At Reclaim, we’re big fans of Clockwise and what they’ve built. The “AI calendar assistant” space is on the forefront of innovation and companies are eager to solve their time management problems. 

And we get asked nearly every day “So what’s the difference between Reclaim and Clockwise?” and “Is Reclaim a Clockwise alternative?”. For a quick comparison, you can check out Clockwise vs. Reclaim page for a line-by-line feature review. But for a deeper look into the core differences between how we schedule, we’ve got you covered here.

What is Clockwise?

Clockwise is a smart calendar assistant that schedules blocks of uninterrupted time in your calendar for focus work. At a very high level, perhaps the best way to put it is that — from our perspective — Clockwise was built for people who can block out their entire calendar (or most of it) for heads-down work without worrying about balancing meetings and other commitments. This doesn’t apply to the vast majority of managers across every role, and it increasingly doesn’t apply to even the “makers” who are finding themselves getting dragged into meetings every day.

What is Reclaim?

Reclaim is an AI calendar assistant that uses flexible time blocking to find the best time for your meetings, tasks, habits, and breaks around your existing schedule. Reclaim was built for people who have calendars that are slammed with 50+% of their calendar being taken up by meetings and/or task work. If you’re constantly interrupted and context switching from one thing to another throughout the day, Reclaim is for you. Again, many of the people who have this problem tend to be in management positions, but it’s also very common among busy individual contributors (ICs) too.

Both Clockwise and Reclaim have similar goals – to help you maximize your time every week. But fundamentally, we have very different philosophies on how to get there. Let’s take a look at which one is best for your team's scheduling  needs.

TL;DR: Reclaim vs. Clockwise

1. Time blocking

Clockwise: Blocks generic “Focus Time” events as either entirely “free” or “busy”, which makes your calendar either totally open to interruptions, or completely blocked off.

Reclaim: Blocks time for each of your tasks, routines, meetings, and even breaks in flexible time holds that automatically lock into place as your schedule fills up. This allows you to maximize availability for meetings, while defending your time for the things you need to get done. 

2. Tasks & routines

Clockwise: Uses ‘holds’ for tasks or routines or generic ‘Focus Time’ blocks to reserve time on your calendar, but lacks context around what you’re working on – making your events more interruptible by others.

Reclaim: Allows you to personalize your time blocks with dedicated features for Tasks and recurring Habits, so schedulers and your team have insight into your priorities and are less likely to disrupt your working sessions.

3. Prioritized scheduling

Clockwise: Does not support prioritization or tradeoffs on time blocks.

Reclaim: Offers the ability to set the priority level of any event on your calendar to automatically make tradeoffs around what’s most important, hit your deadlines, and maximize availability for important meetings. And when conflicts come up, Reclaim completely reshuffles your schedule around your highest priority items.

4. Integrations

Clockwise: Integrates with Google Calendar with a cool Chrome extension, and Asana. The Slack integration allows you to view your agenda and sync your Slack status to your calendar.

Reclaim: Integrates with Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Tasks, Jira, ClickUp, Todoist, Linear, Asana, as well as Zoom and Google Meet. An advanced Slack integration allows you to manage your agenda, create Tasks from Slack messages, check off todos, start and stop events, join meetings, share Scheduling Links, and sync your Slack status to your calendar.

5. Support for synced calendars

Clockwise: Supports one-way basic personal calendar sync to your work calendar to block off personal events as “busy” blocks.

Reclaim: Allows you to sync unlimited calendars in multiple directions, and merge availability across all of them to give schedulers a true picture of your availability

6. Calendar privacy options

Clockwise: Events are either completely private and simply marked as ‘Busy’ blocks or completely public, giving you no real options to share context without sacrificing privacy.

Reclaim: Provides visibility options to customize how your synced events and time blocks appear to others, with advanced options for privacy controls such as “Personal Commitment” time blocks that communicate additional context around your time while keeping private events, private.

7. Priority Scheduling Links

Clockwise: Availability on booking links shows only empty time slots around other scheduled events.

Reclaim: Offers maximum availability with custom prioritized Scheduling Links that show lower-priority events as available times, and auto-reschedules events to accommodate your most important meetings.

8. Pricing & free tier

Clockwise: Limited core features in free tier usage, making it hard to try out across the team without purchasing.

Reclaim: Offers a robust free forever tier which includes 1 Calendar Sync, 3 Habits, unlimited Task scheduling with limited customization, 1 Smart Meeting and 1 Scheduling Link, plus full integration with Slack, Zoom, Google Meet, and Google Tasks.

9. Time blocking for teams

Clockwise: Supports “no meetings day” and can move around only internal meetings you mark as ‘flexible’, which reschedule once a day..

Reclaim: Supports "No-Meeting days" and offers Smart Meetings enabling your team to automatically schedule meetings at the best time for everyone on the invite (internal and external) , while also making intelligent decisions about other priorities throughout the day.
‍

1. Reclaim was built for people who need flexibility

If you’re the kind of person who is constantly fighting for every scrap of time you can find on your calendar, you’ve probably tried blocking time for your priorities and heads-down work. You’ve also likely run into a variety of challenges around time blocking: it’s too time-consuming, too manual, and ultimately results in you spending a large percentage of your workweek just trying to keep your calendar in check.

Yet there’s another challenge that emerges when we think about time blocking, particularly if you’re someone who needs to stay available to meet with your team and other colleagues: flexibility. 

Let’s take a practical example: it’s Sunday night, and you’re getting prepped for the week ahead. You see a few hours of open slots on your calendar, so you decide to block them out to get some work done. Monday morning rolls around, and you wake up to a deluge of email and Slack messages – many of which are from coworkers who looked at your calendar, hoping to meet with you that week, and couldn’t find any time slots available. “Your calendar looks nuts!” they say, prepping you for the negotiation ahead. “It looks like you’ve got a few hours blocked out here. Can I take 30m to sync up?”

And herein lies the problem with time blocking methods and tools: they don’t give you a sufficient balance between collaboration time and focus time, which in turn leads to you spending even more time trying to wrangle schedule negotiations like the example above. 

Because your schedule is changing all the time, and because you don’t have the luxury of blocking out your entire workweek to just go heads down, you have to maintain some flex in your schedule in order to make time blocking effective.

When we first started building Reclaim, we took this example very much to heart, having lived the experience for years as overwhelmed middle managers in a fast-growing company with too many meetings. We realized that we could build software that could make the calendar smart enough to know when to “lock things down” and defend your time, or when to “keep things flexible” and preserve some free time for people to meet with you. Not only is it a more intelligent way to block time, it’s also just much more realistic: let’s not pretend you’re going to have zero hours of meetings every week, or that your role doesn’t rely on collaborating with your coworkers.

You can see this experience most prominently in how we built Tasks and Habits. With Tasks, for example, you tell Reclaim when something is due and how much time you need. Reclaim automatically finds time for your focus work on your calendar before the due date, even allowing you to break up larger projects into manageable task blocks 

But here’s where it gets interesting: Reclaim runs millions of simulations daily against the calendar, and looks ahead to try and predict how many other possible options you might have to get that work done before it’s due. If the answer is “lots of options”, then Reclaim tentatively schedules the event but marks it as ‘free; time, which means that it isn’t visible to your coworkers and can still be booked over if someone needs to meet with you.

Conversely, if the answer is “you’re running out of time”, Reclaim locks the event down and marks it as ‘busy’, adding a description to the event that communicates context to others viewing your calendar:

Additionally, Reclaim allows you to set AI Priorities for all the events on your calendar, including Tasks, so you can identify what items are most important and automatically make tradeoffs around lower-priority events in busy weeks. 

Clockwise is a better fit for people who don’t need that level of flexibility in their workweek, and who can be reasonably confident that they won’t have a lot of inbound requests for their time. This is because, unlike Reclaim, Clockwise blocks “Focus Time” as either entirely free or entirely busy. That means that either your blocked times are totally invisible to schedulers – which doesn’t help you much in defending your time – or they’re completely visible, which means you’re back to manually negotiating for your time.

While it’s useful to have software block out your time automatically, it’s less useful if it doesn’t address a core challenge that’s prevented you from being successful at it in the first place. Reclaim takes advantage of a little-used feature in Google Calendar – the concept of “free” and “busy” events – and uses automation to manage those states in a way that gives you optimal balance between heads-down work and collaboration time.

2. Reclaim makes your calendar intentional

Another core issue that we heard from users in the early days of building Reclaim was that their time blocks were simply too interruptible. “I do block out time to focus,” they’d say, “But it doesn’t help, because people just book over it.”

Mike Monteiro, the co-founder of Mule Design, put this brilliantly in a post he wrote back in 2013: 

People rarely schedule working time. And when they do it’s viewed as second-tier time. It’s interruptible. Meetings trump working time. Why?

One thing we’ve found, time and time again, is that context matters when it comes to your calendar. A block of time that simply says “Focus Time” or -- even less helpfully -- “busy”, is inherently less useful to would-be schedulers than an event that has a named purpose and intention. In other words, if someone looks at your calendar and sees a block of time for four hours that simply says “busy”, they’re very likely to ping you on Slack and say “Are you really busy at that time, or can you meet?”

This, like flexibility in your schedule, creates even more pain. Rather than using your calendar as an external record of your priorities, which gives signals to people about whether or not they can ask for your time, it turns your calendar into a meaningless space where schedulers can’t determine if one “busy” block is more important than the other. That means more time negotiating, more time adjusting events, and less time for the good stuff.

When we built Reclaim, we felt it was critical to have a strong opinion about time blocks as intentional spaces. We didn’t want to recreate the problem that we knew all too well, and we really believed (and continue to believe) that a great calendar should be a reflection of your truest priorities. For that reason, features like Habits and Tasks purposefully push you to name your objectives and routines and to make specific choices about the relative importance of them. 

This, combined with the more flexible approach to time blocking that Reclaim takes, gives you a really powerful way to broadcast your true availability -- without the manual work. Beyond that, making your calendar intentional means that you get a roadmap for your day and week that you can follow, which is essential for staying focused. 

Again, Clockwise here is great if you don’t have a lot of fears about being interrupted or your calendar being run over by would-be schedulers. By filling up your calendar with blocks of time that either say “Focus Time” or just “busy”, you’re still in the situation where people feel empowered to interrupt your heads-down work.

If you’re someone who wants to get ahead of interruptions and schedule negotiations, it’s critical to make your time blocks intentional instead of generic. Reclaim was built with this philosophy in mind, and we believe strongly that as the future of work evolves, the calendar will need to become a more accurate representation of your priorities. 

3. Reclaim lets you make tradeoffs about your schedule

Speaking of priorities, let’s talk about how they affect time blocking. Instinctively, we know that not all the tasks on our to-do list, or even the meetings on your calendar, are urgent and that some are inherently more important than others. Regardless of what time management methodology you adhere to, you inevitably have to make decisions about where you’ll spend your time, and to do that you have to push work off that is lower-priority.

We apply this kind of scrutiny to our backlog, but it never seems to translate to our schedules. It’s almost as if our to-do list is the “real” record of what we want to do with our time, but the thing that determines where our time actually goes (the calendar) often ends up being an obstacle course that we have to complete in order to get to the stuff we actually need to work on.

In order to manage your schedule effectively, you have to have some ability to frontload the work that is more important and push off the stuff that is less so. But doing this kind of “calendar surgery” comes with a lot of challenges: often, when you want to make even a small adjustment to the priorities of events on your calendar, it requires you to think through some tough bin packing problems manually.

Unlike Clockwise, Reclaim lets you set the priority level for everything on your calendar (including non-Reclaim created events to open up more time for important meetings) – taking care of the hard scheduling math for you. 

You simply tag each event with one of four priority levels from Low-Critical, depending on how aggressively you want to defend the event on your calendar. Reclaim will automatically reshuffle your schedule to ensure your limited time and energy are dedicated where they matter most. 

Reclaim uses AI to build out your schedule around the priorities you’ve set for your events, and also takes into consideration other details like upcoming deadlines for Tasks and your team’s availability for meetings. Like having an assistant that actually understands what matters to you, Reclaim can then make tradeoffs on your behalf so you can spend less time messing with your calendar and more time doing, well, anything else. 

While Clockwise blocks out time for you to work, it doesn’t have the insight to know if one “Focus Time” block is more important than another, or what items you’d be happy to reschedule to fit another important event in. That makes it much harder to make tradeoffs around your time, both in terms of moving particular time blocks up in scheduling priority as well as deprioritizing non-essential work to make more time for other priorities.We believe strongly that your calendar has to be a reflection of your priorities. To do that, you need a system that actually understands what those priorities are.

4. Reclaim meets you in more places where you already work

We didn’t build Reclaim with the intention of building a better calendar app. Talking with hundreds of early users, it wasn’t clear that the calendar itself was broken, it was just missing a lot of context, intelligence, and automation. Calendars are pretty decent at doing what they do: creating, visualizing, editing, and deleting events. What they lack is any sense of what matters to you, which is why they can’t offer you more powerful controls for managing your workweek.

To that end, we started Reclaim with the goal of stretching the existing calendar as far as we could take it. We wanted to meet people where they already worked, and not force them to adopt an entirely new platform in order to get control over their schedule.

In addition to integrating with Google Calendar, we built robust integrations with Slack, Zoom, ClickUp, Asana, Jira, Todoist, Linear, and Google Tasks. We wanted to make it possible for users to manage Reclaim events and make changes to their tasks and routines from anywhere, even if that meant they spent less time interacting with our own UI. With our Google Tasks integration, we enabled users to create new to-dos directly alongside their calendars that would automatically sync with Reclaim to block time out as smart Tasks. Our project management integrations allow you to automatically sync your task list to your calendar so you can make time to work on your projects before deadlines come up. With Slack, we went even further.

Reclaim’s Slack integration isn’t just a background tool that you can use to view your agenda and update your status (although we do that too). It’s a hub for you to create Tasks from Slack messages, join your upcoming meetings, make decisions about when to start your Habits and Tasks, share your availability with Scheduling Links, as well as get deep control over how your week is structured. Again, this theme of intentionality and flexibility are embedded in how we built our integration: we recognize that stuff changes, and we want you to have maximum control over what kinds of things you decide to prioritize during the day.

Clockwise’s Slack integration provides an agenda view as well as a feature that automatically syncs your Slack status with your calendar events. But again, it lacks some of that control you’d find in Reclaim’s Slack integration: particularly around actually managing your schedule via Slack. Even where Reclaim and Clockwise have features in common, we’ve taken some very different approaches. For example, Clockwise will let you set Do Not Disturb based on “meetings” and “Focus Time”, but doesn’t offer any other customization beyond that. 

While it’s useful to be able to let people know when you’re in a meeting or heads down on work, it doesn’t cover the reality of your world. What if you want to really make sure you don’t get interrupted during family time? Or, what if you want to communicate Do Not Disturb for your one-on-ones, but no other meetings?

Reclaim gives you a lot more control here, and allows you to communicate the context of what you’re working on with as little or as much detail as you’d like:

In fairness, Clockwise does offer a pretty awesome Chrome extension that plugs into your calendar and sits alongside it – but the central challenge with that approach is that it really doesn’t work for mobile use cases. The reason we built Reclaim to integrate natively with the calendar without having to add another app was because we wanted you to be able to get control over your calendar without having to worry about what channel you’re operating from. And, if you do want to use Reclaim without leaving Google Calendar, you can install the free Google add-on to manage your smart events right from the sidebar.

5. Reclaim offers more coverage for syncing your calendars

The first feature we ever built and launched was Calendar Sync. Calendar Sync solves that age-old problem where events from other calendars never show as blocked on your work calendar, which means you get overbooked for a meeting during a doctor’s appointment.

In the beginning, Calendar Sync was simple: it let you sync one calendar to another, and specifically focused on syncing your personal calendar to your work one to make sure you don’t get double booked. As more and more use cases emerged, we evolved the feature to support much more complex setups that we were seeing in our users’ environments. 

For example, we found that a lot of people not only wanted their personal calendars to sync to their work calendars, but that they also wanted to sync back their work schedule to their personal calendars so that their family knew when they had work commitments. Similarly, we found that there were people who had more than just one additional calendar – shared family calendars, different client calendars, side gig calendars, school calendars – all of which were disconnected from one another. 

This prompted us to take a platform approach, where we rebuilt Calendar Sync from the ground up to support a broader array of use cases and setups. Today, users can sync as many calendars as they want in as many directions as they want, giving them true merged availability across all their schedules:

Clockwise has a calendar sync feature, but it’s still limited to the original use case we targeted: personal to work. 

Beyond that, Clockwise doesn’t support syncing any other calendars to your work calendar. No shared calendars, no syncing in multiple directions, and no multiple accounts. That gives you some simple controls to keep your personal calendar defended on your work calendar, but it doesn’t cover the multitude of other calendars that you’re still struggling to balance.

6. Reclaim gives you more options for controlling your privacy

As we’ve mentioned several times now, context matters. But there’s a tension between offering context and preserving your privacy. On the one hand, exposing the details of your calendar to others is critical to keeping you from getting interrupted, but on the other hand, it can be anxiety-inducing to have your events on full display to your coworkers. Google Calendar doesn’t help this much. Google gives you two options: all or nothing. You can show everyone all the details of an event, or you can show them “Busy”.

Reclaim gives you nuance around these controls by offering privacy options that sit in-between “all details” and “just busy”. For example, if you sync your personal calendar to your work calendar using Reclaim, you can opt to show synced events to others in a variety of ways, including as “Personal Commitments”:

This is a seemingly simple thing, but it has powerful benefits. You can communicate to your coworkers that you’re busy for something personal — thereby giving them a sense of its interruptibility – without giving them all the details. Again, these kinds of features are what give you flexibility, and enable you to better defend your time.

Clockwise’s privacy settings are limited to marking synced events from your personal calendar as “Busy (via Clockwise)”. While your time gets blocked and your events get synced, you might find yourself still getting interrupted often and playing a lot of Calendar Tetris because your coworkers can’t see any context around your calendar events.

7. Reclaim lets you share max availability with Scheduling Links

We designed Reclaim Scheduling Links to take a smarter approach to managing your availability for important calls by tapping into the priorities on your calendar. Scheduling Links allow you to share your maximum availability for meetings with priority settings that offer up time slots over lower-priority events. Additionally, you can include multiple durations on a single link so others have options for how soon they can get in with you. Customize your links to create the perfect experience for your schedulers, create Round Robin links to distribute the meeting load, and use Team Scheduling Links to find the best time for group scheduling.

Clockwise’s links allow you to also share your booking availability but, like other solutions on the market, just show availability for meetings around your other scheduled events. While this works for simple use cases to get time on the calendar, it doesn’t solve the problem for busy people with packed schedules who might not have an open block for an important meeting until weeks out.

8.  Clockwise pricing makes it harder for teams to adopt

Reclaim and Clockwise offer similar pricing models per user/per month so that both individuals and teams can benefit, but there are some key differences that make it harder for teams to adopt at Clockwise. 

Reclaim’s pricing structure allows you to use all features on the free forever Lite plan with 1 Scheduling Link, 1 Smart Meeting, 3 Habits with 100+ templates, and 1 Calendar Sync. As you move up in plans at Reclaim, you can leverage more of the features you and your team’s need, like additional Scheduling Links, more Smart Meetings, or advanced Task integrations. 

Clockwise’s free plan is very restricted, with core features like focus time holds, flexible meetings, group scheduling links, and no-meeting days limited to exclusively paid plans. This makes it hard for teams to actually explore these solutions before committing to a subscription. 

By offering a transparent pricing model and a broad free tier, we think Reclaim gives you more opportunities to really see if it’s right for you before committing to a purchase.

‍

8. Both Reclaim and Clockwise block time for teams

Similar to Reclaim’s Tasks and Habits features, we also take the same approach to scheduling your recurring meetings at Reclaim – with flexibility based on you and your attendees’ actual availability. If you've felt like your team meetings and one-on-ones have evolved from maybe once a week to every single day, you're not going crazy. Before the pandemic, professionals only averaged 0.9 one-on-one meetings a week – as of October 2021, this average increased over 500% to 5.6 one-on-one meetings a week. This has been the major driver in the overall 69.7% increase in meetings since February 2020, and was clearly the place we needed to start in our journey to optimizing meetings for our users busy calendars.

So, we decided to build Smart Meetings which allow you to automatically schedule all your recurring meetings at the best time across all attendees calendars. Instead of locking in a rigid meeting time where ultimately 42% of one-on-ones gets rescheduled and 30% are canceled, Reclaim allows you to automatically find the best time for your one-on-ones, team meetings, and external meetings every time, and auto-reschedules for you when conflicts come up. You can even convert your existing meetings to Smart Meetings using your current meeting details as the ideal time, and it will auto-schedule within your working hours.

Clockwise also offers scheduling for teams through Flexible Meetings which allows their users to enable flexible scheduling for meetings they are open to moving around on their calendar. The goal behind Clockwise's Flexible Meetings is to try to group them together in meetings blocks to free up fragmented time in users calendars so they can block that off for Focus Time.

One the of limitations of Clockwise's Flexible Meetings is they are only available for internal meetings, where Reclaim works with internal and external meetings so you can keep up with clients, partners, and contractors, in addition to your team. Another challenge that we've heard from many users is that Clockwise's Flexible Meetings feature is a bit too aggressive – it doesn't let the other party opt in or get control over how the meetings get scheduled according to their preferences, and it can result in people burning out on the feature quickly.

Because we’ve built a system that is aware of priorities, keeps your schedule flexible, and thinks of time blocking as an intentional process, we have the power to think of meetings and projects in the same way that we think of other time blocks: they’re part of your prioritized plan, and we intend for them to fit neatly into the model we’ve already built around how we block time for you.

Clockwise vs. Reclaim: which should you choose?

This may seem like a silly question given the bias of this article’s author, but as we mentioned at the beginning, we do believe that we’re in the early innings of this space and there is a lot of room for different approaches. We’re believers in what we’ve created, and we think it better addresses the needs of people with busy calendars who need a lot of flexibility and intentionality in how they block time. 

But ultimately, it comes down to what fits you and your team’s workflow best. Try them both and decide for yourself! If you’re looking to switch from Clockwise to try out Reclaim – check out our switching providers discount to get 20% off for 6 months.