Last Updated on May 8, 2024 by Ewen Finser
If you are on the fence about Reclaim.ai and want to know if it actually delivers, this review is for you.
I’ve been watching the smart scheduling and AI productivity space heat up this year. There’s some great new tools out there. But cutting through the hype takes some hands on testing.
Thankfully, as a busy business operator, I’m right in the target demographic for most of these companies. I previously signed up for, tested out and reviewed Motion recently, a similar work operating system promising AI efficiencies.
So, when heard about Reclaim.ai (and it’s a top competitor to Motion), I immediately sign up to see if it was as credible as Motion and others.
But first, what exactly IS Reclaim.ai?
What is Reclaim.ai?
Reclaim.ai is an AI-powered scheduling and habit-building tool designed to optimize your time management.
It integrates with your existing calendars, understands your tasks, habits, priorities, and then schedules your work accordingly.
What sets Reclaim.ai apart is its focus on adaptive scheduling, which adjusts to your changing priorities and unforeseen interruptions, making it a comprehensive solution for effective time management.
Core Reclaim.ai Selling Points
After testing out Reclaim for about 3 weeks, these are the key takeway features for me:
1. AI-Driven Task and Habit Scheduling
Reclaim.ai’s primary draw is its AI-driven task and habit scheduling. You can set tasks and habits, assign them priorities, and Reclaim.ai will create a schedule for you.
It’s like having a personal assistant who understands your work rhythm, ensuring you’re always on your game.
2. Integration with Multiple Calendars
Reclaim.ai integrates with multiple calendars, including personal and work ones. This makes it easier to manage your schedule and prevents double-booking.
3. Smart 1:1s and Scheduling Links
Reclaim.ai also features Smart 1:1s and Scheduling Links. The Smart 1:1s feature finds the best time to meet based on both attendees’ schedules and reschedules if there are conflicts. Scheduling Links, on the other hand, allows you to share your availability and book meetings faster.
4. Buffer Time and No-Meeting Days
Reclaim.ai automatically schedules buffer time after meetings to prevent back-to-back calls. It also allows you to block off no-meeting days for focused work.
How Reclaim.ai Works
Reclaim.ai integrates with your existing calendars and to-do lists to understand your commitments, deadlines, tasks, habits, and preferences.
Leveraging advanced algorithms, it auto-schedules tasks and habits dynamically, ensuring that high-priority items get prime focus while accommodating breaks and personal commitments.
The Strengths of Reclaim.ai
Reclaim.ai has several strengths that make it a standout productivity tool.
1. Time Mastery
Reclaim.ai doesn’t just manage your time; it gives you mastery over it. It understands your workflow, ensuring you’re both busy and productive.
2. Proactive Prioritization
Reclaim.ai helps you prioritize tasks on your to-do list, lessening stress. It understands your tasks, habits, and goals, subtly guiding you to tackle what truly matters.
3. Seamless Integration with Other Tools
Reclaim.ai offers seamless integrations with many popular productivity software, ensuring a cohesive ecosystem.
4. Affordable Pricing
Reclaim.ai’s pricing is one of its strongest selling points. The Pro plan costs only $7.80 per month, while the Teams plan costs $11.40 per user per month.
Areas of Improvement for Reclaim.ai
While Reclaim.ai is a powerful scheduling tool, there are some areas where it could improve.
1. Limited Project Management Features
While Reclaim.ai is great for scheduling and rescheduling tasks, it doesn’t offer advanced project management features.
2. Initial Setup Overwhelm
The initial setup phase of Reclaim.ai can feel overwhelming, especially for users new to AI tools.
3. Working Hours Limitation
Users who work at non-traditional hours may find limitations with Reclaim.ai. For instance, if you work past midnight, you can’t assign your work block past this time.
The Verdict: Is Reclaim.ai Worth It?
After careful analysis, it’s clear that Reclaim.ai provides a comprehensive solution for time management. I ended up sticking with it after my trial expired.
It’s a great tool for scheduling and managing tasks, and its attractively priced plans make it an excellent option for freelancers and small businesses.
How Does Reclaim.ai Compare to Its Competitors?
Reclaim.ai faces competition from other notable productivity tools such as Motion, Clockwise, and Sunsama.
While these tools offer similar scheduling features, Reclaim.ai stands apart with its adaptive scheduling and seamless integration with other productivity software.
A key difference between Reclaim.ai and its competitors is in the pricing. While other scheduling tools like Motion cost close to $35 per month, Reclaim.ai’s Pro plan costs only $7.80 per month.
Besides Motion (which I compared directly to Reclaim here), this is how I see the alternatives as I wrote in our MarTech Toolkit newsletter recently:
- Sunsama.com: Sunsama is the most user friendly PERSONAL calendar management system, with guided daily planning, better unified calendar views, timeboxing, and daily goals. Sunsama stands out for me because it integrates widely, including with my Notion dashboards and systems. See how Sunsama compares to Motion directly here.
- Routine.co: Another Sunsama competitor that actually does have enterprise and business tiers, but the tooling and workflow is more of a personal view.
- Structured.app: More of a simple personal calendar management optimizer, focused on aesthetic calendar design (great for visual, color-coded scheduling).
- Akiflow.com: A fairly new entrant, backed by YCombinator so one to watch, currently personal around time blocking.
- TickTick.com: More of a time management app, with pomodoro timers, productivity tracking, most popular in Asia right now but adoption is growing.
- Todoist.com: Not a NEW app, but they are the original smart to-do list that offers a similar planner optimization approach (already as teams, enterprise support).
So is Reclaim.ai Worth Sticking With?
Bottom Line: My short answer is yes, give Reclaim.ai a try, particularly if you don’t already have a similar smart work optimization app.
If you are a busy leader, manager, or account manager type, Reclaim.ai will actually do a lot of what it promises… reclaiming lost time.
By building in scheduled decompression time, personal time, deep work, and strategic blocks, it brings an organization to my daily routine WITHOUT feeling like an additional layer of pressure.
Now if you already use something like Motion or Sunsama, this might feel very familiar already (I’d put it closest to Motion as a spiritual sibling). For me, the big difference from Motion is Reclaim.ai’s more holistic approach to work-life balance.
That said, if you are purely after workplace productivity hacking, Motion is a bit more geared towards that objective.