anticipation for an integrated calendar within Notion, Notion Calendar exists as a separate app. Many folks were greatly disappointed that Notion Calendar is a separate app entirely from Notion, the beloved all-in-one tool. Users have mentioned that when clicking a Notion link in Notion Calendar, it opens in the web browser instead of the desktop app, creating too many tabs and context switching.
Notion Calendar is also currently only available as an iOS app, leaving Android users in the dark.
Notion Calendar is free. If you're already a Notion user, we encourage you to give it a shot, even if it's just to have a prettier calendar. Just expect limited functionality with Notion.
The modern way to find a time to meet.
SavvyCal is well-suited for teams that value personalized scheduling and a user-friendly interface, offering thoughtful features like allowing someone scheduling with you to drag times on your calendar instead of clicking available slots.
However, when it comes to workflows and API capabilities, SavvyCal falls short. It’s not as powerful as something like Calendly or our top pick, Cal.com (check out our Cal.com review). If your scheduling needs are heavy or complex, SavvyCal won’t be able to meet those demands effectively.
Adding to this, SavvyCal doesn’t offer a free plan—not even for a single scheduling link—leaving us questioning why you’d pay for it when Cal.com offers free scheduling on their individual tier.
The simplest way to book and schedule meetings.
TidyCal might have caught your attention because it offers a one-time payment of $29 instead of a subscription model. It includes scheduling and payment features, which can be tempting...but let us tell you, it's not worth it.
First, we generally don’t recommend purchasing software with one-time payments because they often lack ongoing updates and support. Subscriptions ensure that a team is continuously improving the product and driving innovation, whereas a one-time fee usually means little to no advancement.
The other reason it's not worth it is because a newer scheduler called Cal.com offers everything that TidyCal does on their free tier 😅
TidyCal was more appealing when it only competed with Calendly, but now, with Cal.com on the market —well — you do the math.
Lightening fast (keyboard shortcut-focused) calendar for individuals.
Vimcal markets itself as "the calendar for people with too many meetings" (iOS only). With that, the main problem they are trying to solve is helping folks schedule meetings more efficiently — think of it as a replacement for Calendly with an entire calendar at the core (Side note: Vimcal's integrations are not on par with Calendly so double check that integrations aren't a core need before switching over).
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.
A simple calendar scheduling tool with a solid API for teams of all sizes.
We've implemented Calendly into many businesses over the years as it once was the market leader when it came to online meeting scheduling. But we recently evaluated a new tool called Cal.com and we found that they are much more modern than Calendly. It is are faster, and their workflows are so much more flexible for teams looking to add automated scheduling into their business processes.
Compared to Cal.com, Calendly are feels like the older tool that feels outdated.
So if you are looking for a new scheduler, skip Calendly and grab Cal.com instead, you'll thank us for it!
Conversion-focused meeting scheduler for enterprise sales teams.
Chili Piper has made their mark in the enterprise scheduling and lead routing space.
We were actually using them back in our search to find the best calendar scheduler on the market, and actually replaced Calendly with Chili Piper.
Since we were quite early on in using it though, we didn't realize that they were building every product decision for that of enterprise companies. So never would they integrate with a non-enterprise CRM like Copper, they focused only on Salesforce.
The long and short of it is that if you're looking for a deeply integrated Salesforce meeting scheduler, and terms like "round robin" come up regularly for your team, Chili Piper is probably the solution for you.
If you're instead looking for deeper integration with your CRM and you're using something like Copper or Pipedrive or HubSpot, you might consider Calendly instead. Especially if you're up for using a tool like Outfunnel to deeply integrate it with your CRM.
If you're just looking for the best calendar scheduler on the market, and thinks like speed of scheduling, spinning up a new scheduling link, and priority/focus time blocking are important to you, Motion is definitely the winner in this category.
If you are an enterprise company, using Salesforce, and robust lead routing + your company is sales-heavy, you might consider Chili Piper.
That said, when I was first using Chili Piper, I was really just looking for a low-friction scheduler that was super flexible. It wasn't until finally stumbling upon Motion, that I could finally end the hunt.
If you're a smaller team, or not using an enterprise CRM like Salesforce, we'd highly recommend you taking a look at Motion vs Chili Piper, as Motion is likely to check more boxes, as it also has a baked in tasks right inside of your calendar.
Clockwise optimizes your team’s schedules to create more time in everyone’s day.
Clockwise is clear in their focus on helping teams find focus time. This means that if you're an individual, or a small team that doesn't have many internal meetings, Clockwise is not right for you.
If the main goal that you have is getting your team to have all of their internal meetings optimized to give everyone a calendar that is optimized for focused time blocks, that's exactly where Clockwise excels.
The piece that is most confusing to me when using Clockwise is that they have a "planner", which looks like a calendar:
But when you actually dive in to use it, you realize that it has no actual calendaring functionality. While it allows you to create a one-off event, you can't even edit after creating it—it's literally read only. So there's no editing the title/description, adding additional guests, etc. you'll have to go to a separate calendar app like Google Calendar to make any of these changes.
What it does allow you to do is tag existing events (sort of like an over-encompassing category of the event), update internal meetings as "flexible"—AKA you're allowing Clockwise to reschedule them automatically, and manually reschedule meetings to others based on some recommended schedule times:
This is all fine, it's just something that I continually get frustrated by when using these time management tools. Just like Reclaim, it's essentially requiring you to either keep Clockwise open in another tab, or you're restricted to using Google Calendar along with the Clockwise Chrome extension.
So this is where you need to essentially forego using a modern calendar app in favor of using Clockwise properly (or you need to have both apps open side-by-side).
Clockwise touts AI for time management/scheduling, and it seems they've actually gone a bit more true to this than that of Reclaim. They've done this by incorporating a ChatGPT-like interface for which you can speak to in-place of a scheduling assistant.
They claim you can use it for things like "I need to meet with our CTO immediately", which will then suggest some shifts in both your calendars, and then you can move forward with it.
The only question I have here is, should everyone at the company really be able to have that level of control? To be able to switch around team member's calendar to prioritize a meeting with you? There's definitely areas where this would be cool and impressive, I'll admit, it's just I wonder how much actual usage this will get on the day-to-day, versus it just being a really cool AI demo type of feature.
To be crystal clear (as many don't seem to understand this point at first glance), if you primarily have external attendees in your meetings, you cannot mark events as "flexible meetings" and thus, they cannot take advantage of the automatic rescheduling and focus time optimization that Clockwise allows for.
Clockwise is also not a calendar replacement. So you'll still want to use an improved 3rd party calendar like Cron, Motion, or if you must, Google Calendar (which is actually suggested because of the Google Calendar Chromium extension for Clockwise):
While it has scheduler options, replacing the need for tools like Calendly in most cases, and unlike Reclaim, it actually allows for booking questions, they are just a bit barebones in terms of options:
Clockwise fits in as the most focused specifically on re-arranging internal team meetings, to optimize chunks of focus time for teams. This means, if you're using Clockwise solo, or with a small team (or just don't have that many internal meetings), the value in which you'll get from it won't be all that high.
This is where we're more a fan of time management tools that also have task management baked in at the core, because really, what is time management without tasks?
While a tool like Motion will actually fit in tasks that need to be done during your focus blocks of time, Clockwise is more about trying to find you and your team focus blocks of time.
Clockwise also just reschedules meetings and focused time blocks once a day, whereas both Motion and Reclaim react to changes on your calendar immediately.
We find it generally difficult to recommend Clockwise if customers actually have any meaningful scheduler needs though, as something like Motion or Calendly allows for far greater control in adding more opinionated parameters around the booking link. Like in Motion, since it also manager your tasks, you can set a scheduler link to be higher priority in that it'll actually book over scheduled tasks, and even over scheduled events (if you wanted a high-priority link set).
If you have a large team along with frequent internal meetings and you want to optimize everyone's calendars (why wouldn't you want to at that point?), then Clockwise is great!
If you're more looking for a modern time management platform that covers scheduling links, improves your calendar experience (desktop & mobile), and helps you get work done in the focus blocks of time created, that's where Motion is more of the top pick of the category.
We're seeing with Clockwise, just like with Reclaim, that they are trying to hand off the actual task management of getting work done to a proper project manager, which is what makes Clockwise and Reclaim both in a powerful yet narrow sliver to the time management space as a whole.
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Google Calendar brings all of your calendars together in one place, so you can manage work, personal life, and everything in between.
Google Calendar is the official calendar app that comes with your Google account ( along with Google Workspace and Gmail). It is also the foundation of some of the best calendar apps and best daily planner apps on the market. It is a direct competitor to Outlook calendar in Microsoft Outlook and Apple calendar.
Google Calendar is a free calendar that helps you organize your schedule and coordinate events with others. Access it via mobile app or any desktop device from your Google Account. Schedule events, set task reminders and share your calendar with others. Like any of it's main competitors, it will allow you to manage multiple calendars in one place (e.g. personal and work).
Google Calendar is the best free calendar app (we prefer it over Outlook and Apple calendar).
We understand that many people using Google Calendar might just be using it for personal use and not for work, so comparing it with other paid tools doesn't make for an apples to apples comparison. While there are better paid calendar apps out there like Motion, Sunsama, and Akiflow, they all use Google Calendar at the foundation.
If you're looking for a free alternative to Google Calendar for improving your calendar view experience (e.g. weekly view, day view, and creating a new event, viewing multiple calendars, basic time management), then your best bet would be to check out Notion Calendar or Routine.
When comparing Calendly vs Google Calendar and Motion vs Google Calendar, you see first-hand how basic scheduling is when it comes to Google Calendar. In-fact, we wrote an entire post comparing these three scheduling apps when Google recently released their Appointment Scheduling functionality.
White Google calendar is a great foundation, it's not the nicest looking calendar app out there. Google Calendar has looked the same for the past 6+ years, but it's because they are building the web app, android app, and iOS app for billions of users. With that, they can't be that innovative without upsetting many users.
So that's where we recommend checking out the daily planner apps space, and opting for a tool like Motion or Routine.
Google Calendar does have Google Tasks which is used for basic time blocking but they are no where near the level of the paid calendar apps.
Google Calendar is free.
An intelligent habit and task time-blocking and event scheduling layer atop your calendar.
Reclaim AI is a unique tool sitting in a bit of an in-between product category. It's a lay on top of a calendar that utilizes AI to help you better manage your time by finding the ideal times for your daily habits, meetings, and focus work.
It's a layer on top of your Google Calendar, but it's not a replacement for a project or task manager (you'd integrate your existing task manager or project manager in with Reclaim).
You enter in your habits into Reclaim, like "lunch" and you tell it to schedule your lunch between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Using AI, Reclaim will make sure to schedule your lunch break everyday between those hours, depending what you have to get done. If your schedule shifts, Reclaim will make sure you still get a lunch break.
If you're working a corporate job, are in constant meetings and want to protect your time from getting pulled into meetings, then Reclaim can help you get more focus time and, well, simple things like a lunch break. Engineering, product, or marketing teams that need heads down focus time will benefit the most from Reclaim.
You've probably heard people comparing Motion vs Reclaim, but to be honest, Reclaim is competing more with something like Clockwise, not really Motion. Reclaim isn't your go-to for project management or even for detailed task management (while Motion excels at both these aspects).
You might like Reclaim if you fit into one or all of the below categories:
Using Reclaim as your scheduler leaves a lot to be desired—you can't 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 (learn more in the full Motion App Review) unless your booking needs are quite simple (e.g. internal meetings or meeting with friends).
If you're thinking of using Reclaim for task management, be prepared for something pretty basic. Reclaim more so wants you to integrate your project management tool. It's going to allow you to set task priority and deadline, but it won't let you manage greater projects, collaborate with your team, or get a bigger picture of all of your tasks at hand. Read our full Reclaim AI review.
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