# Looking for a Reclaim alternative

> An honest Reclaim.ai alternative, from someone who built one. Where Reclaim's calendar autopilot wins, where a 24-hour dial you decide on wins, how to pick.

Published: 2026-08-19. Canonical: https://reassign.ai/resources/reclaim-alternative

First, the bias. Reassign is mine. I built it because my own day kept vanishing into a list, so read everything below with that declared. Everything I say about Reclaim comes from Reclaim's own pricing page, help centre and announcements, checked on 19 August 2026, and where I could not confirm something on a page they own I have left it out or said so.

Second, the thing a comparison page usually skips: **Reclaim is very good at the job it picked.** It has been doing AI scheduling inside Google Calendar since 2019, it has a free tier that is actually free, and it is now a Dropbox company with the resources that implies. If you came here because you assume there must be a better Reclaim, there might not be. The useful question is narrower, and it is not about features.

## The only question that matters

Do you want an engine to fight for your time inside the calendar, or do you want to see the whole day so you can fight for it yourself?

That is the whole comparison. Reclaim is a **calendar autopilot**. You tell it your habits, your tasks and a weekly focus goal, and it finds the room inside Google Calendar or Outlook, defends it, and moves its own events out of the way when a meeting lands on them. You keep living in your calendar. Reclaim works in the background of it.

Reassign is a **24-hour dial you look at and decide on**. All 24 hours as one ring, every block a wedge sized to its real length, your Google or Outlook events on the same ring in their own colour, and a now indicator sweeping round it. Nothing on it moves unless you move it, or you ask an AI to in a conversation you are having with it, and even then it comes back as cards you approve or an edit you can undo. There is no background engine, by design.

If your day fails because your calendar fills with meetings and the real work never gets room, you want the engine, and Reclaim is a good one. If your day fails because you cannot see it, because 4pm arrives as a surprise and the evening did not exist while you were inside the morning, an engine that keeps rearranging blocks you cannot see does not fix that. It can make it worse. That is [time blindness](https://reassign.ai/resources/what-is-time-blindness), and it needs the day to be one visible object.

## What Reclaim actually gives you

Only what I could confirm on Reclaim-owned pages on 19 August 2026.

- **A free plan.** The pricing page lists Lite as "Free forever" for one user, with a "1 week scheduling range", one calendar sync, one scheduling link, and "Limited integrations": Google Tasks, Slack, Zoom and Google Meet.
- **Paid entry.** Starter is $10 per seat per month billed yearly, $12 monthly. Business is $15 yearly and $18 monthly. Enterprise is $22 yearly and is not sold monthly. Starter adds an eight-week scheduling range, three calendar syncs and the Todoist, Asana, ClickUp, Jira and Linear integrations. The site advertises a 14-day free trial.
- **The engine.** The pricing page's own words: Focus Time lets you "set a weekly Focus Time goal, and automatically defend time to get stuff done around your existing calendar events". Habits are "AI-powered recurring events that automatically find the best time within your smart schedule windows". Buffer Time, Smart Meetings and Meeting Quality round out what Reclaim now calls its AI Agents. Lite gets five of them.
- **How it moves things.** The help centre says Reclaim "responds in real time (in about 15 seconds or less) to automatically move around your scheduled events", and that "if a higher-priority meeting is booked over a scheduled Habit, Task, or Smart Meeting, Reclaim will automatically reschedule the overbooked event to the next best time". Its events start as Free and flip to Busy as the start time nears. Locks stop an event moving; auto-lock does that for a whole day or week, on a schedule.
- **Google and Outlook.** Outlook support went to all users in May 2025, and the Outlook notes are refreshingly blunt: Microsoft cannot mute update notifications selectively, so "attendees may notice a lot of notifications about meetings being moved around". Delegated and shared Outlook calendars are not supported yet; on-premise Exchange will not be "for the foreseeable future".
- **No native mobile app.** Their help centre says so in one sentence and points you at adding the web app to your home screen.
- **Owned by Dropbox.** Announced on Reclaim's own blog on 20 August 2024, with "no planned changes to pricing or customer support anytime soon".
- **Reclaim 2.0.** A "complete redesign" with an in-app AI assistant, a Preview Mode that gives you "human-in-the-loop approval before anything goes live", and an MCP server at mcp.reclaim.ai documented for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor. Every one of those pages says 2.0 "is currently in private beta", with access by email request.

## Four real differences

### 1. Who moves the blocks

Reclaim moves them. That is the value and, from its own docs, the cost: the events it creates are flexible by default, they get rescheduled when something lands on them, and locking is the thing you add when you want them to stay put. If you work with people who expect a meeting agreed for 2pm to still be at 2pm, the Outlook notification note above is not a footnote.

Reassign does not move anything on its own. You drag a block, or you pull the whole afternoon along with it using [shift everything after](https://reassign.ai/resources/reschedule-your-whole-day), and the change goes back to Google or Outlook because that is what two-way sync means. Ask for a plan and it comes back as [cards you approve](https://reassign.ai/features/ask-ai) before a single block changes. There is no rule engine watching your week at 1am. That is a refusal, not a gap, and it is the honest trade: you get predictability and you give up the autopilot.

### 2. What you are looking at

Reclaim lives inside a calendar, and a calendar shows the week as a grid with the day as one column in it. That is the right shape for finding a free hour across a week and for team availability, and it is the shape everyone you work with already uses.

Reassign draws the day as [a ring](https://reassign.ai/resources/why-a-day-is-round). Midnight at the top, noon at the bottom, no scrolling, no off-screen. The gap before your next meeting is a visible wedge rather than a subtraction. The afternoon you already lost is a shape. When Reclaim would defend two hours of focus, on the dial you can see the two hours it would defend, and every hour around them, and decide whether that is where they go. If you want to read the days ahead as well, Pro adds [List and Timeline](https://reassign.ai/features/list-and-timeline), and neither one drags, because drawing a day stays on the dial.

The honest cost: a ring shows the whole day at lower detail than a week grid shows a slice of it, and it shows one day. Reclaim's week is a real advantage when the question is Thursday, not today.

### 3. Work and life as one object

Reclaim can hold personal habits, and it can sync a personal calendar to defend your availability, but its home is a work calendar and Lite syncs one. Work is the frame and everything else is an event among events.

On the dial, area is colour: Work, Relationships, Self, Life, all on the same ring in the same 24 hours, with sleep drawn as a non-blocking band underneath. The reason is simple. The hour you are trying to protect is usually the one your day eats first, and it is often not a work hour. A ring that holds the school run next to the deploy shows you the trade you are actually making.

### 4. The agent surface

Both products speak MCP. The difference on 19 August 2026 is who can use it.

Reclaim's server is real and capable, and its docs cover Claude Code, Claude Desktop, the Claude web app, ChatGPT and Cursor. It is also only on Reclaim 2.0, and 2.0 is a private beta you request by email. Until that opens, most Reclaim users have no way to connect it. [The list of day planners with an MCP server](https://reassign.ai/resources/day-planners-with-an-mcp-server) has the same read of every vendor's docs, ours included.

Reassign's [MCP server](https://reassign.ai/mcp) is on Pro for anyone today, with 13 planning tools plus a feedback tool, and it lets [Claude](https://reassign.ai/resources/planning-your-day-with-claude) or [ChatGPT](https://reassign.ai/resources/planning-your-day-with-chatgpt) read and edit the real dial. "Push everything after lunch back an hour" is one tool call that lands on the ring with an undo token. The `schedule` tool books a slot straight away when exactly one fits and returns options when several do. Since August 2026 the same operations are a public REST API at reassign.app/api/v1 (Pro), with an OpenAPI 3.1 spec, for the scripts an assistant is the wrong tool for. Same handlers as MCP, so a script and Claude cannot disagree about your day.

Worth saying plainly: Reclaim 2.0's Preview Mode is propose-and-approve, the same principle Reassign is built on. When 2.0 opens, this section shrinks. The background agents, by Reclaim's own description, still "run in the background, adapting your schedule as things change", so difference one stays.

## Where Reclaim is straightforwardly better

Not a rhetorical section. These are real, and if two or more of them are load-bearing for you, stay.

- **A true autopilot.** Weekly focus goals, habits that find their own slot, buffers after calls, all defended without you touching anything. Reassign will not do any of this. If your problem is that focus time never survives contact with the week, Reclaim solves the problem you have.
- **Team scheduling.** Scheduling links, Smart Meetings that reschedule themselves, team out-of-office calendars, and 2.0 prompts like "Find 30 minutes to meet with Bob this week". Reassign has no scheduling links and no team layer at all. It is a personal planner.
- **A genuinely free tier.** Lite is free forever with real features on it. Reassign is free to start too, but its sync and AI live on Pro.
- **Cheap paid entry.** $10 a seat billed yearly buys you the engine and the full integration list.
- **Task integrations.** Todoist, Asana, ClickUp, Jira, Linear and Google Tasks on paid plans, with Notion named in 2.0's task suggestions. Reassign syncs Todoist and nothing else on the task side; Asana, Linear and the rest are Soon, and Soon is not shipped.
- **Maturity and backing.** Live since 2019, a Dropbox company since 2024, and a help centre that documents its own limits, which I respect.

## Where it is a wash

- **Google Calendar and Outlook.** Both sides do both, two-way. Reclaim's docs list the Outlook gaps above; Reassign's [Outlook sync](https://reassign.ai/features/outlook-calendar) and [Google Calendar sync](https://reassign.ai/features/google-calendar) have their own rails on their own pages.
- **Todoist.** Both pull it in. Reclaim time-blocks the tasks; Reassign puts them on the [dial as blocks](https://reassign.ai/features/todoist), two-way.
- **No native mobile app.** Neither has one. Both are installable web apps.
- **Insights.** Reclaim's 2.0 overview describes an Insights tab that shows how your time is actually being spent against your goals. Reassign's Time Insights reads the plan against the lived day. Different questions, both answered.

## Where this one is better

- **The whole day at once**, which is the entire point, and the dial is free.
- **Nothing moves without your hand.** No background rescheduling, no lock setting to remember, no colleague wondering why the sync moved. Ask AI shows cards you approve. Over MCP an agent edits with an undo token, only in the conversation you are having with it.
- **One ring for work and life**, with area as colour and sleep as a band, rather than a work calendar with personal events in it.
- **The energy curve** (Pro), a per-hour curve of when you will be sharp and when you will flag, drawn round the ring from your own logged sleep. It is a model rather than a measurement, it can be wrong, and it is what [energy-based planning](https://reassign.ai/resources/energy-based-planning) means here. Reclaim's 2.0 overview mentions adapting when "energy levels change" but I could not find a documented curve or model, so I make no claim about theirs.
- **Reflection.** Mark each block as happened, changed, or did not, and read [the day you planned against the day you lived](https://reassign.ai/resources/daily-review-planned-vs-lived). Yesterday is free; further back is Pro.
- **An MCP server and REST API you can use today** (Pro), not a private beta.
- **Your day on every new tab.** The [Chrome extension](https://reassign.ai/extension) frames the live dial in every new tab, free and with no account. Adding the page you are reading connects your account; sending it to your Inbox is Pro.
- **No streaks, no scores.** Reassign ships no gamification, on purpose. Reclaim does not lean on it either, so this is less a point over Reclaim than a note for people arriving from apps that do.

## On price

Reassign is free to start, no card. [Pro](https://reassign.ai/pricing) is $8 a month or $72 a year, with a 7-day Pro trial and no card to start it. Pro is where the sync, Ask AI, the energy curve, List and Timeline, and the MCP server and REST API live; the dial, the Inbox you can see, reflecting on yesterday and the new-tab dial are free.

Reclaim, on its own pricing page on 19 August 2026: Lite is free forever with the limits above; Starter is $10 per seat per month billed yearly or $12 monthly; a 14-day trial is advertised. Their pricing is per seat because it is built for teams, so a solo user on Starter pays more per month than a solo user on Reassign Pro, and a solo user on Lite pays nothing. Both statements are true, and which one matters depends on whether you need the eight-week range and the integrations. Check the page for yours; prices change and I do not get to freeze theirs.

## If you were also looking at Motion

Different engine, same family. Motion is the other full autopilot, and it replaces your calendar rather than working inside it. Reclaim is the cheaper and more calendar-native of the two. [The AI scheduling roundup](https://reassign.ai/resources/best-ai-scheduling-tools) puts both next to the proposers, and it is the page to read if you are still deciding whether you want an autopilot at all.

## How to decide in one evening

Do not read more comparisons. Do this instead.

Turn Reclaim on for a week with a focus goal and two habits, and let it move things. Then, one evening, put tomorrow on the dial, the whole day including the boring parts, and look at it at 3pm when something has already gone wrong.

One of two things will be true. Either you were glad the engine had already moved your focus block out of the way and you never had to think about it. Then keep Reclaim; it is a good engine. Or you wanted to see the whole day and make that call yourself, and the moved block was the thing that surprised you. Then the problem was never that your calendar lacked an autopilot. It was that you could not see the day, and one evening on a ring will tell you that faster than another week of comparisons.

## FAQ

### What is the best Reclaim.ai alternative?

It depends on which half of Reclaim you want to keep. If you want an engine that keeps defending habits, tasks and focus time inside Google Calendar or Outlook, Motion is the other full autopilot, and it costs more. If what you want is to see the whole day and make the calls yourself, a 24-hour circular planner like Reassign draws all 24 hours as one ring, pulls your Google or Outlook events onto it as blocks, and never moves anything on its own. Ask AI proposes cards you approve, and over MCP an agent edits with an undo token. The dial is free; sync, the energy curve and the MCP server are Pro at $8 a month.

### Is Reclaim.ai free?

Yes, with limits. Reclaim's pricing page lists a Lite plan marked free forever for one user, with a one-week scheduling range, one calendar sync, one scheduling link, and Google Tasks, Slack, Zoom and Google Meet as the only integrations. Paid plans start at Starter, $10 per seat per month billed yearly or $12 monthly, and add an eight-week range, three calendar syncs and the Todoist, Asana, ClickUp, Jira and Linear integrations. Checked on 19 August 2026.

### Does Reclaim move my meetings without asking?

It moves its own events, and that is the product. Reclaim's help centre says it responds in about 15 seconds to move your scheduled events, and that if a higher-priority meeting lands on a habit, task or Smart Meeting, it reschedules the overbooked event to the next best time. Its Outlook notes add that attendees may notice a lot of notifications about meetings being moved around. Locks and auto-lock are the brakes. Reclaim 2.0, in private beta, adds a Preview Mode so the assistant's changes wait for your approval; the background agents still run on their own.

### Does Reassign auto-schedule tasks like Reclaim does?

No, and it is not trying to. Reassign will not defend a habit, chase a weekly focus goal, or move a block out of a meeting's way in the background. You draw the day on a ring, your Google Calendar, Outlook and Todoist items land on it as blocks, and when you ask the AI for a plan it comes back as cards you approve or edit. Over MCP, an agent edits blocks with an undo token, and its schedule tool books a slot straight away only when exactly one fits. If you want a background engine, that is a real reason to stay with Reclaim.

### Which one has an MCP server I can use today?

Both have one, with a difference in access. Reclaim's MCP server at mcp.reclaim.ai is documented for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor, but only on Reclaim 2.0, which its own help centre calls a private beta you request by email. Reassign's MCP server is on Pro for anyone today, with 13 planning tools plus a feedback tool, and the same operations are a public REST API with an OpenAPI 3.1 spec. Checked on 19 August 2026.

### Does Reclaim have a mobile app?

Not a native one. Reclaim's help centre says it does not have native mobile apps for iOS or Android today, and points you at adding the web app to your home screen. Reassign is in the same position: an installable web app that works offline, plus a Chrome extension that puts today's dial on every new tab. Neither side gets a point here.

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More from Reassign, a 24-hour circular day planner: https://reassign.ai/llms.txt