As someone who lives and dies by their calendar, I'm always looking for new ways to make managing my schedule easier. Recently, that's meant experimenting with more AI-powered tools, including AI scheduling apps. 

SkedPal and Motion are two AI apps designed to optimize your schedule. But how do they stack up against each other in practice? Here's what I discovered when I tested Skedpal and Motion.

• Both apps have a steep learning curve

• SkedPal offers more advanced features for optimizing your schedule and prioritizing tasks

• Motion is a better all-in-one solution for teams

• Both apps have a mobile app, but they're glitchy 

• Both apps integrate with Zapier

SkedPal vs. Motion at a glance 

If you're looking for the short version, here are the highlights of how they stack up (keep scrolling for a more detailed breakdown): 

• SkedPal: Best for individual users who prefer a simpler user interface and don't mind diving deep into the weeds during setup. 

• Motion: Best for overall aesthetics and team-based functionality. 

Both apps have a steep learning curve 

SkedPal and Motion market themselves as an easy way to automate your scheduling. This might be true—but in my experience, you have to first get over the very large hurdle of learning how to use each app to achieve this hands-off scheduling bliss. 

Sure, both apps take you through an onboarding process, but I still had to dig through their knowledge bases, watch demo videos from power users, and crawl Reddit threads to actually get the hang of each app.

After a lot of trial and error, here's what my schedule looked like in SkedPal:

And here's what it looked like in Motion: 

Search as I might, though, there were no resources to help me explain or troubleshoot a handful of frustrating app behaviors. For example, when I manually tagged Motion tasks to show me as Busy in my calendar, the app's auto-scheduler would override it whenever I refreshed the page. SkedPal, for its part, has its own set of quirks. And both SkedPal and Motion randomly split four-hour tasks into 30-minute time blocks. 

That's all to say: if you're new to AI scheduling like I am, expect some frustration from both apps when you're getting started.

SkedPal offers more advanced features for optimizing your schedule and prioritizing tasks 

When it comes to optimizing your schedule, SkedPal wins by a mile. But it's a double-edged sword: its customization options were overwhelming, even for a scheduling nerd like me. 

Zones and Budgets 

Zones in SkedPal help you visualize where you're spending your time so you can better budget it. You might create Zones for deep work, administrative tasks, or meetings. From there, you can use Budgets to dictate the maximum number of hours per day and week you spend in each Zone. 

Motion doesn't offer anything comparable. 

Automated task prioritization

SkedPal's task prioritization is unique in that it lets you drag and drop your tasks into different priority columns on a Kanban board, all of which are customizable. Then it automatically prioritizes the tasks based on their relative position on the board and within their column. For example, all tasks in a High priority column will have higher priority than tasks in the Low priority column. And tasks at the top of the High priority column will have priority over tasks at the bottom. 

In comparison, Motion limits you to a standard set of priorities, from ASAP to Low, which determines how early the task will appear on your calendar. But you can set if the task has a soft or hard deadline, letting the engine be more strict or lenient as the date approaches. 

Task inheritance

SkedPal lets you group tasks together, which means they'll automatically share customized settings like task timing and tags. For example, let's say all your household chores are tagged as Flexible, Low-priority, and only to be done on weekends. When you add new tasks to your household chores, SkedPal will automatically apply the same settings. 

You can templatize tasks and projects in Motion (more on that in a bit), but it's not quite the same as SkedPal's.

To-do list views

This isn't necessarily a customization, but I like that SkedPal offers a view that displays your daily tasks and events as a checklist. It's another way to visualize your schedule. But more importantly, it gives me a little rush every time I check something off my list. 

Motion is a better all-in-one solution for teams

Motion doesn't claim to be exclusively for teams, but based on the sheer number of times they asked if I have a team (I signed up as an individual) and the sneak peeks of team features scattered throughout the app, it seems that's the audience they're pushing for. 

There's a good reason for this, though. Motion offers more features that are better suited for teams than SkedPal does—from project management to templates to booking pages.

Project management

Motion is better described as an AI calendar mixed into a solid project management app. You can create multiple workspaces for different projects, sort and filter tasks, and view them in a list, in your calendar, or on a Kanban board. 

It's worth mentioning that if you're looking for a more robust project management solution that automatically tracks burndown charts and the like, Motion's not for you. 

Project templates

You can turn projects and their associated tasks into templates that anyone on your team can use. I see this working well for, say, a marketing agency or small team that works on projects with a lot of the same tasks. 

Booking pages

Motion's booking pages are pretty slick. They operate a lot like those from my tried-and-true booking app, Calendly. Set your availability, limit the number of events that can be booked in a day, and add a pre-booking questionnaire. And when you share your meeting availability via email, Motion will automatically generate a bulleted list of your preferred meeting times. 

Note: you can't personalize your booking page with a profile photo or your company logo. And there's no option to add a personalized message to your booking page. So if you want to, say, let a prospect know you're excited to meet, you'll have to send them a separate email. 

SkedPal doesn't have booking pages at all, so if that's important for your scheduling app, it makes your choice a lot easier.

Both apps have a mobile app, but they're glitchy

I'm constantly on the move, so the ability to manage my schedule from a mobile app is non-negotiable. While SkedPal and Motion have mobile apps, there are a lot of limitations that make them much less valuable.

For example, Motion's mobile app displays only a few tasks at a time, and there's generally a lot of scrolling involved. You also can't create or edit booking links through the mobile app. On SkedPal's mobile app, you can't adjust your settings, priorities, or TimeMaps, and there's no way to contact support or access their knowledge base directly through the app. 

And in both mobile apps, you can view only one day at a time, which is difficult if you want to know what else is on your plate for the week or month ahead. Plus, both apps require you to first set up your schedule in their web app.

Both apps integrate with Zapier

Scheduling is best when it takes less time to plan your day than it does to actually get through your daily to-dos. While SkedPal and Motion don't offer much in terms of native integrations, they both connect to Zapier, which instantly expands your app integrations to the thousands. 

Automate SkedPal 

When you connect SkedPal to Zapier, you can take the manual work out of your scheduling-related tasks. Here are a few automated workflows to get you started. 

Automate Motion 

You can also connect Motion to Zapier to automate your tasks, so you can do things like turn Salesforce records and Slack messages into a Motion task. Learn more about how to automate Motion, or try one of these workflows to get started. 

SkedPal vs. Motion: Which is best for you?

The world of AI scheduling apps is still new territory, which is exciting, but it also means that there are still plenty of kinks to work out. They're both great apps—Motion is on Zapier's list of the best meeting schedulers and the best AI scheduling assistants, and SkedPal is on the list of the best time blocking apps.

But for me, neither app hit the mark. Perhaps I'm too particular about my scheduling workflows. Or I lack the patience to train a tool to do what my brain does naturally. But if you're more flexible about your scheduling or you struggle to prioritize tasks, either of these apps might work for you. 

• Choose SkedPal if you're an individual user and want to take the guesswork out of which tasks you should prioritize first. 

• Choose Motion if you work with a team and you want to combine your calendar app with your booking app. 

And since SkedPal and Motion offer free trials, you've got nothing to lose by testing them both out. 

Related reading: 

• The best calendar apps

• To-do list ideas to help you get more done

• Daily scheduling methods to bring more focus to your day

• To-do list apps that actually work with ADHD