Motion Alternatives in 2026: Keep the Planning, Lose What Doesn't Fit

The best Motion alternative depends on which part of Motion you want to change. Reclaim.ai keeps automatic scheduling but has a free plan and leaves your tasks in the apps you already use. Sunsama has you plan each day by hand. Morgen drafts a plan and waits for your approval before it touches the calendar. Merlin, our product, is a Mac assistant that ranks your to-dos and helps finish them, without blocking time for you.

Motion asks for a lot of trust: it takes your task list, decides when each task happens and keeps rearranging the calendar as the week changes. When that works, it takes planning off your plate. When it doesn't, you end up checking your own calendar to find out what you're supposed to be doing. Below is what Motion does well, the usual reasons people start looking, four tools that answer those reasons, and a table of published prices and features.

What Motion is now

Motion has grown from an AI calendar into what its homepage calls an all-in-one platform: AI tasks, projects, a Gantt chart, a calendar that plans your day, a meeting assistant with booking links, a meeting notetaker, docs, workflows for repeatable projects, dashboards and reports. It connects to Google, Outlook and iCloud calendars, and has desktop apps plus apps for iOS and Android.

Auto-scheduling is still the heart of it. Motion's help page on how auto-scheduling works explains the logic: each task's duration, start date, deadline, priority and effort go in alongside your calendar, and Motion finds open blocks, puts deadlines and high-priority work first, and splits long tasks into chunks. When a new meeting lands, tasks move. Events from your connected calendars always win over task blocks, and a past-due task goes into the next free slot.

Motion's pricing page lists two plans. Pro AI is $19 per seat a month with 7,500 AI credits per seat a month. Business AI is $29 per seat a month with 15,000 credits and adds team capacity planning, dashboards and reports, timelines and Gantt charts, time tracking and permissions. The page has separate Individuals and Teams tabs and a switch between paying monthly and paying annually (which it says saves 33%), so confirm the price for your tab and billing period at checkout. There's a free trial, but no free plan.

Where Motion is the better choice

Motion is hard to beat if you want projects, tasks, docs and the calendar in one place and you'd rather not decide when each task happens. A team lead who assigns work and wants it to land on everyone's calendar, with capacity planning and Gantt views on top, gets more from Business AI than from any single tool below. It also has desktop and phone apps, works with Outlook and iCloud calendars, and takes meeting notes, which not every alternative here does.

If the auto-scheduler has been working for you and only the price stings, compare annual billing first. Switching tools takes setup time, whichever one you pick.

What sends people looking past Motion

The reasons that come up most often are about control and cost rather than missing features:

• The calendar keeps moving. Motion's own help page says tasks can shift several times as higher-priority work or new events arrive, and suggests locking a task by hand when its time matters. Some people find that freeing; others find they can't trust the calendar they're looking at.
• No free plan. Every Motion plan is paid, and the cancellation page states that purchases are non-refundable, though Motion may refund at its discretion.
• Tasks already live somewhere else. Motion is built to hold your tasks and projects itself. If your team already runs on Asana, Jira, Linear or Todoist, you may end up keeping two systems.
• More than a solo user needs. Gantt charts, dashboards and capacity planning are useful to a manager and extra weight for a freelancer planning their own week.
• Tasks that don't appear. A task with no deadline or priority isn't scheduled at all, per the same help page, so loose to-dos can drop out of view.

Four alternatives, and the reason each one fits

Reclaim.ai, if you want auto-scheduling for less

Reclaim.ai is the closest match to how Motion plans a week. Its tasks page describes scheduling agents that turn tasks into calendar time around meetings, deadlines and availability, split larger work into focused sessions and move task blocks when a conflict comes up. The difference is where the tasks live: Reclaim.ai pulls them from Asana, ClickUp, Google Tasks, Jira, Todoist and Linear instead of asking you to move them.

The Reclaim.ai pricing page lists a free Lite plan for one user with a one-week scheduling range, two connected calendars and a short list of integrations (Google Tasks, Slack, Zoom and Google Meet). Starter costs $10 a seat a month billed yearly or $12 monthly and stretches the range to eight weeks; Business costs $15 yearly or $18 monthly with a 12-week range. It works with Google Calendar and Outlook. It has no native phone app: its help center suggests saving the web app to your home screen and editing its events in your calendar app.

Sunsama, if you want to decide what fits today

Sunsama takes the opposite view from Motion: you choose. Its homepage describes a morning step where you set priorities and a realistic workload, timebox tasks onto your schedule yourself, and close the day with a shutdown routine and a summary. It pulls tasks from Asana, ClickUp, Jira, Linear, Notion, Todoist, Trello, Microsoft To-Do and others, and syncs with Google, Outlook and Apple calendars.

On the Sunsama pricing page, the Pro plan card shows $17 a month billed yearly or $22 billed monthly, while the FAQ on the same page quotes $20 and $25, so check the figure at checkout. There's a 14-day trial with no card required, and Sunsama says it has no free plan and doesn't plan to add one. Apps cover macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. It suits someone who found that Motion made decisions they wanted to make themselves.

Morgen, if you want the AI to ask first

Morgen sits between the two. Its AI Planner page says suggested plans are only scheduled with your approval: you preview the plan, adjust it, then accept. Once a plan is on the calendar it stays put, and if a new event clashes you're told and can choose to reschedule. It plans Morgen's own tasks plus tasks from Notion, Todoist, Linear, ClickUp, Obsidian, Microsoft To Do and Google Tasks.

The Morgen pricing page lists the Individual plan at $15 a month billed yearly or $30 billed monthly, and Team at $10 a seat a month yearly or $25 monthly with a two-seat minimum. The trial runs 14 days with no card, and the page doesn't mention a free plan. Morgen connects Google Calendar, Outlook, iCloud and Fastmail, and Individual includes Windows, macOS, Linux, mobile and browser apps. It's the strongest pick here if you use several calendar accounts across providers.

Merlin, if the problem is finishing, not scheduling

Merlin is the assistant we make, and it doesn't do what Motion does best: it never places tasks on your calendar by itself or blocks time for focus work. Merlin lives on your Mac, reads your Google calendar and email, and keeps one To-do list next to the chat. That list brings in Linear issues assigned to you, Notion tasks, open Todoist tasks and action items you own from Granola meeting notes, along with to-dos you add by typing "add send the invoice for friday".

After every sync, Merlin ranks open tasks by what to do first, weighing each app's priority and status, due dates and what's on your calendar over the next few days, and shows a few words on why. Open a task and Do it with Merlin asks Merlin to finish it, doing the work where it can. Overdue tasks, or ones due within two days, can come back as a message in your waking hours offering to help with the first step. Each morning a Daily Digest lists the day's meetings and the mail that matters, and every meeting gets a short brief on who you're seeing just before it starts. Ask Merlin to add or move an event and it shows a card to check and confirm before anything changes.

What Merlin can't do matters here. There's no Windows, web or phone version; it's Mac software. It works with Google accounts and nothing else, up to two of them free and five on a paid plan, so Outlook and iCloud calendars are out. Asana and Trello aren't connected yet. The pricing begins with a free tier that renews 5,000 credits monthly; the first paid tier, Pro, costs $29 monthly (20% less when billed annually), and there are no trials.

Motion, Reclaim.ai, Sunsama, Morgen and Merlin compared

Every figure below is a single person's price in USD, as each company lists it.

Picking by situation

• You like auto-scheduling and want to pay less: Reclaim.ai. Start on the free Lite plan to see whether a one-week range is enough before paying.
• Your team runs on Asana, Jira or Linear: Reclaim.ai or Sunsama, which both read tasks from those tools rather than replacing them.
• You want every task's time to be your call: Sunsama, or Morgen if you'd like a suggested plan to edit rather than a blank day.
• You use Outlook, iCloud or several calendar providers: Morgen covers the most; Motion also handles Outlook and iCloud.
• You manage projects for a team and want them on everyone's calendar: stay on Motion and look at Business AI.
• Your desk is a Mac with Gmail, and tasks slip because nobody nudges you: Merlin, alongside your calendar app.

If you'd rather start with what Google Calendar can do without another app, our guide to automating Google Calendar covers the built-in options. For Outlook users moving to Google, see adding an Outlook calendar to Google Calendar.

Leaving Motion cleanly

Motion's cancellation page gives the path for an individual plan: the gear icon, then Manage Plan, then Cancel Plan, a reason, and Cancel Subscription. On a team plan only an admin can cancel, from Settings, Billing, Manage Plan. If you subscribed through Apple in the app, cancel from your Apple ID's Subscriptions menu on the iPhone instead. Cancelling doesn't trigger a refund on its own.

Before you cancel, list the open tasks and projects you still need, since each alternative above starts from its own list or from a task app you connect. Set up the replacement first, run a full week on it, then cancel, so you're never without a plan.