Motion and Sunsama are popular tools in daily planning.
Both can be used to better manage your personal schedule and collaborate with team members on their schedules. We'll look at aspects like planning your schedule with tasks and also overview how they can be used in a work environment and with the team elements of project management.
We're also going to explore which of these applications has pros and cons, evaluate all other features that might be useful, and talk about the pricing. So let's dive into this Sunsama vs. Motion overview
The Basics
Here's what both apps do and what they offer users:
- Motion is well known on the market as one of the fastest-growing to-do list applications. It combines calendar functionality, making it a daily planner application. It also has team functionality, allowing you to collaborate with others, making it easier to manage projects in a small setting that maybe up to 25 people can utilize.
- Sunsama, on the other hand, is a well-known application that has been in the market much longer than Motion. It has probably been one of the original daily planner applications. It does have some team functionality that allows others to collaborate on a project. It also has something called task consolidation, which allows you to bring all of your tasks from other applications that are project—or task-based into the same application, making life easier for managing it as a dashboard.
Interface & Usability
How do Motion and Sunsama compare for day-to-day use:
Sunsama
- Let's begin with Sunsama. The application allows you to manage your calendar and your tasks in one location. You can switch between a calendar view and a task management view, which is more of a Kanban-style upcoming week view, which is perfect for managing everything in one location in Sunsama.
- The primary focus is more mindfulness, allowing you to focus on not overloading your lists or your tasks for the day and focusing on those tasks at hand. They have a combination of features that allow you to do that by focusing on the task and trying not to overload yourself, like weekly objectives, focus mode, and guided planning, which helps you ritualize finishing your work day and starting your next one.
- This is different from the likes of Motion and in terms of interface and usability, Sunsama is approachable with a clean design but doesn't have a phenomenal mobile application, which is more of a reader-like experience
Motion
- On the other hand, Motion allows for a cleaner user interface. The calendar is the focus, and users can jump to projects and tasks. A few different views help organize projects within the team.
- Largely, the calendar is the main element of this with a sidebar, which allows you to organize your tasks for the day ahead as well as drag them into your calendar. Motion also has a booking system that allows you to send out links and this allows.
- Perfectly syncing with the AI is one of the better features inside of Motion, so it's well worth looking into how the interface utilizes artificial intelligence, like reorganizing your calendar and your tasks based on what the AI recommends based on your auto scheduling.
Daily Planning & Scheduling
Let's explore how these two compare when it comes to planning a day:
Motion
- Motion is a popular tool for daily planning. It allows you to schedule your week ahead using the calendar functions. Most importantly, it uses artificial intelligence to reorganize your tasks based on importance through auto-scheduling. This can be activated per task and is an excellent way to organize your tasks so they're more adaptive to the busy day ahead.
- For example, if something comes in that is much more important and the task is flexible or set to be scheduled, it will move that task around based on attributes like time of day, urgency, and other factors.
- This is a really helpful function that many people appreciate in Motion and utilize when planning their day. It's easy to switch between individual task mode and project management mode in Motion, which improves how you use the application to enhance your day-to-day productivity scheduling.
Sunsama
- Sunsama is a great tool for daily planning because it sets limitations for you. This addresses a common issue many people face: overloading their to-do list with too many tasks. Sunsama tackles this by setting a daily limitation and providing small indicators that notify you when you're overloading your to-do list.
- This function is seamlessly integrated into their scheduling, which is designed to help you plan your day effectively without overloading it. A standout feature is the "guided plan" instance, which encourages planning your day efficiently and not taking on too much.
- Additionally, there's a feature called "weekly objectives," which is quite beneficial. It allows you to zoom out from the immediate tasks at hand and focus on what you actually need to accomplish, allocating time per day in what seems to be a much faster way to plan your day ahead and even your entire week.
Team Project Management & Collaboration
For collaborating with others, how do Sunsama and Motion compare:
Motion
- Motion is equipped for project management within the application, allowing you to collaborate with others on projects through various views like Kanban and Table View. These features offer effective ways to organize your team, plan what's ahead, ensure everyone is focused on the same tasks, and assign responsibilities to team members.
- However, one of the major strengths of Motion is in the planning of your own time, especially when it comes to organizing teams. While you can assign tasks to others and collaborate on those tasks within the projects you've created, you also can organize your own day ahead.
- This aspect is particularly effective because many teams struggle to manage their own productivity, and Motion provides tools that help individuals focus on their personal time management as well as team-based project management.
Sunsama
- Sunsama does have some project management abilities, allowing you to assign tasks to other people within your existing Sunsama account, this is very much so because you can add people to different projects, which are essentially just organized areas for you and your team to collaborate.
- It isn't very complex in terms of what you can do with the wide variety of views compared with Motion. However, you do have the calendar and to-do view, which keep things simple. And, of course, with the task consolidation across multiple accounts, it is a much better way to bring tasks from other applications into the system and begin to assign them to other people as well so that the context is continued.
Pricing & Plans
What is in it with pricing, what are the limits and pricing realms:
Motion
Sunsama
Which To Pick: Sunsama or Motion?
Let's help you pick the one that matters most to you:
- Choosing between these two options, Motion and Sunsama, is an interesting one. I would probably typically recommend Sunsama more for those who are looking for more guided planning, task consolidation, and a daily plan-like application.
- While project management has some abilities, I wouldn't typically recommend it above Motion. However, Sunsama is a really good alternative if you're looking for something that's much more mindful, much more focused, and more of a generalized application with a little bit of AI sprinkled in there.
- Whereas Motion is probably better if you are on board with artificial intelligence, happy for it to reprioritize your task list, and also open to adding more people along the line in terms of other people you want to collaborate with. There are some good AI abilities; views are great, and it does have some project management systems too.