Motion vs Sunsama: AI Auto-Scheduling vs Mindful Planning

Motion is all about the AI. You dump in your tasks with deadlines, and the app builds your schedule automatically. Meeting pops up? Motion reshuffles everything to make it fit. Task takes longer than expected? It adjusts the rest of your day.

The interface is calendar-first - you're looking at time blocks, not lists. They launched around 2020 and have been refining the AI since. It's built for people who have too much going on and need a robot to just figure it out.

Sunsama went a totally different direction. Instead of automation, they built guided planning rituals. Every morning, you walk through a planning session where Sunsama helps you pull tasks from other tools, set your intentions, and commit to a realistic amount of work.

There's even an end-of-day reflection to review what you actually got done. The whole philosophy is about being intentional and sustainable - they actively try to stop you from overloading yourself. Been around since 2018 and has a cult following among people who burned out on other productivity systems.

The AI scheduling is what you're paying for. You create a task, give it a due date, estimate how long it'll take, and Motion finds time for it automatically. You can set preferences like 'don't schedule deep work before 10am' or 'no meetings on Fridays' and it respects those.

When conflicts happen - and they will - Motion moves things around in real-time. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it reschedules something you were mentally prepared for and that's annoying. But for people with chaotic calendars, having the app handle tetris instead of you is worth it.

Sunsama's approach is manual but thoughtful. During your daily planning session, you drag tasks from your backlog into specific time blocks on your calendar. The app will warn you if you're scheduling more hours than you have available, which honestly more apps should do. You can set a daily task limit - like 'I can only handle 6 hours of work' - and Sunsama stops you from adding more.

It's slower than Motion's automation, but you stay in control. Some people find this therapeutic. Others find it tedious.

Motion supports teams up to 25 people and does it well. Everyone can see each other's calendars and current workload without constantly asking 'hey, do you have time for this?' You can assign tasks to team members, and Motion will auto-schedule it on their calendar based on their availability.

There's project management stuff too - kanban boards, dependencies, that whole deal. If you're managing a small team, Motion gives you real-time visibility into who's working on what without micromanaging.

Sunsama is really built for individuals. There's no team features to speak of. You could technically share your daily plan with someone, but it's not designed for collaboration.

If you need to coordinate with a team, you'll be doing that in Slack or Asana or whatever, then pulling those tasks into Sunsama for your personal planning. That's fine if you work solo or just need to manage your own workload within a larger team.

Motion connects to the major calendar apps - Google Calendar, Outlook, iCloud - and that's mostly what you need since it's calendar-centric. There are some task integrations but they're not the main focus.

The idea is that Motion replaces your task manager and calendar, not that it pulls from them. If your workflow involves a bunch of different tools, Motion might feel limiting.

This is where Sunsama shines. It pulls tasks from Asana, Trello, Gmail, Jira, GitHub, Notion, ClickUp, and more. During your planning session, you can import tasks from all these sources into your daily plan.

So if your team uses Asana for project management, you don't have to duplicate work - just pull today's Asana tasks into Sunsama. The Gmail integration is particularly nice for turning emails into tasks without leaving your inbox.

Motion is $34/month if you pay monthly, or $228/year which works out to $19/month. That's on the expensive side for a task app, but they'd argue you're paying for the AI. There's a 7-day trial to test it out.

Team pricing exists but varies based on size. Given how much it costs, I'd really want to be sure the AI approach fits your brain before committing.

Sunsama is $20/month or $192/year ($16/month). Still not cheap, but a decent chunk less than Motion - saves you $36/year if you go annual. You get 14 days to try it, which is more generous than Motion's 7 days.

There's no team plan since it's individual-focused. The price has gone up over the years, which people on Reddit complain about, but honestly most productivity apps are in this range now.

Okay so this is embarrassing for Motion - they basically don't have a real mobile app. There's supposedly something in the works, but for a scheduling app to not have a mobile app is kind of absurd.

You can use the web version on mobile browser but it's not great. If you need to check your schedule or add tasks while you're out, this is a real problem.

Sunsama has iOS and Android apps, but they're pretty basic. It's more of a 'check what's on my plate today' view than a full planning experience. You can mark tasks complete and do simple edits, but the guided planning sessions really need the desktop app.

Think of mobile as read-only with light editing. Not ideal but at least it exists, unlike Motion.