Is Akiflow better than Motion?

For gathering tasks from many apps and placing them yourself, yes. For a calendar that plans your tasks and replans when the day changes, Motion is better, but it costs more: US$29 a month for one person billed yearly, against US$19 for Akiflow.

Does Akiflow auto-schedule tasks like Motion?

No. Akiflow's Schedule Optimizer moves tasks only when you click it, keeps them in the same order on the same day, and doesn't work on phones. Motion places and reshuffles tasks on its own.

Which is cheaper, Akiflow or Motion?

Akiflow, for one person. It costs US$19 a month billed yearly or US$34 month to month, against Motion's US$29 and US$49. Over a year on yearly billing that's US$228 for Akiflow and US$348 for Motion.

Do Akiflow and Motion have a free plan?

No. Akiflow has a 7-day trial that asks for a card and starts your plan when it ends unless you cancel. Motion has a free trial, and it says purchases are non-refundable.

Can you use Akiflow and Motion together?

Not easily. Motion's own help centre says the two can't be connected through Zapier, so you'd copy tasks between them by hand.

Do Akiflow and Motion work with iCloud Calendar?

Yes, both connect iCloud calendars. Only Akiflow can put tasks on iCloud, once you lock a task to an iCloud calendar. Motion sends tasks to Google and Outlook calendars only.

Akiflow vs Motion in 2026: prices and who plans your day

Which one to pick

Akiflow vs Motion comes down to who decides when a task happens. Pick Motion if you have more tasks than hours and want the app to fit them around your meetings, then rebuild the plan each time something moves. Pick Akiflow if your tasks come from a dozen places and you'd rather choose every hour yourself.

Both put your tasks next to your calendar in one window. Neither has a free plan, so you pay once the trial ends. For one person, Akiflow is cheaper: US$19 a month on yearly billing against US$29 for Motion, or US$34 against US$49 if you pay month to month.

Find your row:

If you	Pick	Why
Have more to do than hours to do it	Motion	It places tasks and replans
Get tasks by email, Slack and other apps	Akiflow	One inbox pulls them in
Hate rebuilding the day after a late meeting	Motion	It reshuffles on its own
Want nothing to move without you	Akiflow	Its optimizer runs only on a click
Pay for one person and watch the cost	Akiflow	US$228 a year against US$348
Plan projects with other people	Motion	Projects, docs and team seats

How we compared them

Every fact here comes from Akiflow's and Motion's own websites and help centres, read on 31 October 2026. We didn't run a hands-on trial of either app, and there are no star ratings here. Prices are US dollar list prices before tax, as of October 2026.

Then we asked each app what you'd ask before paying for a planner to run an ordinary week at work and at home:

What does one person pay, and what happens when the trial ends?
Who puts a task on the calendar: you or the app?
What happens when a meeting runs long?
Which calendars and devices does it work with?
Where does it let you down?

Akiflow: best for gathering tasks and placing them yourself

Akiflow starts from an inbox. Its features page says the Universal Inbox imports tasks from more than 3,000 tools. Slack and Gmail head its integrations page, and Todoist and Trello are on it too. The email you need to act on and the Slack message you can't answer yet land in one list.

Typing is fast. Press Cmd+E on a Mac or Ctrl+E on Windows to open the command bar from anywhere. Write "Call John today at 3pm for 1 hour" and the task lands at 15:00 with an hour blocked. Daily goals ask you for the two or three tasks that matter most today.

Then you place the work. Akiflow's guide for people leaving Motion tells you to drag tasks onto your calendar instead of letting AI decide when you work on them. Time Slots hold time for one kind of work, a deep work morning say, and you plan tasks into them.

Four rituals turn this into a habit. A planning ritual opens each day and each week, and a shutdown closes it, where you rate the day and write a short reflection. You also get a Focus Timer, a booking link for your free time and stats that track your Inbox Zero streak. The features page lists an Apple Watch app and offline use.

Pick it if your trouble is scattered tasks and you like deciding the shape of your day. Skip it if you want an app to plan the week for you, because Akiflow hands that job back to you every morning. Pro costs US$19 a month billed yearly or US$34 month to month. The 7-day trial asks for a card, and the plan you picked starts when it ends unless you cancel.

Motion: best for a calendar that plans and replans itself

Motion starts from the calendar. You add a task with its length and deadline, and Motion picks the slot. Its auto-scheduling guide says it weighs your free time against each task's length and due date, puts higher priorities first, and moves things when a new event lands.

Motion earns its price when the day breaks. Motion's AI calendar page says that when a meeting runs long, it reshuffles your day and your week. It also flags when you've scheduled more than you can handle. Turn on chunking and a two-hour job gets done in 30-minute pieces. Mark a task ASAP and it jumps the queue.

It has grown into a work suite too. Motion's pricing page lists AI chat and AI docs on even the cheapest plan, beside projects, phone apps and unlimited storage.

Pick it if your days fall apart because no plan survives the first late meeting. Skip it if you're on a tight budget or you like choosing your own time blocks. For one person it's the pricier of the two, at US$29 a month billed yearly or US$49 month to month. Its cancellation page says purchases are non-refundable.

Side by side

	Akiflow	Motion
Main job	Gathers tasks, and you place them	Places tasks and replans the day
Yearly billing, one person	US$19 a month	US$29 a month
Month to month	US$34	US$49
Free plan	None, but a 7-day trial with a card	None, but a free trial
Calendars	Google, Outlook, iCloud	Google, Outlook, iCloud
Tasks on iCloud	Yes, once you lock them to a calendar	No, only Google and Outlook
Apps	Mac, Windows, web, iPhone, Android	The same five
Apple Watch	Yes	Not on its download page
AI	Aki, marked beta	Chat and planner, paid in monthly credits
Team extras	Team calendars	Projects, plus Gantt on Business AI

Who moves your tasks when the day changes

Motion moves tasks by default. Its best practices page calls auto-scheduling the normal mode for most tasks. It asks you to pin tasks to a time sparingly, since every pinned task leaves the planner less room.

It also wants honest lengths. A task left at the default 30 minutes gets 30 minutes, even when it takes two hours. A deadline you mark hard is kept at any cost: if your 9 to 5 is full, Motion books the task after hours, at 6 PM in its own example.

Akiflow's own helper, the Schedule Optimizer, came out this summer, and it does much less. Drag or stretch a task so it overlaps the next one and an Optimize schedule button appears. Click it and the tasks below shift down in the same order. Ignore it and the button goes away after a few seconds. ASAP puts one task into the first free slot today. Both come with an Undo.

Its help page lists what the optimizer won't do. Nothing happens until you click, and a long task stays in one piece. It ignores priority and deadlines, never pushes a task into tomorrow and leaves meetings and Time Slots alone. On phones you won't find it at all.

Motion saves you the replanning, if you feed it good inputs. Akiflow leaves you in charge, and the price is a few minutes each morning. Happy dragging blocks around yourself? Then look at the best time blocking apps before you pay for Motion.

Planning the same day in each

Take one Wednesday. You have a dentist at 10:00 and a team meeting from 13:00 to 14:00. Five jobs need a slot: a two-hour essay draft due Friday, a passport renewal form due today, 45 minutes of Spanish, a car service to book and an email to your landlord about the boiler.

In Motion, you add the five jobs with a length and a deadline on each, and it fills the open time around the dentist and the meeting. With chunking on, the two-hour essay goes in as an hour at 11:00 and another at 14:00. Then the meeting runs until 14:45 and the whole afternoon reshuffles while you're still in the room, which leaves no free half hour for the passport form. You marked its deadline hard. Motion puts it at 17:30, after your working day, rather than miss it.

In Akiflow, the landlord's email is already a task, because you turned it into one from Gmail last night. Daily Planning puts yesterday's leftovers next to today's calendar. You drag the essay to 14:00, the form to 16:00 and Spanish to 19:30. The meeting runs until 14:45. You drag the essay to 14:45 yourself, where it overlaps the form, so the Optimize schedule button appears. One click moves the form to 16:45. The car service doesn't fit anywhere today, and you push it to Thursday by hand.

Motion's version took more typing in the morning. Akiflow's took two drags and a click at 14:45.

Want something between the two? In ActivityTracker, press Plan my day and your dated tasks go into the gaps between your Google Calendar events, inside your work hours, with long ones split. Switch on Block my Google Calendar and those blocks show on Google as busy.

See how calendar sync works

What a year costs

Twelve months at list price, for one person unless the row says otherwise:

Plan	Billed yearly	Billed monthly
Akiflow Pro	US$228	US$408
Student price on Akiflow Pro	US$136.80	Yearly only
With Akiflow's meeting add-on	US$456	US$636
Motion Pro AI	US$348	US$588
Motion Business AI	US$468	US$828
A Pro AI seat bought for a team	US$228	US$348

For one person, Akiflow saves you US$120 a year on yearly billing and US$180 if you pay monthly. Akiflow's pricing page puts its yearly saving at 44%, and Motion's says 33%. Either way the yearly plan takes the whole year's money at once.

Akiflow has one plan, Pro, with Aki included. The meeting add-on records and transcribes your meetings and writes the summary, for US$19 a month more. Students and researchers who verify an academic email get 40% off the yearly plan for life, Akiflow's pricing FAQ says. Some countries see a lower local price at checkout.

Motion charges teams less per head. Bought for a team, Pro AI costs US$19 a seat each month on yearly billing, the same as Akiflow costs one person, and every seat comes with 7,500 AI credits a month. Business AI doubles the credits and adds Gantt charts and time tracking. A one-person week rarely needs either.

Calendars and phones

Both connect to Google and Outlook calendars, and to iCloud. The difference shows when you look at your tasks from another app.

Motion's calendar syncing FAQ says Motion tasks reach Google and Outlook calendars, never iCloud. New iCloud events can take up to 10 minutes to show in Motion. Its supported providers page adds that tasks appear on your other calendars for visibility only, so you edit them inside Motion. An Exchange server your employer runs in-house isn't supported.

Akiflow keeps a task inside Akiflow until you lock it to a calendar. Its iCloud guide says a locked task becomes a real event on a calendar you can edit, iCloud included, and events sync both ways. You connect iCloud with an app-specific password made in your Apple Account.

Both have iPhone and Android apps, and both run on Mac and Windows or in a browser. Akiflow's download page wants the desktop app installed before the phone one. Motion's mobile app guide calls its phone app a companion to the desktop app, and on iPhone you can add tasks through Siri.

Akiflow also has an Apple Watch app, and Motion's download page lists none. Akiflow's Watch guide needs watchOS 10 or later and a paired iPhone. A task you dictate or type on the Watch goes to your inbox exactly as written, because the Watch doesn't read dates from it. Still choosing the calendar underneath? Start with the best calendar apps for iPhone.

The AI in each

In Motion, the AI is the planner, and scheduling runs in the background all day. The chat and docs sit on top, paid for from a monthly allowance of AI credits on each plan.

Akiflow's AI is Aki, marked beta on the features page and included in Pro. You ask, it acts. Tell it to clear your afternoon and push anything that isn't urgent to tomorrow, and it moves the tasks. Until you ask, Aki leaves your calendar alone, says Akiflow's switching guide.

If the AI is why you're buying, push it hard during the trial. Aki is still in beta, and Motion's AI runs on that monthly allowance. Buy for the part you'll use every day.

Using both, or switching

Don't plan on running both. Motion's integrations FAQ says Akiflow and Motion can't be connected through Zapier, so you'd copy tasks by hand. Email is one way into Motion from anywhere: forward the message to tasks@usemotion.com from an address on your account, with nobody else on it, and it becomes a task.

Switching is easier. Akiflow's switching guide maps Motion's workspaces to folders and its labels to tags, and swaps auto-scheduling for time blocking. Deadlines become due dates with a priority from Urgent to Low. Time Slots stand in for the time Motion protects for you. Moving the other way, give every task a length and a deadline as you bring it in, because that's what Motion plans from.

Before you delete anything in Motion, know that its FAQ says deleted tasks and projects are gone for good, and that the app comes in English only. Keep your notes in Notion? Read Notion vs Motion before you pay for Motion's docs as well.

Test both in one week

Akiflow's trial is 7 days, so run both trials in the same week:

Monday, enter the same ten tasks in both apps, each with a length and a deadline, and connect the same calendar.
Tuesday, follow Motion's plan without touching it. Count how often you start a task without having to decide first.
Wednesday, plan by hand in Akiflow's Daily Planning, and time it.
Thursday, move one meeting and add an urgent job. Note how long each app takes to give you a workable afternoon.
Friday, count what each app left undone, and how many tasks moved more than twice.
Sunday, decide before Akiflow's trial turns into a charge. A weekly reflection template gives you the questions.

Neither one feels right? Read Akiflow vs Sunsama before you start a third trial.

Made-up example: Mei shelves books at a library three days a week and has one term left of a part-time master's. She's also redoing her bathroom, so emails from the tiler arrive at all hours.

In her Motion week, her library shifts change twice. Both times Motion moves her reading without being asked, and she likes that a lot. On Thursday the tile order is due with no gap left, and because she marked that deadline hard, Motion books it for 18:00, half an hour after her shift ends.

Her Akiflow week starts with the tiler's emails turned into tasks, and she drags them into a Time Slot on Friday, her day off. Daily Planning takes her eight minutes, and she clicks Optimize schedule once, on Tuesday.

She liked the Motion week better. At US$348 a year against US$228, she picks Akiflow and plans her evenings by hand.