The short answer
It's tempting to line these two up as competitors, but they really answer different questions. AANA Motion is a map. It plots nearly every place a CRNA works in the country, hiring or not, and layers on the kind of context you'd want when you're thinking about where to live and work: home prices, commute times, which states have opted out of supervision. crna.jobs is a job board in the traditional sense, showing the roles that are open right now with the details filled in.
So Motion is the tool for "where might I want to be in a year," and crna.jobs is the tool for "what can I apply to this week." If you're an AANA member mapping out a move down the road, Motion is genuinely useful. When you're ready to actually interview, you'll want the active listings.
What is AANA Motion?
Motion describes itself as career exploration rather than a job board, and the comparison it likes is Zillow: an interactive map of CRNA employers you can browse the way you'd browse houses. Nearly every facility in the country where a nurse anesthetist works shows up on it. You can filter by site status, practice setting, and employment type, follow a market or a specific site to be notified when something changes, read community data layers, and reach out to employers that interest you.
Access is the first thing to know. Motion is open only to AANA members, so it assumes you're already paying for membership in the association, which counts 60,000-plus CRNAs. For employers, pricing is per location rather than per posting: a single hiring site starts at $1,350 for three months with unlimited job posts.
Sites fall into three states on the map. A hiring site is actively advertising openings. A networking site has nothing posted but wants to build relationships for roles down the line. An inactive site is a place CRNAs work where nothing has been activated yet, and Motion routes your interest through an AANA liaison. In practice, most of the map is networking or inactive rather than hiring. Alongside it, members get the association's career support: liaisons who help with research and introductions, plus the wider AANA benefits around education and advocacy.
Where Motion excels
For longer-horizon planning, nothing else quite does what Motion does. If you're eighteen months out from a move and want to understand a market before anyone there is hiring, the map lets you study it, follow the sites you like, and get a nudge when one flips to hiring. The community layers are the standout feature, turning a job search into something closer to relocation research: you can see what housing and commutes look like in a place before you ever talk to an employer.
It's also good at early, low-pressure contact. On networking sites you can raise your hand with an employer who isn't formally hiring yet, which is a useful way to get on a radar early. On the quieter inactive sites, an AANA liaison will make the introduction for you and research the opportunity on your behalf. And if you already belong to AANA for continuing education or advocacy, all of this comes with the membership at no extra cost.
Where Motion falls short for immediate job search
The same design that makes Motion good for exploring makes it slower for an urgent search. You can filter the map to hiring sites, but most of what's plotted is networking or inactive, so you're browsing a landscape of employers more than a feed of current openings. Reaching them is more of a conversation than a click: you send an "I'm Interested" note, or wait for a liaison to broker the introduction on an inactive site, rather than filtering, reading the particulars, and applying.
The employer pricing shapes what you'll see, too. Charging per location suits large health systems with fixed addresses better than it suits locum agencies, staffing firms, or a practice with a sudden short-term gap, so locum and PRN work can be thin. And the whole thing sits behind AANA membership, which makes sense if you're already a member but is a steep entry point if all you need is to see what's open.
Where CRNA Jobs is stronger
crna.jobs is narrower on purpose. Everything on it is an active opening, and once a role closes it comes off the board, so you're never reverse-engineering a facility profile to work out whether anyone's hiring. Each listing carries the employment type, setting, location, and pay range in the same place, and postings are reviewed before they go up, so the vague ones don't make it through.
Because it's organized around individual roles rather than fixed sites, it also handles locum, PRN, and per-diem work comfortably, the kind of short-term arrangement a per-location model tends to miss. It's free and open to any CRNA, with no membership in the way. You can filter by state, employment type, and setting, save those searches for weekly alerts, and apply in a click, with a dashboard that tracks what you've sent and whether it's been viewed.
The candidate profile is anonymous and NPI-verified. It shows you're a credentialed CRNA without showing who you are, and recruiters will be able to bring you specific roles while your identity stays private until you respond. For locum decisions, the pay calculator estimates after-tax take-home in any of the 50 states.
What you give up with CRNA Jobs
What Motion has that we don't is the weight of the association behind it. We're not part of AANA, we don't carry decades of institutional standing, and we don't offer career liaisons, CV coaching, or cost-of-living layers laid over a national map. Motion is a career-planning environment; crna.jobs is a focused tool for finding and landing a job. The upside of that focus is that everything here is a real opening, with the details attached and the means to act on it.
Should you use both?
If you're an AANA member, the two genuinely complement each other. Lean on Motion for the long game: research markets, follow the facilities that interest you, study the cost-of-living layers, and let a liaison open doors at places that aren't formally hiring. Lean on crna.jobs when you're ready to move: filtered searches, weekly alerts, one-click applications, and a quick read on locum economics from the calculator. One answers where you might want to work someday; the other answers what's hiring now.
Our recommendation
If you're job-hunting today, start on crna.jobs. Filter to your states and the kind of work you want, save your searches, and build an anonymous profile so recruiters will be able to bring opportunities to you. If you're a member and your move is still six months or a year out, spend time in Motion mapping the markets you're curious about and following the sites you'd consider. Just don't lean on it as your only search tool. When it's time to interview, you'll want the live listings with the pay attached.