People cancel Motion for one of three reasons. The bill is about $29 a seat with nothing free underneath it. The scheduler keeps moving blocks they wanted left alone. Or they realise the tasks they never typed in, the ones sitting in email, were the problem all along. This guide sorts six Motion alternatives into those three groups so you can skip straight to yours.
Leaving Motion over price? Reclaim gives you auto-scheduling with a free-forever tier and paid plans from about $10 a user. Leaving because the AI kept rearranging your day? Sunsama, Akiflow and Morgen hand the pen back to you at $15 to $20 a month. Leaving because half your work lives in email and never reached Motion at all? Pidgy reads Outlook and Gmail and writes the task list itself, then lets you plan it. Todoist stays the cheap, plain list for anyone who only wants that.
Motion's scheduler is clever. It is also the thing most cancellation notes complain about, right after the invoice.
About $29 per user per month, no free plan, and AI credits that can push the total higher.
Motion rebuilds your day whenever something changes. Reviewers love it until it moves a focus block they wanted left alone, say from Tuesday morning to Thursday afternoon.
Motion only schedules tasks you typed in. The request from a client at 16:40, or the thing you promised in a reply on Monday, never enters the system unless you enter it.
Getting Motion configured well takes days, not minutes. The phone app trails the desktop version, and Linux users have no native app at all.
Every tool below was measured on the same four points, and we say plainly where Motion still wins.
An algorithm (Reclaim, Motion), you with a keyboard or mouse (Akiflow, Sunsama), or an assistant that proposes and waits for a nod (Morgen, Pidgy's Plan mode).
Most planners start after a task exists. Only one tool on this list reads the email and writes the task.
Rates are the published monthly figures at the time of writing, rounded. Reclaim and Todoist have free plans, Sunsama and Akiflow do not.
Weak mobile apps are a recurring complaint against Motion, Sunsama and Akiflow. Morgen and Todoist run on every platform.
You liked the idea of Motion. You did not like paying for it.
Reclaim sits on top of your calendar and fills it with tasks, focus time, habits and meetings, then moves things around when the week shifts, much as Motion does. It syncs both ways with Google Calendar and Microsoft 365, the free-forever tier is genuinely usable, and paid plans start around $10 per user per month. It now belongs to Dropbox.
Where it falls short of Motion is task management itself. Reclaim schedules tasks but is not a place to keep them, so you still need a list somewhere else, and like Motion it never looks at your email.
You want your calendar to stay where you put it. Three tools take that stance, each with a different personality.
Sunsama gathers tasks from more than twenty apps into one column, asks you to guess how long each will take, and has you drag them onto the day yourself. A guided shutdown closes the evening. Nothing moves unless you move it, which is the whole point. Around $20 a month, trial only, no free plan.
The mobile app cannot run the full ritual, so it is a desktop habit. If you found Motion's setup week long, be aware Sunsama asks for a planning session every single morning.
Akiflow pulls tasks out of Gmail, Slack, Notion, Asana and Todoist into one inbox and then gets out of the way while you time-block them from a command bar. Its assistant, Aki, takes new tasks by chat, by Siri or by email. Around $19 a month on an annual plan.
There is no auto-schedule at all, no free plan, the monthly price is steep, and the phone app is thin. It gathers tasks from tools you already use, but it does not read the email itself and decide what needs doing.
Morgen combines your calendars and task tools, then drafts a plan for the day that you accept, edit or ignore. That is the middle path between Motion's takeover and Sunsama's hand-placement. It runs natively on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android and the web, which makes it the only tool here with a real Linux app, and costs from about $15 a month.
The suggestions are just suggestions. Morgen will not reshuffle for you when a meeting lands, and it is a planner rather than a place tasks originate.
If your Motion task list was always half empty, no scheduler will fix that. These two start earlier.
Pidgy connects to Outlook and Gmail, reads every thread as one inbox, and pulls out the action items, including the commitments you made in your own replies. It ranks them, groups related email, documents and tasks into projects with a progress percentage, and lets you drop them into calendar blocks in Plan mode. It will also draft the reply in one of four tones in your voice, chase the follow-ups that stalled, and give you a single Inbox Health score. Nothing sends until you click, hosting is in the EU, and your mail is never used for training.
Two honest caveats. Pidgy does not auto-schedule your day the way Motion does, and it is built around email, so a task that never touched your inbox has to be added by hand. Access is currently by invitation while early-access waves roll out.
Todoist is the cross-platform standard, with natural-language quick add that nobody has bettered, projects, labels, filters and a Karma score. Free tier, Pro roughly $5 a month.
Every task is typed or forwarded by you, and calendar planning stays basic. It is a list, not a planner, which after Motion may be exactly the relief you want.
Motion waits for you to type a task. Pidgy starts the moment the message lands, and these four steps run without you.
Same four questions from the method section, one row per tool.
| Tool | Who schedules your day | Free plan and price |
|---|---|---|
| Motion (for reference) | The AI, and it reshuffles | No free plan, about $29 a user |
| Reclaim | The AI, and it reshuffles | Free tier, paid from about $10 a user |
| Sunsama | You, by dragging | Trial only, about $20 |
| Akiflow | You, from a command bar | No free plan, about $19 annual |
| Morgen | AI proposes, you approve | From about $15 |
| Pidgy | You, in Plan mode, from tasks it found in email | Early-access pricing, by invitation |
| Todoist | Nobody, it is a list | Free tier, Pro about $5 |
Practical notes for the changeover.
Run the replacement alongside Motion for a fortnight before you cancel. Reclaim can sit on the same Google or Microsoft calendar, so you will see both scheduling engines fighting over the same hours, which tells you quickly which one you trust. For Sunsama or Akiflow, expect the first week to feel slower, because you are now doing the placing that Motion did for you.
Pidgy is a different kind of swap. It does not replace Motion's scheduler so much as feed it. Some early-access users keep Motion or Reclaim for the calendar and let Pidgy handle capture, drafting and chasing from the inbox side. If that describes you, the tools coexist without a fight.
Catch the task first. Schedule it second.
Request accessHead-to-head pages for the tools in this guide.
Pidgy reads Outlook and Gmail as one inbox, writes the to-dos, plans them into your week and nudges the ones that stall. Ask for an early-access invite below.