Motion vs Sunsama: AI Scheduling or Mindful Planning in 2026?

Motion launched in late 2020 with a bold pitch: what if AI just scheduled your entire life? The app pulls in your tasks, looks at your calendar, considers deadlines and priorities, then auto-schedules everything. When a meeting pops up, it reshuffles tasks automatically. When you're running behind, it adjusts.

I tested it for about 8 months and honestly, once you trust it, it's weirdly freeing. You stop thinking about when to do things and just follow what the AI planned.

Sunsama has been around since 2018 and takes the exact opposite approach. Every morning, you sit down for 10-15 minutes and manually plan your day. You pull tasks from all your different tools (Todoist, Asana, Gmail, whatever), drag them into today's schedule, estimate how long they'll take, and commit to a realistic workload.

The app literally won't let you overschedule yourself. End of day, you reflect on what you actually finished. It's slow and deliberate - kind of the antithesis of Motion's automation.

Motion's AI is the whole point. You create tasks with deadlines, priorities, and estimated durations. The AI looks at your calendar and schedules them automatically. It learns your patterns over time - like if you're most productive in the morning, it schedules hard tasks then.

When your calendar changes (and it always does), Motion reschedules everything. No manual dragging. The first week feels weird because you're not in control, but that's kind of the idea. Reddit's productivity crowd seems split - half love it, half can't give up manual control.

Sunsama's daily planning ritual is structured: review yesterday, plan today, time-box your tasks. You drag tasks into specific time slots, set durations, and the app shows you a visual timeline of your day. If you try to add more tasks than you have hours, it warns you.

There's something calming about the process - it forces you to be intentional instead of reactive. The downside? If your day gets derailed by an urgent meeting, you're manually replanning everything. No AI to help.

Motion isn't just a scheduling trick - it's a full project manager. You get tasks, subtasks, dependencies, priorities, and deadlines. The project views show Gantt charts and timelines.

You can see how one delayed task affects everything downstream. For teams, it's genuinely useful - everyone's tasks are visible, and the AI schedules around the whole team's availability. It's like Asana met a calendar app and had a very smart baby.

Sunsama doesn't manage tasks - it aggregates them. You keep using Todoist, Asana, Trello, whatever. Sunsama just pulls tasks from those tools so you can decide what to work on today.

It's more of a daily planning layer than a task manager. You can add tasks directly in Sunsama, but honestly most people use it to curate from existing tools. The focus is on choosing what matters, not managing a million features.

Motion is built for teams. The calendar shows everyone's schedule, the AI books meetings across multiple people's calendars, and you can see who's working on what.

It's honestly kind of magical when someone needs to schedule a meeting - Motion checks everyone's actual workload (not just free calendar slots) and suggests times that won't wreck anyone's day. For managers, being able to see the team's capacity before adding more work is a game changer.

Sunsama works for teams technically, but it's really an individual tool. You can share your plan with teammates, but there's no real collaboration features. It's designed for you to reflect on your own work, not coordinate with others.

If you're a solo founder, freelancer, or someone who just needs to manage your own stuff, that's perfect. If you're managing a team, Sunsama won't help much.

Motion connects to Google Calendar, Outlook, Slack, Gmail, Linear, Jira, Asana, and more. The Gmail integration is slick - turn emails into tasks without leaving your inbox. Slack integration means your team can see your schedule without asking.

The API is solid too, so developers have built custom workflows. It really tries to be the central hub that connects everything.

Sunsama pulls from Todoist, Asana, Trello, Jira, Gmail, GitHub, and about a dozen others. But it's one-way mostly - you import tasks to plan your day, then check them off in Sunsama, and it syncs completion back.

You're not managing projects in Sunsama, just using it as a daily planning interface for tasks that live elsewhere. Calendar integration is good - Google and Outlook both work smoothly.