DoneThat vs Motion

The short answer

Motion plans your day. DoneThat records it.

Motion takes your tasks, works out when each should happen, and writes them into your calendar — re-planning automatically when something slips. DoneThat captures what actually occurred and coaches you on the difference. Those are two halves of the same loop, which is why the honest answer to "which one" is often "these are not substitutes".

If you cannot decide what to work on next, Motion. If you cannot see where the day went, DoneThat.

The plan versus the outcome

This is the distinction the whole comparison turns on, and it is easy to miss because both products talk about AI and productivity.

Motion's data is intention. Tasks, priorities, deadlines, estimated durations, and the schedule it derives from them. Its intelligence goes into deciding what should happen when — genuinely hard, and it does it well.

DoneThat's data is outcome. What was on screen, for how long, and what it appears to have been about, reconstructed without you logging anything.

The gap between those two is where most of the interesting information lives. Motion can tell you it scheduled two hours for the migration on Tuesday morning. It cannot tell you that ninety minutes of that went to Slack, because nothing in the product observes the work — only the plan.

Motion does add time tracking, but on the Business AI tier only, so the entry plan records intentions exclusively.

Pricing

Motion pricing, as of 11 August 2026:

There is a free trial and no free plan. Business AI adds time tracking, team capacity planning, advanced dashboards, timelines and Gantt charts.

Two things to factor in:

• Credits are metered. Overage runs at $0.25 per 100 credits on Pro and $0.19 on Business. If your team leans on the AI heavily, this is a variable line item rather than a fixed seat cost.
• Time tracking is a tier up. If you want Motion to record as well as plan, price Business, not Pro.

DoneThat is subscription-based with a 14-day free trial; current prices are on the DoneThat download page.

Where Motion is genuinely better

Auto-scheduling. Motion's core loop — take a pile of tasks and produce a realistic, self-healing calendar — is a hard problem solved well. DoneThat's Don can block calendar time for a goal, but that is a much simpler mechanism and it would be dishonest to present it as equivalent.

Breadth of planning. Projects, tasks, docs, wiki, notes, meeting booking links, repeatable SOPs. Motion is trying to be the whole planning surface, and largely is.

Team delivery. Capacity planning, timelines and Gantt charts serve people running projects, not just their own day.

Mobile. iOS and Android; DoneThat has neither.

Where DoneThat is better

It sees the work. No plan survives contact with a Tuesday. Automatic capture records what actually happened, including the parts nobody scheduled.

Coaching during the work. Don nudges you onto goals, flags low-value work while you can still fix it, checks your mood, reminds you of meetings, suggests breaks. Motion re-plans around slippage; it does not ask why you slipped or intervene while it is happening.

Nothing to maintain. Motion's scheduler needs task data, priorities and estimates to be any good — that is real ongoing input. Capture needs nothing.

Work history for AI tools. An MCP server and API make your actual history queryable as long-term memory. Motion has no equivalent.

No credit metering. No allowance to watch.

On the ask, since Motion needs no capture at all: screenshots are never stored — processed in real time, deleted immediately, only derived structured activity persists. Excluded apps are redacted on your machine before anything is sent. With your own Gemini or OpenAI-compatible model, raw activity never reaches our servers. The desktop app is open source.

Running both

This is the recommendation more often than with any other tool in this comparison.

Motion owns the forward-looking half: what should happen, and when. DoneThat owns the backward-looking half: what did happen, and what that says about your estimates. Feeding the second into the first is how estimates stop being fiction — most people schedule optimistically because nothing ever shows them how long things actually took.

The cost is two subscriptions, and Motion is not cheap, so this is a pairing for people who genuinely have both problems.

Where Motion is the better choice

• Deciding what to do next is the bottleneck. That is precisely what it automates.
• Your calendar is chaos and re-planning by hand eats your week.
• You run projects for a team and need capacity planning and timelines.
• You want one planning surface rather than a stack of tools.
• You need mobile.

Where DoneThat is the better choice

• You know what to do but not where the time went.
• Your estimates are consistently wrong and nothing corrects them.
• You want intervention during the work, not a re-planned calendar afterwards.
• You do not want to maintain task data for a scheduler to consume.
• You want AI tools to have your work history through MCP and an API.
• Your team wants shared signal without surveillance. Summary-level dashboards, relative trends rather than per-person hours, visibility set per summary, optional mood tracking.

How we compared these

Everything stated about Motion comes from its public pricing and product pages, read on 11 August 2026 and linked below. Claims about DoneThat are first-hand: we build it.

Motion's scheduling engine is better at scheduling than anything we do, it has mobile apps and we do not, and its planning surface is far broader — all said plainly above. Vendors change pricing without notice; check the source link, particularly for the credit allowances.

Questions people ask about Motion

Does Motion track time?

Only on the Business AI tier, at $19.43 per seat per month billed annually. The cheaper Pro AI tier does auto-scheduling and task management but no time tracking, so it records what you planned rather than what happened.

What are Motion's AI credits?

Both paid tiers include a monthly AI credit allowance — 7,500 per seat on Pro AI and 15,000 on Business AI — with overage charged at $0.25 and $0.19 per 100 credits respectively. Heavy AI use is a variable cost rather than a flat one.

Motion vs DoneThat: what is the actual difference?

Motion decides what you should do and when, then puts it in your calendar. DoneThat records what you actually did and coaches you on the gap. They are complementary rather than competing: the plan and the outcome are different data.

Can I use Motion and DoneThat together?

Yes, and it is a coherent pairing. Motion schedules the intention; DoneThat shows whether the scheduled block went the way it was meant to. Don can also block calendar time for goals, which overlaps slightly — but Motion's scheduling engine is far more sophisticated at that specific job.