Notion vs Motion: Best Choice & Detailed Comparison (2024)

Notion and Motion are both popular productivity tools with similar names. Here's a deep dive and comparison between these two tools and which is best for project management, task management, and general productivity use.

Notion and Motion.

Who names these apps? One letter differences. Next, we'll be covering Lotion vs Motion vs Notion. Despite the names, underneath the surface, there are hundreds of differences when it comes to features, pricing, specifics, and practical use cases.

Both of these apps will help you in a variety of ways, but which way are you looking for?

Why Notion and Motion?

You might be looking for something that resembles a way to better plan your time, or maybe even between to help plan your time with your team. This might be one of the reasons why you have stumbled across Notion and Motion.

This is the key list of areas we're comparing these both against and each category:

• Project Management
• Task Management
• Knowledge Management
• Meeting Scheduling
• Team Productivity

Each category will have a winner and exploration into why they won this specific category of the detailed comparison. Let's begin with some of the basics of these two.

The Main Differences

What do both these apps focus on?

Notion is well-known in the productivity space and arguably the biggest for personal and team productivity right now and in the last 5 years as they've expanded their reach beyond the realms of just managing your to-do list and notes into your entire team's second brain.

Notion

Notion is an all-in-one workspaces for notes, projects, tasks, documents & calendar.

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Motion is also growing in the productivity space, but known for mainly task management. Motion brings a sense of focus with their AI investments and focuses on helping to take the weight out of scheduling and planning your week's schedule.

Motion

Motion is an AI-focused planner app designed for tasks, calendar events & meetings.

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Let's dig into detailed comparisons to each category they cover:

Best For Project Management

The winner is Notion

Notion brings a feature called databases for project management.

This goes above and beyond for building the perfect project management system for teams due to the total flexibility, it gives you to build workspaces that your team can use with a range of views. To give you more context, databases can be molded using properties, filters, views (gallery, Kanban, list, calendar, timeline), and a way to set multiple views for people to save views for later.

Notion recently launched a focus on projects called Notion Projects with pre-built templates like meetings, sprints, tasks, and more that all interconnect to save you time building workspaces inside of Notion.

The level of customization in Notion databases is the main reason why Notion is the best for project management and is used by small and large teams to manage their workspaces, and projects in multiple views and collaborate in real-time. Going from a timeline view to manage a product release to a Kanban view to manage issue tracking with app development is one of the reasons why Notion is one of the most popular no-code tools.

How did Motion compare for project management to Notion?

Motion on the other hand does have good project management, just not what we'd call a strong enough competitor to Notion for managing projects at scale.

Project management in Motion exists as a tab in the top of Motion and allows for a way to spread out your tasks and schedule into a few views like Kanban and lists view. This allows for really good project management for small businesses (teams of 5-20) or even solo project management that Motion typically does well at.

But when it comes to expressing information at scale or in a much more customized manner, Motion cannot do what Notion offers for project management.

Best for Task Management

The winner is Motion

Motion is a classic task management experience and for solo users and even a small team, it rocks as a way to tally tasks, schedule them and their most powerful feature, AI them.

For task management, Motion brings a sense of structure - whereas Notion cannot bring that layer without making it feel a little too complicated. For individuals, Motion will be one of the better task management apps on the market for planning and organizing their week. This is something we commonly refer to as a daily planner application - which combines the likes of calendar and task management into one base.

Layer the ability to use AI scheduling also known in Motion as auto-scheduling, that allows users to add tasks, calendar events and even book meetings with the AI - and then get those tasks to be re-scheduled based on the recommendations as it further learn.

How did Notion compare for task management to Motion?

Notion does have the capabilities to be a good task management app, but at the core it probably does personal and team task management about 80% well. They better excel at project management here than they do at task management.

There are naturally ways to use Notion for task management and it isn't bad, one of the most popular templates is the Ultimate Brain by Thomas Frank that helps organize your brain, tasks and notes in Notion, but it will only do it 80% well in our opinion.

Best for Knowledge Management

The winner is Notion

By a country mile, Notion wins the knowledge management categories.

For teams, this is the place that people are coming to in droves including apps like Slab, Slite and Tettra for managing knowledge as a team. Notion brings a way to create a team wiki with ease allowing you to create pages, sync blocks, table of contents, blocks for text formatting and media with total fluidity, combined with a clean design.

Many large teams use Notion for team knowledge management and others apps for project management like monday.com - one interview we created many moons ago was with a 90-person remote team that were using Notion to better collaborate and collect insights to add to their team second brain.

More recently, in late 2023, Notion added the ability to speak with the information you add to Notion called Q&A AI that better examined what you had in Notion and spouting out the answer to best help team members - helping to save time with new employee questions, insights and beyond.

Why Motion isn't good at knowledge management?

Motion just doesn't have the abilities to manage knowledge like Notion does. There's light note-taking inside each of the tasks you create, but that's it.

Don't expect to find a haven with Motion for collecting team knowledge or even personal.

Best for Meeting Scheduling

The winner is Motion

Motion is the best for meeting scheduling between it and Notion.

Motion will allow you to send a booking link that is very smart and uses AI to better manage them alongside your meetings. So you get real-time management of your tasks and real-time management of what meetings best pair with the day you have, so you're always one step ahead of managing your productive schedule.

Motion has a powerful settings page for the booking links meaning you can customize it to better align with your vision for the calendar including the likes of buffer time, types of meetings and much more.

Does Notion have meeting scheduling abilities?

Rumor has it, Cron Calendar might be becoming closer to Notion.

But until then, Notion offers a basic calendar mode that allows you to add cards to a set date and even plan ahead, but nothing that is connect to Google Calendar or other such 2-way sync abilities that the likes of Motion brings to the table.

Best for Team Productivity

The winner is both of them

Motion is great for smaller teams between 5-20 people that want to manage their tasks within a lightweight project management system that is maybe more advanced than apps like Superlist and Todoist, and a dose of AI technologies within them.

Notion is great with larger teams between 50-250 people that want to use it to better collaborate on not only tasks, projects but knowledge management. This makes it have an edge on many project management software tools that haven't yet added document abilities.

Best for You: Notion or Motion?

• Overall, Notion is better for those who need project management, knowledge management, and general team productivity management.
• Motion on the other hand focuses well on personal task management, light small team project management and meeting scheduling (within the comfort of your to-do app).
• For solo users, we'd recommend both - but it depends on what you're focusing on. For team users, we'd probably push you towards Notion - despite the need to learn it a little more - it offers much more of an overall package.