Motion vs Reclaim.ai: Which is the best productivity planner?

Feeling like your calendar’s full, but nothing important gets done?

You’re not the only one. In the past few years, how we work has changed, with fewer hours on the clock and more pressure to stay productive. In fact, the average U.S. workweek has dropped from 44.1 to 42.9 hours since 2019 (Gallup, 2024). But while we may be working slightly less, it hasn’t exactly translated to less stress or better focus.

The real challenge? Making sure the time we do have actually goes toward work that matters. That’s why productivity tools are everywhere now. There are over 14,700 AI apps in the U.S. alone, many of them claiming to solve scheduling chaos, protect deep work time, or automate your day entirely.

Some even promise up to 25% more tasks completed just by helping you manage your time better. And with 92% of employees saying the right tech improves their job satisfaction, it’s no surprise we’re all searching for tools that actually help.

Two names that come up often: Motion and Reclaim. Both use AI to organize your day and protect your focus, but they take very different approaches. If you’re deciding between them, here’s a clear, side-by-side look at what each one does best—and where they fall short.

TL;DR 

• 42.9 hrs — Average U.S. workweek (↓ from 44.1 in 2019, Gallup 2024), yet productivity pressure is up.
• Motion increases productivity by up to 137%, building your daily schedule around tasks, deadlines, and meetings. Great for founders, solo operators, and project-heavy teams. No free plan.
• Use Motion if you want AI to manage and reshuffle your calendar based on task priority fully.
• Reclaim helps users protect up to 40% more Focus Time and automate recurring routines. Perfect for Google Calendar users juggling meetings and personal priorities. Free forever plan available.

Motion vs Reclaim

As an app in the auto-scheduling space, we’re always looking at how different tools serve different workflows. Motion and Reclaim are two of the most talked-about options in smart scheduling, so we decided to take a closer look. In this breakdown, we’ll compare their features, highlight the pros and cons, and help you figure out which tool is a better fit for your calendar.

Motion

Meet Motion: the productivity app that promises to increase productivity by 137%, virtually adding an extra month to your year.

Image source: UseMotion.com

Motion is a productivity platform founded in 2019, designed to help users manage their time with more structure and less effort. In 2022, the company raised $13 million in Series A funding, reflecting a growing interest in AI-powered scheduling tools.

What sets Motion apart is its ability to build your daily schedule automatically. It doesn’t just track your tasks or show your availability; it actively prioritizes your work, fits it into your calendar, and continuously adjusts as things change throughout the day.

For individuals who deal with decision fatigue or struggle to manage shifting priorities, this kind of automation can be especially helpful. In fact, some experts suggest that tools like Motion may benefit users with ADHD or executive function challenges thanks to its structured, hands-off approach to planning.

Motion brings together task lists, calendar events, and lightweight project management in one streamlined view, aiming to reduce the time you spend planning and give you more time to focus.

‍Motion Key Features

Whether you're a solo planner or managing a fast-moving team, Motion offers a unified platform packed with smart features to automate, organize, and elevate your daily workflow. Whether you’re working solo or managing a team, here’s what makes Motion stand out:

• AI-Powered Task Scheduling: Motion automatically plans your day by prioritizing tasks around meetings, deadlines, and working hours. If your schedule changes, it instantly reshuffles everything for you; no manual updates are needed.
• Unified Task + Calendar View: Manage tasks and calendar events in one timeline. Sync multiple calendars, including Google Calendar, Outlook 365, and iCloud, to get a complete picture of your day.
• Email to Task Automation: Forward emails from Gmail or Outlook, and Motion will turn them into tasks. You can also send quick reminders or reschedule requests directly from your inbox.
• AI Project Management: Use auto-scheduled Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and workload views to manage projects and team assignments with minimal overhead.
• Smart Meeting Integrations: Motion integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams to simplify booking and launching meetings right from your calendar.
• Recurring Tasks & Templates: Save time with custom templates and flexible recurring task logic, ideal for weekly check-ins, reports, or SOPs.
• Voice-Activated Task Capture: Create tasks on the go using Siri, and Motion’s AI will slot them into your calendar automatically.
• Automated Workflows via Zapier: Connect Motion to thousands of other tools through Zapier to automate repetitive tasks and streamline your stack.
• Collaboration for Teams: Assign tasks, share project boards, track workloads, and keep everyone aligned in one workspace.

Read: No More Busywork: Tips and Tools to Automate Tasks

Who Is Motion Best For?

Motion isn’t just for productivity nerds or hyper-organized managers. It’s used by people who are busy, juggling way too many things, and want to stop spending half their day just planning the other half.

That includes a lot of service businesses, agencies with back-to-back client calls, consultants who need deep focus time between meetings, tradespeople balancing job sites and invoices, and even law firms coordinating casework and court dates. When your day’s constantly shifting, Motion tries to do the re-planning for you.

But it’s not just for client-facing work. Inside teams use it, too. Startups looking to bring order to messy schedules. Product teams with dozens of moving parts. Marketing teams with campaign timelines to track. Sales teams are trying to fit prospecting around constant calls. Even exec teams with schedules so packed there’s barely room to think.

Motion is made for people who don’t want to think about scheduling and just want their calendar to make sense, automatically.

Read: Rewriting the Rules: 9 Productivity Myths Debunked

Motion Pros

If you're looking for a tool that merges AI scheduling with task and project management, Motion offers a well-rounded platform that handles both personal productivity and team workflows. Here's what it gets right:

1. AI-Powered Task Scheduling

‍Motion's standout feature is its ability to automatically schedule tasks around your meetings, deadlines, and availability. It doesn't just suggest times, it books tasks directly into your calendar, reshuffling them in real-time if your day changes. You set priorities and deadlines, and Motion handles the rest.

2. Unified Calendar + Task Management

‍ Instead of switching between a calendar and a task app, Motion gives you one interface that handles both. You can see all your events, meetings, and to-dos in one timeline. This calendar-task sync makes it easy to manage your day without bouncing between tools.

3. Smart Auto-Rescheduling

‍If a meeting is added or your availability changes, Motion intelligently reorganizes your schedule. It automatically shifts lower-priority tasks to free up time and ensures nothing urgent is dropped, something few scheduling tools do as fluidly.

4. Project & Team Management

‍Motion lets you assign tasks, track progress, and visualize projects through Kanban boards and Gantt-style timelines. It’s not a full-blown project management suite like Asana or ClickUp, but it’s ideal for teams that want lightweight coordination with minimal overhead.

5. Deep Calendar & Communication Integrations

‍Motion integrates natively with Google Calendar, Outlook, iCloud, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Gmail. You can forward emails to create tasks, join meetings directly from the dashboard, and sync across all your devices.

6. Minimal Setup, Fast Onboarding

‍The UI is clean and modern, and Motion’s onboarding flow is simple, with no steep learning curve. Once your calendar is connected, the AI gets to work immediately, making it a strong choice for people who want time-blocking without micro-managing their schedule.

Motion Cons

Motion is simple to use once everything’s set up, but the initial setup can take a bit of time. You’ll need to map out your full schedule, work hours, personal time, and more for the best results. Features like emailing tasks directly to the app are helpful in theory, though they don’t always work perfectly. Pricing-wise, it’s more cost-effective for teams, while solo users may find it a little on the higher side.

Read: The Best Motion App Alternatives for 2024 (Free & Paid Options)

Reclaim

Now, meet Reclaim: geared towards busy teams, Reclaim is designed to manage professional and personal events, helping you reclaim your time and find the best time for everything.

Image source: Reclaim.ai

Reclaim is an AI scheduling assistant designed specifically for Google Calendar users. Rather than replacing your existing calendar or task tools, Reclaim integrates directly with them and supercharges your day with intelligent automation. From automatically protecting your focus time to scheduling recurring habits like lunch or workouts, Reclaim helps busy professionals defend their calendars from chaos and reclaim their most productive hours.

Reclaim Key Features

Reclaim is built for busy professionals who need their calendar to do more than just track meetings; it proactively organizes your day around priorities, habits, and focus time using intelligent automation.

• Smart Meeting Scheduling: Finds the best time for meetings by checking availability across everyone’s calendar; no back-and-forth needed.
• Routine Management: Keeps space open for regular habits like exercise, reading, or planning without you having to remember.
• Focus Time Blocks: Protects quiet time in your calendar so you can actually get work done without constant interruptions.
• Automatic Buffers: Adds breathing room between meetings for breaks or travel, so your day flows better.
• Calendar Sync: Combines multiple calendars into one view while respecting privacy settings.
• Smart Scheduling Links: Lets you share availability that adapts based on your workload and personal time.
• Time Insights: This breaks down how your time is spent across meetings, tasks, focus blocks, and routines so you can adjust if needed.

Built for Busy Teams

Reclaim tends to shine inside small teams that run on tight calendars and shifting priorities. Product and engineering teams use it to protect deep work and plan sprints more effectively. Sales and marketing teams lean on it to book meetings without losing time for routine tasks. HR, finance, and EAs use it to bring more structure, balance, and flexibility to fast-moving workweeks. It’s built for teams that need their calendar to work around how they actually work. It can get costly to scale to larger teams based on their plan limits.

Read: Deep work tips to help you make the most of your time

Reclaim Pros

Reclaim is built for users who juggle packed calendars and want to find harmony between meetings, tasks, and personal time, with automation and AI that proactively works behind the scenes.

1. Smart 1:1 Meetings & Scheduling Links

Reclaim has two powerful features that make scheduling meetings a breeze: Smart 1:1 Meetings and Scheduling Links. Using Reclaim’s powerful AI, the Smart 1:1 feature will auto-schedule and adjust any 1:1 meeting to the most optimal time based on your calendar and the person you’re meeting with. Reclaim uses available time slots in your calendar and your prioritization algorithm to create smart scheduling links that colleagues and friends can use to book a meeting with you.

2. Features for Work-life Balance

One of Reclaim’s biggest claims is that it helps users with work-life balance, and boy does it deliver. With the AI Habits feature, users can mark which tasks they’d like to be recurring and when, and Reclaim will adjust your calendar and schedule tasks around your habit to make sure there’s time. Another feature, Buffer Time, is an automation that schedules breaks and travel time into your calendar so you can catch your breath in between meetings and tasks.‍

3. Free Plan

Reclaim stands out from many competitors with its Lite: Free Forever plan that requires no credit card to sign up and includes 1 user who can schedule up to 3 weeks ahead. After that, Reclaim offers a Starter Plan at $8/user/mo, a Business Plan at $12/user/mo, and an Enterprise Plan at $18/user/mo.

Reclaim Cons

Reclaim is powerful when it comes to automating schedules, but it’s not without trade-offs. While it does offer helpful integrations, the free plan is limited, and even paid plans miss out on native support for some popular tools. There’s also a learning curve, because there is a lot of set up required for Reclaim to work well for you

Want to learn about more AI time management apps? Check out this article that explores Reclaim.ai alternatives. 

Choosing the Best Calendar App: Features That Matter

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to AI scheduling tools. What matters is how well the tool fits into your current setup and how much structure or flexibility you actually need. Here are the real criteria worth paying attention to:

How Do You Manage Your Time

If your day is task-driven, with constant deadlines, deliverables, and shifting priorities, Motion gives you more control with task auto-scheduling, priority rules, and built-in project views. If your time revolves around meetings and routines, Reclaim defends your calendar by blocking focus hours and adjusting habits around your changing availability.

How Much Structure Do You Want

Motion offers full structure; it plans your day from start to finish, automatically shuffling tasks as things change. That’s helpful if decision fatigue or planning paralysis is your issue. Reclaim, on the other hand, works with your existing calendar and lets you keep more manual control while still protecting your time in the background.

Team vs. Solo Workflows 

Both tools support teams, but in different ways. Motion is more task and project-centric, making it a better fit for teams managing shared deliverables. Reclaim is stronger for cross-functional teams trying to reduce meeting friction with smart 1:1s, adaptive scheduling links, and collaborative time blocking.

Automation Depth

Reclaim excels at passive automation, routine scheduling, buffer holds, and time insights. Motion leans into active automation, building your plan from scratch and adjusting it constantly based on task priorities and deadlines.

Setup and Learning Curve

Motion requires some upfront planning: work hours, personal time, and task imports. Reclaim is lighter on setup but might need tweaking to make sure habits and holds align with how you actually work.

If you’re unsure, try both. Reclaim has a Free Forever plan, and Motion offers a 7-day free trial - see which one fits your cognitive style and workflow better.

The Impact of AI-Powered Tools on Remote Work Productivity

AI-powered platforms like Motion, Reclaim, Clockwise, and Asana are redefining how remote teams structure time, not just track it. These tools go beyond scheduling; they remove the constant micro-decisions that fragment focus. With features like automatic task prioritization, protected focus blocks, and smart scheduling links, they help individuals reclaim mental bandwidth, and teams collaborate across time zones without constant coordination. Motion actively reshapes your calendar around shifting deadlines; Reclaim safeguards personal time and recurring routines with zero manual input. Clockwise optimizes meetings to reduce fragmentation, while Asana keeps broader project timelines clear and actionable. Together, they’re changing the nature of productivity, not by adding more to your day but by helping you protect the hours that matter most.

Plan Smarter: Use Clockwise to Boost Daily Output

While Motion and Reclaim focus on combining tasks and scheduling, Clockwise is built specifically around optimizing your existing calendar. It automatically shifts meetings to create uninterrupted focus time, which is especially useful for teams with overlapping schedules. Its clean interface, smart automation, and free plan for teams make it a practical option for those who want better control without switching tools.

Let’s unpack just some of Clockwise’s features and how they help you best manage your time and tasks! For an even closer look, head to our full overview of Clockwise here.

Automated Calendar Management

Let Clockwise handle the tasks of organizing your schedule in real-time.

• Focus Time: Tell Clockwise how many hours of Focus Time you need in a week and also whether you prefer to do deep work in the morning or afternoon. Then, watch the magic happen as Clockwise rearranges your schedule and opens up long blocks of time.
• Flexible Holds: Choose which routines and tasks need to be on your schedule, and Clockwise will automatically shift your calendar as the week evolves so you never run out of time to clear your inbox, take a walk, or finish a task.

• Meeting Breaks & Lunch Holds: Whether you need to grab a coffee or just want a break to recharge, Clockwise will automatically create gaps of your chosen duration between long blocks of meetings. Plus, never miss lunch again by having Clockwise automatically sync a lunch hold to your calendar.

Scheduling made easy

Simplify meeting coordination with intelligent booking links and an AI-powered assistant.

• Clockwise Links: Auto-populated, easy-to-share links that let colleagues and friends alike book into your calendar with availability based on your preferences.
• AI Scheduling: As easy as chatting with a friend, use Clockwise to manage bulk scheduling requests easily, create space in your week, find time with a group, and more.

Culture aware

Promote a healthy workplace culture by protecting focus time and syncing team calendars.

• No Meeting Days: Create a day without meetings for your team to focus on deep work.
• Team Analytics: Easily see how much Focus Time and meeting time your team has for an overview of how you’re spending your time and where to make adjustments.

Fully integrated

Connect Clockwise with the tools you already use to maximize productivity without switching contexts.‍

• Slack: Clockwise automatically syncs your calendar with Slack and vice-versa. Get an overview of your day directly in Slack, auto-reply to your peers when you’re in Focus Time, automatically update your Slack status, and get Clockwise updates right in Slack.
• Asana: Clockwise seamlessly integrates with Asana to create more Focus Time, easily add Asana tasks to your calendar, and simply time-block your tasks.
• Microsoft Office: Now rolling out in Beta, Clockwise is compatible with Microsoft Office in addition to Google Calendar! Users can easily use their Microsoft login to create an account and get started.

Wrapping Up

So—Motion or Reclaim? Both aim to tackle calendar overload, but they take very different paths. Motion is ideal if you want a fully structured productivity platform that builds your day around tasks, deadlines, and meetings. It's especially helpful for users who struggle with decision fatigue or need constant schedule reshuffling, though it doesn’t offer a free plan. 

Reclaim, on the other hand, is great for those who already rely on Google Calendar and want a lightweight, automated layer that quietly protects Focus Time and personal routines. It’s more flexible and offers a Free Forever plan, but it comes with a slight learning curve. Ultimately, the right pick depends on whether you want full control through a dedicated platform or smart support that works quietly in the background.