Motion App Review

Best Features, Pros & Cons, Pricing & Alternatives

Motion is an AI-based task management application popular for auto-scheduling, meeting booking and a combination of calendar and task planning abilities for individuals.

What is Motion App?

Motion is a daily planner application that allows you to manage your tasks and calendar in one. At heart allowing you to add to-do's, manage calendar events and co-ordinate meetings all in one base. The special element that Motion app has is AI that helps you better auto-schedule tasks and meetings for a more suitable time slot.

Think of Motion as a super advanced to-do list application that allows people to take their hands off their task management by allowing AI a window into sorting that out for you. Motion brings a new take on task management trying to save you more time on administrating your tasks, and hopefully more time on doing them.

Motion is a Y-Combinator backed company with a focus to solve tasks using AI - so if you're considering exploring this application - you will need to be happy and sold on this task management connecting to external AI processes & technology.

Best Motion Features

What We Liked about Motion AI

Okay, let's unpack some of the best features inside of Motion and how it uses calendar, tasks and meeting booking with AI to make life easier:

1. Motion Auto-Scheduling Worked Well

Motion allows for auto-scheduling with AI meaning you can take your hands off the driving seat and let the system prioritisie your tasks for you, scary but decent.

The premise in which Motion is built off is AI that helps you better organize your task. In our review, we used the add task function, add event and allowed the auto-scheduling to make the decisions for us. The ability to replace and co-ordinate the week worth of tasks better helped us in prioritising. Each time you add a task, you add a series of inputs and this helps the system to better judge the decision the AI system makes. We noticed when meetings popped up, tasks disappeared and re-arranged themselves with low priorities.

Ideal for releasing the reigns to AI but will take some getting used to that Motion is leading the way with for auto-scheduling abilities.

2. Task Input Helps Unpacks Tasks

You still need to add tasks into Motion and there's quite a bit of input to consider.

The amount of data to input per task might seem daunting, but it is worth it and helps to really establish a better understanding of what a task consists of. You can urgency, deadlines, importance and even whether or not it fits into typical working hours, which all serves the AI to make more informed decisions on where your task belongs once something else creeps into your system. The most important tasks rise to the top a little like how "Task Score" works in Amplenote.

This addition from Motion helps to better improve the decision-making of the AI and underlines your task with an algorithm to set the priority of tasks.

3. Meeting Bookings with AI Scheduling

Booking of meetings is all inclusive with Motion.

Meeting links can be created inside of the Motion settings which make it perfect for sharing externally and even hosting on your website for external parties to book meetings with you. What works well with this meeting booking link is the level of customisation and optionality. This helps better align with the AI scheduling to make sure it prioritises the right thing between a task, event and meeting using that said link.

Worst Motion Features

What We Didn't Like about Motion AI

Let's unpack the not so good bits about Motion and what we didn't find as good.

1. Motion's Project Management is Basic

Motion offers project management for teams and it isn't going to be what you expect. Many people might find this helpful for a team under maybe 10-15 people that are in love with Motion and want to be able to work with others using kanban layouts, assigning tasks and managing project notes and details.

But beyond 15 people, this project management solution doesn't offer anything special and won't be replacing ClickUp or monday.com in the current format. This is much more in-depth than tools like Todoist for example, but when it comes to the overall abilities for managing projects and handling the structure of projects for larger teams, Motion misses the mark.

Check out best project management software list to help seek the right one.

2. Very Pricey Application

As you'll find out Motion app is expensive. Motion pricing is one of the highest on the market. Common of most productivity applications, charging higher monthly entices people into the yearly pricing - with Motion the monthly pricing is almost double of what the yearly pricing is making it hard to, outside of the trial, commit to anything but the annual pricing which is still steep in itself. We'll unpack whether this is worth it later on.

Motion AI Pricing

Let's explore what Motion offers and how much it is:

How much is Motion AI?

Pricing starts from $19 per month (billed annually). Motion offers a 7-day free trial and has no free plan. There are student pricing which can reduce the pricing.

Motion charges two pricing options - monthly and annual pricing - monthly is a whopping $34 per month. Annual pricing comes in at $19 per month still more expensive than apps like Akiflow and Sunsama for their yearly plans (at time of review). There is also pricing for teams that brings the annual cost down to $12 per user, per month, paid annually which makes Motion much more accessible.

• Motion is $34 per month (monthly)
• They offer a $19 per month pricing (annually)
• They do offer a team and student pricing too

Can you use Motion app for free?

There is no free plan in Motion however, there's a free trial of 7-days.

Motion AI Verdict

Motion is a tough choice for many thanks to the AI systems behind it.

If you're in the hunt for a task management app that takes a bit of weight off planning tasks, then this is probably the best one out there thanks to the Motion AI system.

Busy professionals who use this at work will probably be the best to gain from this and the pricing isn't for everyone especially those comparing this to a to-do list application. Small teams will probably like Motion too, as it works with simple project management abilities to better plan and ahead and collaborate too.

Housing task, calendar and booking management in one helps a lot of people sway towards Motion but many find the AI very scary as a way to handle tasks.

What are the limitations of Motion?

From our review, we'd probably say the limitation of Motion is the forced nature of the AI auto-scheduling and the commitment to annual pricing if you're looking to spend less.

Should I get Motion App?

Yes if you want to commit to AI. Motion works well to balance auto-scheduling and handling your tasks using that perspective, which is still early days.

No, if you don't and want something more managed like Sunsama or Akiflow which are both great Motion alternatives to consider.

Best Motion AI Alternatives

Let's explore Motion alternatives and what they offer as a difference from Motion:

• Akiflow - allows you to bring in tasks from other tools like Gmail, Todoist & more.
• Sunsama - presents a more mindful approach to task management with day planning.
• Routine - this presents a hub for organizing tasks, calendar and even light notes too.

What's the best Motion alternative?

The best all-round one is probably Akiflow. It seems to be the closest although misses out on the AI auto-scheduling abilities that Motion is best known for. Here's our full in-depth Motion vs Akiflow feature to help you gauge if it is for you.