Motion vs. ClickUp vs. Notion: The Ultimate Comparison

Project management is no walk in the park.

Juggling many tasks, teams, and deadlines amid ever-changing priorities is a surefire recipe for chaos.

As Monday rolls around and your endless to-do list teases you, you can’t help but wonder—“Is there a better way?”

Luckily, there are better ways.

And they come as project management tools promising clarity, not confusion, collaboration not isolation, and progress, not mayhem.

This definitive guide compares three of the top contenders—Motion, ClickUp, and Notion.

Let’s begin.

Why Trust Squeeze Growth?

I have written over 100 articles for Squeeze Growth, reviewing and testing various software products. While exploring countless solutions, I have learned a lot about how to manage projects, and tasks, and take notes.

I used ClickUp for the better part of a year to manage projects. Motion and Notion are core parts of my daily productivity system. I use Motion to share meeting availability and Notion as my current project management app.

Having used all three tools extensively, I can compare their strengths and weaknesses from a position of deep knowledge.

In this post, I will draw on my research and hands-on experience to provide an unbiased, comprehensive comparison.

In essence, I’m not just a guy with opinions; I’m a guy with well-informed, battle-tested opinions. You can trust that the analysis comes from a place of experience and objectivity.

Overview of Motion

Motion is an all-in-one project, calendar and meeting management app with built-in AI capabilities.

Motion combines a smart calendar, automated task manager, and team coordination software all in one app.

Its key features include:

• Intelligent Calendar: Motion builds a daily schedule for you based on your tasks, priorities, and time preferences. It automatically schedules time for deep work and meetings.
• Automatic Task Manager: Motion automatically prioritizes your tasks and projects so you always know what to do next. It also ensures nothing falls through the cracks.
• Automatic Project Manager: You can view all your tasks and projects in one place. Motion builds individual task schedules for each person on your team.
• Meeting Scheduler: Easily share your availability for others to book time with you. Motion tries to batch your meetings together, so you have fewer interruptions.

Motion is ideal for busy professionals, entrepreneurs, teams, and anyone who struggles to stay on top of their many responsibilities.

In essence, it combines scheduling, task management, and team coordination, so you don’t need multiple tools.

The best part?

One of the key features that differentiates Motion is its AI-powered automatic schedule building and task daily system.

Our research testing countless productivity software shows that Motion is the only productivity tool that uses AI to build a schedule and task list for you each day.

This removes the manual planning and prioritizing that wastes time with other tools.

Finally, Motion integrates with the other tools you might be using, like email, Slack, Google Calendar, etc.

This allows it to centralize all your work into one place.

If you often feel overwhelmed and too busy, Motion might be the productivity tool you need.

Overview of ClickUp

Undoubtedly, ClickUp is one of the most prestigious and well-rated project management tools.

ClickUp comes packed with literally hundreds of features to help teams manage their work more efficiently.

Some of the key features include:

• Customizable tasks with 35+ ClickApps: Tailor tasks to your needs by adding things like checklists, automation, custom fields, and more.
• Multiple views: View your work from different angles with list views, board views, calendar views, and more.
• Document creation and knowledge base: Create, edit, and store documents of any kind directly within ClickUp.
• Time tracking: Track time at a task level and create reports to analyze where time is being spent.
• Goal setting: Set goals and track progress at a high level.
• Reporting: Build custom dashboards with metrics important to you.
• Integrations: Connect 1,000+ apps you already use like Slack, Google Drive, GitHub, and more.

ClickUp is ideal for teams of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises. The flexibility to customize ClickUp to your needs makes it a great fit for all types of use cases.

Overview of Notion

Notion is a note-taking and “second brain” app. It also combines wikis, documents, spreadsheets, and project management in one workspace.

Notion is built around customizable building blocks that allow you to create any kind of page or document you need.

Everything is flexible and drag-and-drop.

You can add text, images, to-do lists, tables, toggles, embeds, and more. It’s as simple or powerful as you need it to be.

Some key features of Notion:

• All-in-One workspace: Notion consolidates wikis, docs, spreadsheets, project boards, and more into one tool.
• Extremely customizable: You can build any page or document by dragging and dropping text, images, embeds, tables, toggles, and more.
• Real-time collaboration: Work together in real-time, @mention teammates, assign tasks, and more.
• Powerful search: Find anything instantly with lightning-fast search across people, projects, content, and more.
• API and integrations: Connect your favorite apps through Notion’s API or integrate with hundreds of tools.
• Responsive design: Notion uses a chunky, responsive design that works great on any device.

Like ClickUp, Notion is also ideal for teams of all sizes, remote teams, marketing teams, product and engineering teams, designers, startups, and individuals.

It’s flexible enough to work for any use case.

Teams can bring all their work together in one place, get rid of old tools, and work faster.

The design is easy to understand for non-technical people and can be customized by developers and power users.

Notion hits that sweet spot between simplicity and flexibility.

With the intros out of the way, let’s compare them apples to apples.

Comparing Key Features

We compare the features that are common in all the apps and somewhere either of the apps dominates. Let’s dive right in!

Task Management

When it comes to task management, each of these tools takes a slightly different approach:

Motion is designed for automated personal task management. It focuses on automatically scheduling tasks on your calendar between appointments.

Motion is great for handling basic to-do lists and scheduling your time. But it lacks more advanced project management capabilities.

ClickUp offers extremely flexible and customizable task management. You can create different task types, and add statuses, priorities, assignees, checklists, and more.

It’s great for both personal tasks and complex team projects. The many views and collaboration features make ClickUp powerful for managing workflows.

Notion provides a simple and flexible way to create personal or shared task lists.

You can add due dates, assignees, tags, and statuses to tasks. Calendar and board views make tasks visual. However, Notion lacks some of the more advanced project management features of ClickUp. It’s best for straightforward task lists.

Overall, ClickUp’s task management capabilities are the most extensive. The ability to customize statuses, fields, views, and more makes it suitable for diverse workflows.

Notion and Motion strikes a nice balance with its friendly and adaptable task lists for personal and basic team use.

Project Management

Motion

When it comes to project management, Motion takes a straightforward approach. It has all the basic features you’d expect, like the ability to create task lists, set due dates, and assign tasks to team members.

It makes Motion a great choice if you just need simple tasks and project tracking.

You can break down a project into manageable checklists and to-do lists, and keep tabs on who’s doing what.

However, Motion lacks some of the more advanced project management capabilities that power users might expect.

For example, there is no ability to create custom fields, dependencies between tasks, Gantt charts, or advanced reporting.

Motion does not have any automation features, except for the fact that Motion automatically creates the ideal schedule for each team member.

So if you want to level up your project management beyond basic task tracking, Motion might not be the best choice. But for simple, everyday project needs, Motion has you covered.

ClickUp

ClickUp is the Swiss Army knife of project management tools. It provides extensive PM features to handle even the most complex projects and workflows.

Like Motion, ClickUp allows you to create tasks, set due dates, and assign work.

But ClickUp takes it to the next level with capabilities like custom fields, task dependencies, Gantt charts, portfolios, and powerful automation.

You can tailor ClickUp to your team’s specific needs thanks to the highly customizable fields, views, and templates.

For example, you could create a content production template complete with custom statuses, assignees, and automated workflows.

The automation makes it easy to trigger actions when certain conditions are met, removing tedious manual work.

ClickUp also provides top-notch visualizations like customizable dashboards, calendars, and reports to help you analyze your projects.

Whether you’re an individual user or an enterprise team, ClickUp likely has the project management capabilities. It supports complex projects from start to finish.

Notion

With its flexible building blocks, Notion is like a digital whiteboard for project management.

It allows you to create customized project pages tailored to your needs using simple drag-and-drop blocks.

You can track tasks, deadlines, assignees, status, and progress all in one place.

For example, you could build a launch plan with task lists, a calendar view, and a Kanban-style board.

Everything stays synced and up-to-date for your team in real time.

This makes Notion great for collaboration and team projects.

It also provides analytics, so you can get insights into your project performance.

Notion is adaptable enough to be used for basic task tracking but also has the flexibility to manage larger initiatives.

While it may not have the same depth of PM-specific features as ClickUp, Notion makes it easy to build customized workflows for your projects.

Our Verdict

• Motion is best for individuals or teams with basic project needs
• ClickUp is the most robust and customizable for advanced project management
• Notion strikes a balance between simplicity and advanced capabilities (thanks to its new automation feature).

Overall, ClickUp stands out as having the most impressive and extensive project management features. It provides powerful functionality for managing complex projects and workflows.

Motion is on the simpler end of the spectrum, lacking some key PM capabilities.

Notion, as always, hits a nice sweet spot with its flexibility and balance of features.

SIDENOTE: The individuals/businesses who switch from ClickUp to Notion are usually the ones who prioritize GTD (getting things done) and simplicity. With so many features and more, ClickUp can quickly become overwhelming for some. This is where Notion shines.

Sharing Meeting Availability

Motion has robust features for sharing meeting availability and scheduling meetings. Some key capabilities include:

• Meeting participants can view each other’s calendars and availability directly within Motion. This makes it easy to find a time that works for everyone.
• You can set your working hours and time zones in Motion. This automatically marks you as busy during those blocks on the calendar.
• Motion has a “Find a Time” feature that analyzes everyone’s availability and suggests the best meeting times. Everyone could then vote on the options to reach a consensus.
• Motion automatically syncs with calendars like Google and Office 365. Any events from those platforms will show up directly in Motion’s calendar.
• You can mark times as “Out of Office” or “Busy” to indicate periods when you are not available for meetings. This information syncs across the team.

Overall, Motion makes sharing availability and scheduling seamless. The integrated calendars and smart suggestions reduce meeting coordination friction.

Our Verdict
Motion is the best tool for sharing availability and scheduling meetings among the three.

ClickUp and Notion do not have built-in calendars to view schedules or coordinate meeting times efficiently. Motion’s robust scheduling AI-equipped assistance provides significant convenience and coordination benefits. While ClickUp and Notion have many strengths, meeting workflow is an area where Motion shines.

Automation

When it comes to easy-to-use conditional automation for personal productivity, ClickUp steals the show.

ClickUp is the undisputed automation champion for power users.

You can build intricate automation for everything from task management to time tracking and process optimization.

Whether you want to assign tasks based on deadlines or create detailed analytics of how your team spends time, ClickUp has the versatility to make it happen.

And with its customizable dashboards and views, you can visualize your workflows to spot bottlenecks.

Notion recently introduced conditional automation features in their database.

It may not have the complexity of ClickUp, but you can still create multistep workflows and systems to streamline your work.

Integrations

When it comes to productivity apps, integrations are the secret sauce that brings everything together.

Let’s see how our three contenders, Motion, ClickUp, and Notion, stack up in enabling connections.

Motion

Motion takes a selective approach with its integrations. It connects with a handful of popular tools like Slack, Google Suite, Trello, and more.

The goal is to provide seamless workflows without overwhelming users.

For example, Motion and Trello integrate beautifully to give you visibility into tasks from ideation to completion.

As you create tasks in Motion, they sync to visualized boards in Trello. This thoughtful integration empowers better project management.

ClickUp

With over 1000 integrations, ClickUp lives up to its motto of being an “all-in-one workplace.” ClickUp plays nicely with popular tools like Slack, Google Suite, Asana, Jira, and more.

But it also connects with more niche apps using custom integrations with Zapier. This flexibility allows teams to craft truly customized workflows.

For example, e-commerce owners can integrate ClickUp with Shopify to manage orders alongside other tasks. The possibilities are endless.

Notion

With over 2000 integrations, Notion comes close to ClickUp. But its approach is more meticulous.

Notion carefully curates a selection of thoughtful integrations with tools like Slack, Trello, Evernote, and more.

The focus is on enhancing productivity without complicating things.

Notion also leverages API integrations to enable building custom solutions. For developers, it provides ample room for creativity.

Our Verdict
For lightweight connectivity with everyday apps, Motion is a prudent choice.

ClickUp takes the cake when it comes to the breadth of integrations. Notion shines in how thoughtfully it enables connections.

Overall, ClickUp edges out as the most versatile integration hub.

Regardless, all three tools excel at connecting the dots in your workflow.

Pricing

Now that we have discussed the critical features, let’s talk moolah.

Motion’s pricing

Motion offers a 7-day free trial. The Individual plan costs $34 per month (or $19 per month on annual billing).

The Team plan costs $20 per member per month ($12 per month when billed annually).

Motion is available as a web app, mobile app (both Android and iOS), and desktop app (both Mac and Windows).

Get started with Motion

ClickUp’s pricing

ClickUp has a forever-free plan. The pain plan (they call it the Unlimited plan) starts at $10 per month. There is also a Business plan costing $19 per month.

ClickUp is available everywhere. On all mobile and desktop devices, as a Chrome extension, and on Apple Watch. Surprisingly enough, they are also planning to launch ClickUp on Meta Quest (think project management on Metaverse).

Get started with ClickUp

Notion’s pricing

Notion also offers a forever-free plan. The Plus plan costs $10 per month ($8 on annual billing) and the Business plan starts at $18 per member per month ($15 when billed annually).

You can use Notion as a web app, a desktop app on Windows and macOS and even as a mobile app, on Android and iOS.

Get started with Notion

Our Final Recommendations

After comparing Motion, ClickUp, and Notion across all the key categories, you know that each tool has its own superpowers:

• Motion is the leader for effortless scheduling and coordinating meetings. Its AI abilities make this a breeze.
• ClickUp dominates project management, especially for complex workflows. It’s customizable and full-featured.
• Notion strikes the best balance between simplicity and flexibility thanks to its building blocks.

So which one should you choose? Well, it depends on your needs!

Here are some common use cases and my recommendations:

• Distributed teams that require automated task management: Motion is perfect here with its intelligent scheduler and focus on automation.
• Startup that wants an all-in-one customizable workplace: ClickUp was built for this with its endless integrations and ability to customize everything.
• An individual looking for a flexible writing and life workspace: Notion’s adaptable blocks make it great for personal productivity and note-taking.
• Medium-sized businesses needing straightforward project coordination: Notion gets the yes for its uncomplicated approach to getting things done.
• Enterprise companies managing complex initiatives: ClickUp has the detailed features and customizability to handle this well.

The bottom line is that the right tool depends on your unique situation.

But this comparison guide breaks down how Motion, ClickUp, and Notion excel in different scenarios.

Hopefully, it makes your buying decision easier knowing which tool aligns with your needs.

The good news is that you can’t go wrong with any of these leading solutions!