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GoodPlans vs Motion

Motion's plans, prices and credit allowances checked on usemotion.com in August 2026. Pricing on both sides can change — verify before you buy.

What Motion is actually for

Motion started as an AI calendar and grew into a work operating system. Today the scheduler sits inside a much bigger product: projects with dependencies and Gantt views, team capacity planning, meeting booking links, dashboards, an AI chat layer, and integrations with the tools work already lives in. Its 2026 pricing reflects that — Pro AI at $19 per seat per month (about $12.73 annually), Business AI at $29 (about $19.43 annually), each metered in AI credits, with no permanent free plan.

If you're a founder, an agency lead or a manager who needs to see whether four people can absorb another project by Friday, that's a reasonable thing to pay for. Motion is one of the few tools that will genuinely answer it.

What GoodPlans is actually for

GoodPlans assumes there's exactly one person to schedule: you. You add a task with an estimated duration and a deadline, file it under a category that carries its priority, and optionally mark that it can't start until another task is done. You set your available hours for each day of the week once. From there the app builds the week — splitting long tasks into focus sessions with breaks, fitting them into your real availability, and never scheduling over the events already in your calendar.

Then it does the part most schedulers stop short of: it runs the session. One tap starts a focus timer with a live countdown on your lock screen, so you can leave your phone face-down and still know where you are. "Hey Siri, start my next GoodPlans session" works without opening the app. When the day falls apart, one tap reshuffles what's left into the best open slots.

The three differences that actually decide it

1. Scheduling versus doing

Motion is excellent at placing work on a calendar and keeping the placement honest as things move. What it doesn't do is stand next to you while you work. GoodPlans treats the scheduled block as a session with a beginning and an end — timer, countdown, break, log — because for a lot of people the plan was never the hard part. Starting was.

2. Priced for a team versus priced for a person

Per-seat pricing makes sense when there are seats. For one person, Motion's Pro AI runs roughly $150 a year on annual billing and around $230 if you pay monthly, on top of AI credit limits you have to think about. GoodPlans is $29.99 a year with nothing metered, and if you only ever juggle a handful of things at once, the free tier's 5 active tasks may be all you need.

3. A cloud platform versus your own device

Motion needs an account, and your tasks, projects and calendar live on its servers — that's what makes the team features possible. GoodPlans has no account and no server of ours. Your tasks stay on the device you added them on, and the schedule is written into a dedicated GoodPlans calendar created in your own iCloud during onboarding, so your plan shows up in whatever calendar app you already use. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to leak, no ads.

How GoodPlans decides what goes where

Both apps are more than gap-fillers, but it's worth being concrete about how GoodPlans decides. It reads each task's laxity — how much slack is left before the deadline compared with how much work remains — so something quietly running out of room climbs before it turns into a crisis. It respects the priority of the category you filed the task under, rather than guessing importance. It honours ordering, so a task that depends on another won't be scheduled ahead of it. And it re-evaluates which task deserves the next slot at every step as the week fills, which is why low-priority work doesn't get permanently buried under whatever is loudest. The full explanation is here.