If you’re a user of the smart calendar app, Motion, you may be wondering what to do about your calendars these days. As of September 1st, 2023, Motion decided to discontinue support for their Sync Calendars feature which allowed users to copy events from one calendar to another.

Fortunately, there are a couple free tools available to replace Motion’s lost functionality. In this post, we’re going to walk you through the best alternative - Reclaim.ai, a free AI calendar app that allows you to sync, and actually merge your availability, across multiple calendars so you’re never overbooked again.

How does Motion compare vs. Reclaim.ai?

Motion and Reclaim are both smart calendar apps designed to help you become more productive through time blocking. While Reclaim is used more across teams and for individual professionals, Motion tends to be less suited for team support. They each take a different approach to scheduling, but there are a few features that are pretty similar across these two tools. Let’s compare Motion vs. Reclaim.

Features supported by both Motion & Reclaim

• Task scheduling: Both Reclaim and Motion allow you to automatically schedule your tasks to your calendar so you can defend and prioritize time for productive work. While Motion requires you to build and maintain your task list in their app, Reclaim allows you to integrate with ClickUp, Asana, Jira, Todoist, Linear, or Google Tasks to automatically schedule your work from your existing project management app.
• Habits/recurring tasks: Both Reclaim and Motion allow you to automatically schedule smart recurring blocks to defend time for your regular routines on your calendar. Reclaim does this through the Habits feature which can schedule daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, or quarterly, while Motion users can use their recurring tasks feature, but they only offer daily and weekly scheduling. 
• Real-time changes: Both Reclaim and Motion allow you to make real-time changes to your calendar. However, if you make a manual change in Motion, your event can no longer automatically reschedule, while Reclaim does allow those changed events to auto-reschedule if a conflict comes in.
• One-on-one meetings: Both Reclaim and Motion allow you to automatically schedule your one-on-one meetings at the best time, but only Reclaim appears to offer the ability to schedule at the best time for both attendees, not just the scheduler.
• Scheduling Links: Both Reclaim and Motion allow you to book meetings based on your availability. However, Reclaim’s scheduling links understand your priorities to automatically book appointments at the best time around your meeting hours, task work, and personal events where Motion only books around mutual availability.

Features supported by Reclaim, but not Motion

• Calendar Sync: Reclaim allows you to sync multiple calendars and merge your availability so coworkers can see when you’re busy, and keep your events updated when things change. Motion discontinued support for their Sync Calendars feature.
• Slack Status Sync: Reclaim allows you to automatically sync your Slack status to your calendar to prevent coworkers interruptions when you’re busy, and create tasks, reschedule events, and stay on top of your agenda through Slack.
• Productivity Analytics: Reclaim allows you to analyze both your personal productivity and where your team’s time is being spent across meetings, focus time, habits, breaks, and work-life balance metrics. 
• Smart Breaks/Buffer Time: Reclaim allows you to automatically schedule breaks after meetings and focus time sessions to prevent burnout and meeting fatigue.
• Travel Time: Reclaim will automatically add travel time blocks to your events to ensure you have time to get from place to place.
• No-Meeting Days: Reclaim allows you to designate no-meeting days to reduce distractions, increase productivity, and auto-schedule focus time for deep work.
• Connected Calendars: Reclaim also offers Connected Calendars which allows you to check availability for conflicting events before scheduling your smart events, without having to actually sync events to your primary work calendar.
• Advanced Privacy Controls: Reclaim provides a variety of privacy controls for you to show as much or as little details of synced events on destination calendars.

How to migrate your Calendar Sync from Motion to Reclaim

Migrating from Motion to Reclaim is incredibly easy, and Reclaim provides both an onboarding walkthrough and a setup guide to guide you through your smart calendar creation.

If you’re just migrating your Sync Calendars from Motion to Reclaim, you can get your basic sync in place in less than a minute through the onboarding walkthrough. And to optimize all of your smart scheduling through Reclaim, you can get up and running in less than 15 minutes creating everything you already have in Motion – plus all the new scheduling capabilities available through Reclaim’s free plan, or more powerful paid subscriptions. 

Here’s how to migrate Sync Calendars from Motion to Reclaim:

1. Cancel Motion
2. Create your free Reclaim account
3. Connect your first primary calendar in onboarding (use your work calendar)
4. Connect your second calendar in the Calendar Sync step of onboarding
5. If you want to set up multiple Calendar Syncs, you can head to the Calendar Sync page after you complete your onboarding to configure every calendar connection you need.

It’s best to turn off Motion before turning on Reclaim to avoid any chance of loops upon syncing your calendars. Don't hesitate to reach out to us via support if you need help – we typically respond in less than 60 minutes during support hours.

Reclaim free Lite plan includes one Calendar Sync, but you can upgrade to the Starter plan for only $8/month to sync an unlimited number of calendars both ways. Compared to Motion’s cheapest plan at $12/month (which is only available for teams), even with the paid Reclaim plan you’re saving 33% per month, or 58% against their individual plan at $19/month.

If you’re switching from Motion, you should also check out Reclaim’s switching providers deal which allows you to save 20% off your first 6 months, and 20% off your first year if you’re switching with your team.

We hope this helps you get set up with a replacement for Motion’s discontinued Sync Calendars feature, and possibly even save you some money every month.

As always, if you have any questions, reach out to us at [email protected] or via live chat in the app and we’re happy to help you out.