The right task management tool can transform your productivity. Motion and Todoist are two popular tools that promise to organize your life and boost efficiency.
But with overlapping features and unique strengths, how do you choose the best fit? Whether you need advanced AI scheduling or a straightforward way to organize tasks, this guide breaks down everything you need about Motion vs. Todoist. It introduces a powerful alternative that might just outshine them both.
🧠 Fun Fact: Research has found that spending only 10-12 minutes planning your day can save you two hours. This makes you realize how the right tool makes all the difference in boosting productivity, doesn’t it?
⏰ 60-Second Summary
The right task management tool can transform your productivity, but how do you choose between Motion and Todoist?
- Motion excels at AI-powered scheduling, automating task prioritization and calendar management.
- Todoist offers simplicity, collaboration, and extensive integrations at a lower cost.
Want the best of both? Try ClickUp—a powerful alternative that combines task management, automation, AI, and 1,000+ integrations in one platform.
What is Motion?
Motion is a task scheduling software that helps you manage your time and tasks better. It combines task management, schedule calendar scheduling, and AI automation.
This tool stands out for its AI-powered scheduling. It creates a personalized schedule by prioritizing tasks, meetings, and deadlines based on urgency and availability.
To increase your productivity, Motion integrates with many popular apps, such as Google Calendar, Zoom, Google Meet, Zapier, Microsoft Outlook 365, and more.
It is perfect for professionals, students, and teams looking for an all-in-one tool and who want to spend less time planning and more time executing.
➡️ Read More: Motion App Review: Is AI Scheduling Right for You?
Motion features
Let’s discuss what makes Motion a great Todoist alternative. Here are some of its best features:
Task management
Motion’s task manager features involve task prioritization and creation with a single click. Its recurring tasks feature ensures you never miss out on important work. If a task isn’t completed on time, it automatically reschedules it for you.
Project management
Motion also works as project management software. If you are working on a project with your team, Motion will create a prioritized schedule for each team member.
Open your projects in the board view to check task status or list view to see a comprehensive list of all the tasks you have to do.
The tool integrates project tasks into the calendar and centralizes all project-related collaboration, ensuring seamless organization and communication on a single platform.
Calendar Scheduling
One of Motion’s standout features is its AI calendar, which automatically creates a schedule for you. Just add details like task priority, deadlines, and duration. The AI factors these in along with your activities and to-do lists.
Managing your calendar is far easier with Motion, combining all your calendars in a single view and automatically time-blocking your tasks.
And if you like to create your schedule, Motion lets you do that, too!
AI meeting assistant
Motion’s AI meeting assistant simplifies scheduling by effortlessly identifying optimal meeting times. Just set your preferences, and it suggests the ideal options automatically.
Create a personalized meeting booking page to share your availability. Use the recurring booking link to schedule recurring meetings and keep things consistent. Set daily limits to manage your time and prevent meeting fatigue.
Motion pricing
Motion offers three pricing plans:
- Individual: $34/month per user
- Business Standard: $20/month per user
- Business Pro: Custom pricing
📽️ Bonus Watch: Want to learn how to use AI for task automation? Check out the video below:
What is Todoist?
Founded in 2007, Todoist is a popular task management and daily planner app. It allows you to create and prioritize tasks, add labels, and organize daily schedules.
Check your tasks in views like list, board, and calendar. Capture tasks on the go, add reminders, and ensure you’re never behind on deadlines.
This, too, allows you to track your tasks better by sorting them into today, upcoming, and other custom options, so you only see what’s relevant at the moment.
Todoist also offers 80+ integrations, including Zapier, Time Doctor, Slack, Google Calendar, and Outlook.
🔍Did You Know? 33% of people use to-do lists to manage their work and time!
Todoist features
Here is a breakdown of some of Todoist’s best features that make it a great Motion alternative:
Task management
Todoist offers many task management features to manage all your to-dos. Use the Quick Add feature to create a task with a single click. Just name the task and schedule it.
Set recurring due dates, organize tasks in sections, add subtasks, and decide priority levels to ensure you know what comes first. Add context to your tasks with voice notes and screenshots.
This to-do list app lets you create tasks directly from your email inbox.
Project management
Create team projects and share access with multiple team members with Todoist. It lets you create shared projects (separate from your personal projects), assign tasks to team members, and set deadlines.
You can also leave comments and attach files to provide more context to tasks and improve coordination.
Productivity tracking
Want to make productivity tracking more fun? Todoist does it for you with its Karma feature.
You get points for completing tasks and lose points for postponing them. This keeps your morale high while adding a fun element!
Set daily or weekly goals and visualize your productivity trend. Get an overview of exactly what you have achieved with activity history.
Customizable views
Todoist offers three views for you to manage projects: List, Board, and Calendar.
Use the List View to arrange your tasks linearly and get an overview of what’s pending and what’s done. Use the Calendar View to monitor your present and future commitments for detailed planning and scheduling.
The Board View arranges your tasks in columns with proper labels, facilitating easy and clear progress tracking.
Todoist pricing
Todoist offers three pricing plans:
- Beginner: $0
- Pro: $5/month per user
- Business: $8/month per user
Motion vs. Todoist: Features Compared
Motion and Todoist are popular productivity tools, but their strengths cater to different types of users. Here’s a Motion vs. Todoist comparison to help you understand their features:
Task management
Managing tasks efficiently is at the core of any productivity tool. The ability to organize, prioritize, and track tasks significantly impacts how well you stay on top of your goals. Let’s see which tool wins in this category.
Motion
Motion focuses heavily on automation, with AI-driven task prioritization and scheduling. It rearranges your to-do list based on deadlines, ensuring your urgent work is always front and center.
It also lets you create or reschedule tasks with a single click and add recurring tasks.
Todoist
While lacking AI automation, Todoist excels in flexibility. It offers basic task management features, including organizing tasks into projects, adding labels, setting filters, and assigning priority levels.
With Todoist, adding a task in a single click or directly creating it from your email inbox becomes easy.
🏆 Winner: Motion wins this round of Motion vs. Todoist for personal task management. Its advanced automation and time optimization capabilities leave Todoist behind.
Collaboration and project management
Collaboration tools are essential for team projects for sharing updates, assigning tasks, and tracking progress without confusion.
Let’s see which tool offers better project management features:
Motion
Collaboration in Motion is basic but effective for task sharing and meeting scheduling. It allows users to create prioritized schedules, add project work to the calendar, add comments to tasks, and attach documents to each project.
However, since it is designed for individual productivity, its team features fall short compared to collaboration-focused tools.
Todoist
Todoist lets you share projects, assign tasks, and communicate directly within the app using comments and mentions. You can label and categorize tasks, set priorities, plan goals, add task descriptions, and break down tasks into subtasks for clarity.
Real-time updates regarding who’s completed a task and reminders ensure everyone stays aligned.
🏆 Winner: Todoist takes the crown with advanced features, including real-time updates, labeling and categorizing tasks, and communication using comments and mentions.
Scheduling
Combining your tasks and events into one clear plan? That’s a game-changer. Let’s see which tool does it better.
Motion
Scheduling is where Motion goes all-in. Its AI builds a daily planner by blending your tasks and meetings, even adjusting it when things shift. It’s like having a super-organized assistant.
Todoist
While Todoist does not have a built-in scheduler, it integrates smoothly with calendars like Google Calendar. However, you’ll need to do the heavy lifting yourself.
🏆 Winner: Motion wins this category by a mile here as it’s a full-fledged planner, not just a task list.
Ease of use
How intuitive and user-friendly a tool is determines how quickly users adopt it. Let’s see which tool has a more user-friendly interface:
Motion
While powerful, Motion’s AI-driven features and automation can overwhelm beginners. The learning curve is steeper than that of traditional task management apps.
Todoist
Known for its simplicity, Todoist’s interface is intuitive and easy to navigate. It’s designed for quick adoption, making it a favorite for users new to task management apps.
🏆 Winner: Todoist wins this category for its easy-to-navigate interface and simple design.
Pricing
Cost is a major factor when choosing a task management tool, especially when balancing features against budget constraints. Here’s how the two tools stack up:
Motion
Motion positions itself as a premium tool. Its individual plan starts at $34 per month. It also offers team plans, with the standard plan starting at $20 per user.
Todoist
Todoist offers a more budget-friendly structure. Its beginner version is free. If you want more advanced features, the pro version is $5 per user, and the business version is $8 per user.
🏆 Winner: Todoist is more accessible and budget-friendly, with free beginner and pro versions for only $5.
Integrations
Let’s see which tool offers better integrations:
Motion
Motion’s integration options are somewhat limited. It works well with Google, Apple, and Outlook calendars. It also connects with apps like Zoom, Google Meet, Zapier, and Microsoft Teams.
However, it doesn’t offer integrations for other productivity, project management, or collaboration tools.
Todoist
Todoist shines in this area with 80+ integrations. It connects with tools like Google Calendar, Outlook, Slack, Dropbox, and Zapier, allowing users to automate workflows and sync tasks across platforms.
🏆 Winner: In this Motion vs. Todoist comparison, Todoist wins by offering 80+ integrations with communication, project management, and email tools.
Motion vs. Todoist on Reddit
We went to Reddit to see which app people prefer, Todoist or Motion. This helped us better understand these tools.
Many people love Motion’s AI scheduler and advanced features. One user commented:
Others found Todoist a better tool. A user appreciated its vast array of features:
Many users use Motion for scheduling. However, some also found it expensive and slow to release new features. A user said:
Given the app’s cost, I would expect a more consistent cadence of updates and new features, especially considering how fast the productivity space evolves. Don’t get me wrong—I love the automation features that Motion offers, but I also feel like I’m paying a premium price for a tool that isn’t evolving at the same pace as some of its competitors.”
Another user found Todoist’s pricing worth its features:
Meet ClickUp—The Best Alternative to Motion vs. Todoist
If Motion and Todoist are impressive, ClickUp is like that overachieving friend who does it all—and most importantly, better!
Designed to be a one-stop productivity platform, ClickUp seamlessly blends task management, scheduling, and automation into a highly customizable interface that fits personal and team workflows alike.
Besides its features, ClickUp supports 1000+ integrations, ensuring you get your favorite tools on the same platform.
Here’s what Starr, Accounts Officer at West Tech Shipping, has to say about ClickUp:
Let’s dive deeper into why ClickUp might just be the ultimate choice.
ClickUp’s One Up #1: ClickUp Tasks
ClickUp Tasks lets you create, share, and assign tasks for any project. Organize tasks with Custom Fields, assign them to team members, and track progress effortlessly. Group tasks into folders, sort by due dates or task types, and even automate recurring tasks.
Use ClickUp’s Task Priorities to set priorities for each task: urgent, high, normal, and low. This ensures you don’t miss out on urgent tasks.
Want to add more context? Add detailed descriptions, attach files, and even leave comments directly on tasks.
ClickUp’s One Up #2: ClickUp Task Checklists
Can’t resist checking things off your to-do list? Use ClickUp Task Checklists to create a simple to-do list. It lets you create nestable items to add subtasks for each task. If you require another team member to work on a task on your to-do, simply add an assignee.
ClickUp’s One Up #3: ClickUp Calendar View
ClickUp Calendar View is a project management calendar that gives you a clear, visual overview of your tasks, deadlines, and events—all in one place. View tasks by day, week, or month for a clear overview.
Sync it with external calendars like Google Calendar, and enjoy bidirectional updates to keep everything aligned. Drag and drop tasks to reschedule and customize your view by filtering for specific projects, priorities, or assignees.
💡Pro Tip: Wondering how to organize your work with a project management calendar?
Here’s a step-by-step guide:
- Step 1: Set clear goals and outline the scope of your project.
- Step 2: Outline essential tasks and milestones.
- Step 3: Distribute resources.
- Step 4: Pick the right tools.
ClickUp’s One Up #4: ClickUp Brain
ClickUp Brain is your AI assistant that brings an innovative edge to productivity. From automating repetitive tasks to drafting content and analyzing data, it saves you time and mental effort.
Get answers to any work-related questions from ClickUp Brain. It will simply search your workspace for relevant information and give you accurate data.
Use this tool to summarize meeting notes, generate action items, and even help brainstorm ideas for your next big project. It’s like having a personal productivity coach ready to simplify your day in your workspace.
ClickUp’s One Up #5: ClickUp Templates
ClickUp offers many task management templates to improve your productivity.
For example, ClickUp’s Daily Planner Template helps you plan your day by organizing and categorizing your tasks, prioritizing them, and visualizing progress.
ClickUp’s Employee Schedule Template also stands out if you want to plan work schedules for your teams. It lets you sync tasks with your team’s availability, ensuring nothing goes amiss.
If you need a more comprehensive task manager, check out ClickUp’s Task Management Template.
The template lets you visualize your tasks by status, priority, and department. You can track progress, optimize workflows, and collaborate seamlessly with your team.
It also supports six dynamic views, including list, board, box, and calendar, enabling you to choose one that best matches your requirements.
Find Your Perfect Productivity Match With ClickUp
Motion and Todoist each excel in different ways. Thanks to AI-driven features, motion is perfect for users who crave automation and a tightly scheduled workflow. In comparison, Todoist stands out for its simplicity and team-friendly collaboration. But if you are looking for a tool that combines the best of both these tools, don’t look further than ClickUp.
From AI-powered productivity and task management to calendar views and a wide range of customizable templates, ClickUp is designed to adapt to your unique needs. Sign up for free today!