Nov 24
Motion and Sunsama are very similar daily planner apps that can be used for busy individuals and for teams. Here's our comparisons to help you pick between them, which ones suit your needs, pricing breakdowns & more detailed tests.
One of the more challenging decisions is picking between these daily planner apps.
Many of these daily planner apps share many similarities but offer unique approaches to similar situations, so finding one that best suits your needs requires extensive research. That's where we can help. These tools aim to solve the same problem and balance your calendar and tasks together in one base with unique technologies.
Motion is much more of a scheduler's dream, while Sunsama tries to think about reducing mental overload at work. They are both similar in pricing, meaning many users find it hard to choose the right one if their budget isn't a factor.
Let's unpack all features, pricing, key differences & everything you need to know:
To help you better navigate between Sunsama and Motion, here's what we plan to cover:
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Before you begin, let's better understand the pillars of choosing these applications. This might help you choose between them for the surface value they offer.
Motion is well known on the market as one of the fastest-growing to-do list applications. It combines calendar functionality, making it a daily planner application.
It also has team functionality, allowing you to collaborate with others. This makes it easier to manage projects in a small setting that up to 25 people may use.
Sunsama, on the other hand, is a well-known application that has been in the market much longer than Motion. It has probably been one of the original daily planner applications. It does have some team functionality that allows others to collaborate on a project.
It also has something called task consolidation, which will enable you to bring all of your tasks from other project—or task-based applications into the same application, making it easier to manage it as a dashboard.
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Motion is an AI-powered to-do list app for busy professionals.
Motion allows you to manage your tasks and calendar and has project management abilities for small teams. It is available on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and the web. Many use Motion to auto-reschedule their tasks to reduce overwhelm.
Motion connects calendar management with Google Calendar (personal and work), Outlook Calendar, and iCloud Calendar, allowing you to see what's ahead for meetings alongside your tasks in real-time.
Sunsama is a daily planner app that lets you organize your week ahead with tasks from other apps and calendar events from popular tools like Google Calendar.
It is available on desktop (macOS, Windows), iOS, and Android. It is very popular with busy professionals who want to manage their time with work-life balance as a focus.
Motion focuses on bringing scheduling and AI to the front of their application, allowing you to reduce the need to micro-manage your schedule. This is helpful for those who want to reduce the act of productivity admin.
Sunsama wants to be more focused on guided planning, which, compared to Motion, is more of a mindfulness activity that should be embraced for managing your burnout and workload.
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A side-by-side look at Sunsama and Motion's best features:
Sunsama | Motion | |
---|---|---|
Guided Planning | Yes | No |
AI Scheduling | No | Yes |
Time Blocking | Yes | Yes |
Project Management | Limited | Yes |
Task Consolidation | Yes | No |
Focus Modes | Yes | No |
Timer | Yes | Yes |
Time to look at what features Sunsama has and whether they can be helpful:
Features | Good For? |
---|---|
Task Management | Adding tasks and sub-tasks and organizing them into project labels can be done within Sunsama. You can see how many tasks you have, the amount per day, and whether doing them all will be possible on the typical working hours you have suggested to the app. This is a favorite feature amongst those who want a better work-life balance. |
Task Consolidation | Task consolidation means all your tasks in one place. You can add tasks from Notion, Trello, and around 15 other tools into Sunsama. This makes it the perfect place to manage all tasks in one. You can find the context needed to complete the task with a click, but the aim is to reduce the need to switch between apps. |
Guided Planning | One of Sunsama's brilliant features is guided planning, which allows you to plan your day and reflect on the one that has just been. This experience is great for those who want to be more mindful of tasks. It is one of the best planning experiences on the market, and it will allow you to think better about a plan for your week or even the day ahead. |
Week Objectives | Week planning is even more advanced. It allows you to set hierarchy goals for the week and feed amounts of time into your task list, making week goals more approachable. |
Focus Mode | Focus mode allows you to set a timer, zoom into your task, and add notes as you go to the task. This is perfect for keeping better and more accurate focus. The timer on the desktop shows outside of the app, which means you can see it anytime. |
Let's unpack the core features and ratings of each feature:
Features | What does it do? | Quality |
---|---|---|
Task Management | Motion offers task management for adding tasks, detailed priorities, deadlines, and more. It also comes with auto-scheduling, which operates the plan for your week ahead. | A |
Calendar Management | Connect Google, Outlook, and iCloud calendars to manage your incoming events. This helps you plan your tasks and calendar events in conjunction with each other. | B |
Project Management | Motion comes with lightweight project management abilities, not only for you but also sharing. This means you can assign tasks and organize them into Kanban boards or list views with many filters, sorting, and settings. | B+ |
AI Auto Scheduling | Task auto-scheduling is part of Motion and allows you to schedule any added task automatically. The more detail you add to the task—priority, deadline, importance, and value—the better the AI assistant will learn to plan future tasks. | A+ |
Meeting Scheduling | A comprehensive meeting scheduling system in Motion makes it easy to send a booking link or keep one active all the time. A decent settings area allows you to customize this further based on factors surrounding your other calendar and tasks. | B |
You'll have to break down what differs between these two daily planner apps a little more. This might be the most helpful section, as it might help you see what is valuable to you and your work.
The most apparent benefit to Sunsama above Motion is the involvement of systems that help you guide your planning. This can be done at any time, during the workday, or at the end, allowing you to reflect.
This is also incorporated throughout the week, with weekly objectives as a feature and weekly reflection to assess how well your week went.
While AI doesn't automate this, it is automated each week to go off, allowing you to have a better and more reflective practice as part of your routine. For many, this embedding is an excellent approach to managing the task list forcedly (it can be turned off).
Throughout Sunsama, focusing on managing your workload is critical to reducing overload. This benefit is showcased in features where you can set working hours and get indications that you are overloading yourself with how much is added to your task list, a perfect way to keep focusing on quality, not quantity.
Thinking about what you do is breathed into Sunsama from the outset with features like the weekly objectives, which help you set a series of weekly tasks to filter down into your daily tasks and think about what matters.
Tasks can be managed in one place, which is something you cannot do inside Motion. This means you can quickly bring apps like Todoist and Gmail to your task list, among many more. This makes it a popular alternative to Akiflow, too.
The motion does AI very well; you can add tasks, and the more detail you add, the more accurately it helps you weave your week ahead.
This is something Sunsama doesn't have, despite them adding the recent abilities, with AI project and time allocation, and even their existing auto-scheduling feature that doesn't live up to the more structural powers of managing your week with AI schedule.
Project management is much more robust in Motion than in Sunsama, giving those who want to plan with AI and schedule more effectively a better platform.
This is clear when you land on the "Projects" tab. You will find in Motion that the combination of views like Gantt is much more adapted for teams to collaborate within, maybe not a large team, but a smaller team that might want to use AI scheduling alongside projects.
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How do Motion and Sunsama compare for day-to-day use:
Let's explore how these two compare when it comes to planning a day:
For collaborating with others, how do Sunsama and Motion compare:
This should give you a quick summarized version of the pros & cons:
Sunsama | Motion | |
---|---|---|
Pros | Focused, Great for Guided Planning, Beautiful | AI Scheduling, Easy to Use, Project Management |
Cons | No AI Scheduling | Expensive Monthly |
Let's take a look at how price makes and impact between these two:
Sunsama costs $20 per month or $16 per month billed annually.
Plans | Pricing |
---|---|
Monthly | $20 per month |
Annual | $16 per month |
Sunsama does not have a free plan outside of the 14-day trial.
Motion is not free and has a few pricing models; they are the following:
Plans | Pricing (approx) | What's included? |
---|---|---|
Individual Monthly | $34 per month | All-access features |
Team Monthly | $20 per month | Collaboration with others |
Individual Annually | $19 per month | All-access features |
Team Annually | $12 per month | Collaboration with others |
Motion is not free but offers a 14-day free trial you can get here.
Sunsama and Motion are similar in pricing, but here's a short guide to help you:
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Let's help you pick the one that matters most to you:
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