If you're looking for the best to-do list app—one that works on all your devices, tracks your productivity, and lets you geek out on organizing and analyzing your life—Todoist is it. Todoist makes apps for all major devices and platforms, and it couldn't be easier to use. There's a free version, which is very good, though the Pro level is absolutely the way to go. If you need an app that will keep you productive with tools for organizing your tasks, either by yourself or in collaboration with others, get Todoist. It's a five-star Editors' Choice winner.
Asana, our other Editors' Choice in this category, straddles the line between a to-do list app and a work-management app. It even includes project management capabilities, though I hesitate to call it traditional project management software. For collaborative professional work, we prefer Asana slightly to Todoist. Conversely, we like Todoist a smidgen more for personal task management and lightweight teamwork.
How Much Does Todoist Cost?
Todoist has three tiers of service: free, Pro ($5 per month or $48 per year), and Business ($8 per person per month or $72 per person per year). The company gives discounts to students, educators, and nonprofit organizations. Prices for the annual subscriptions are up more than 30% compared with what Todoist was charging in early 2021. In the grand scheme of things, they're still fair prices, but this is a sharp increase worth noting.
The free account offers a more-than-adequate experience, but it holds back a few features you may want. Reminders, labels, filters, different color themes for the interface, and the ability to comment on tasks and upload files are all missing from this version. With a free account, you can collaborate with up to 5 people per project and manage five projects at a time. If you're using Todoist for your personal to-do list and maybe some shared task lists for a household, the free version may suit you just fine.
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Pro is worth paying for if you want those features that are missing from the free account, and I suspect most people do. With this tier, you also get reminders, productivity reports, automatic backups, email forwarding, calendar sync, project templates, an activity log, priority support, and more. You can manage up to 300 projects and collaborate with 25 people per project.
The Business account supports 500 projects and collaboration with up to 50 people per project. You also get a team inbox, admin and member roles, centralized billing, and priority support, along with everything that comes with the Pro account.
Similar to-do list apps charge around the same or a little less. Toodledo has four versions: Free, Standard (about $36 per year), Plus (about $60 per year), and a Business subscription with custom pricing. One hitch with Toodledo is that you can only collaborate with paying members. That's not the case with Todoist. TickTick offers a free account as well as a paid Premium plan that costs a very reasonable $27.99 per year. Todoist has a superior interface and user experience to Toodledo and TickTick, however.
Asana has a free tier of service that, like Todoist, gives you a more-than-adequate feel for the experience and may even be sufficient for some people. Paid accounts start at $13.49 per person per month or $131.88 per person per year. Those prices are more in line with business-grade tools. Again, Asana is more of a work-management system than a traditional to-do list app, so it's more typically used in business than as a personal to-do list app.
Getting Started With Todoist
Todoist is a cloud-based service, so all your tasks and notes sync automatically to any device where you use the app. If you use the app offline, your changes sync the next time your device connects to the internet.
Todoist has apps for every major platform: Android, iPhone, iPad, macOS, Windows, Android Wear, Apple Watch, browser extensions, and the web. Syncing is reliable and effortless.
A huge part of what makes Todoist such a wonderfully productive app is that it's packed full of features, but it never feels overwhelming. The design of the interface keeps the experience simple and light. When you first start using the app, it takes little time to figure out how to use all the core functionality, such as creating tasks, scheduling due dates, adding comments, and marking tasks done. The more you use Todoist, however, the more depth and features you discover.
Creating Your Task Lists With Todoist
Setting up the app is straightforward. First, you create projects. Projects can be color-coded to help you differentiate among them. Projects let you separate your personal to-do list from your work tasks, but they also let you compartmentalize lists, like a grocery shopping list. You can also create projects for one-time events, like a to-do list for buying or selling a house.
Next, you add tasks to your projects and as much or as little details as you need. Tasks can have subtasks. You can reorder tasks and subtasks by dragging and dropping them where you want them; just be sure you don't have an active sorting option already applied, which disables sorting by hand. Tasks can also have labels, sometimes called tags in other apps. Labels can be whatever you want, and you can assign each one a color. Reminders (for paying subscribers only) by time or geolocation are available, as are general push notifications when a task is due or when someone else marks a task as done.
If you need help setting up projects, you can explore Todoist's template gallery. It contains templates for projects across a variety of topics, from personal projects, such as moving to a new house, to work-related tasks, like a hiring pipeline.
Custom Views in Todoist
Once you've set up your Todoist account and have a good number of tasks, you might create a custom filter. A custom filter is a view of tasks that meet specific criteria. By default, you get views for Today (all tasks with a due date of today) and Upcoming (tasks with deadlines in the coming days). With custom filters you can, for example, make a view that shows only tasks due either today or tomorrow that have the same tag, regardless of their project. Or your view might be tasks labeled Home with a high priority rating. People who follow the Getting Things Done method of productivity (developed and trademarked by David Allen, who wrote a book of the same name) will notice that you can use labels to add what Allen calls context to any task. That way, you focus on only the tasks that are relevant at any given time or place.
Todoist offers custom sorting and grouping. These tools show you the tasks that matter to you grouped in ways that help you see what's what and quickly make sense of the information. For example, you can have Todoist show you all tasks due today sorted by who is responsible for them. Or you might want to see all tasks in a particular project sorted by priority rating but grouped by the person assigned to do them. Enabling and disabling custom sorting and grouping is fast and simple with a dropdown option for it at the top right.
If you aren't keen to view your tasks in a list, you can switch to a board view. You can use boards however you want, but the main idea is that they let you view your tasks as cards in columns that you can name whatever you want. In the image below, the columns related to different subcategories within the project (a shopping list). As they relate to task management, the columns of a board can relate to a workflow, and you can move the task card from one column to another as the state of the task changes. Imagine the columns are called To Do, Doing, and Done. As you (and your collaborators) start working on the tasks, you move them from the To Do column into the Doing column. When you complete a task, you move the task to the Done column.
Natural Language Input and Quick Actions in Todoist
When setting up due dates, including those for recurring tasks, Todoist lets you use natural language input. If you want a task to repeat every Monday, you can type "every Monday" or even shorten it to "ev Mon" right alongside the task name, and Todoist will create a new instance of the task due on the next Monday every time you mark the previous one complete. It can read other shorthand, too, like "tom" for tomorrow, "ev 15th," and so forth. You know when Todoist has interpreted text as a date because it adds a highlight around it. If you're trying to type a word into the name of your task that you don't want interpreted as a due date, like "Watch the movie Friday the 13th," you simply press backspace once—the highlight disappears and no due date is added.
You can add other details through shorthand, which means you don't have to pick up your fingers from the keyboard while writing down your tasks. To assign a new task to a particular project, you use a # symbol before the project name. In shared projects, you can use add + sign before someone's name to assign the task to them. The @ key lets you add labels.
If you use voice assistant apps, such as Siri and Google Assistant, you can set up Todoist to create and edit tasks using voice commands.
In the Todoist mobile apps, quick action buttons appear when you swipe on any task. These buttons let you change the task to be due today, tomorrow, next week, in a month, or any date you choose.
Collaborating in Todoist
Whether you want to share a grocery shopping list with someone in your home or you need to closely tag-team a work project from start to finish, Todoist can help.
To collaborate in Todoist, you first must invite collaborators to one of your projects. They'll need to sign up for a Todoist account, but they don't need to upgrade to Pro.
Once a collaborator has accepted your invitation to join your project, you can assign tasks to them, and they have the power to assign tasks to you as well. You can upload a file and add comments to any task to share information with your collaborators. You can customize the alerts you receive if you don't need to know about every little change that your collaborators make.
Smart Scheduling With a Pretty Backdrop
If you've ever used and stuck with a to-do list before, you know that you end up looking at your list of tasks a lot. Hopefully, it's not an eyesore. It's a sad state of affairs if the app helping you stay on top of everything you need to do is ugly. If you don't want to look at it, how will you get anything done?
Todoist has not only a highly functional design, but also a pleasing one that improves when you choose a color theme that suits you. All the options are all solid colors, so don't expect background images or anything more stylized, but it still goes a long way to keeping the app easy on the eyes. Dark themes are included, too.
What happens to tasks when you don't complete them by their deadlines? If you reschedule tasks regularly, Todoist's automatic Scheduler will save you the time and hassle of having to change due dates manually. When assignments become overdue, Todoist asks to reschedule them for you. The app then makes intelligent guesses based on your previous history. Do you tend to get the most done on Thursdays? Do you only have one other task on your list for Monday? The Scheduler takes a stab at finding appropriate times. It works on all your overdue tasks in one fell swoop, too. If the new dates don't feel right, you can always change them.
Backups and Productivity Reports in Todoist
Todoist keeps automatic backups of your data. When I explored this section of my account, which lives in the Settings, I found a list of backups clearly labeled with time and date stamps. You can download any of them and get a Zipped file containing a CSV file for each of your projects from that date and time, which you could use to restore your data or move it to another app.
The last feature I want to mention is reports. Todoist tracks what you get done and generates a small productivity report that it updates daily. You can view the report by daily tasks completed or weekly tasks completed, and the report shows tasks color-coded by project. A custom Karma score gives you another way to track how much you get done by individual statistics and goals you set, such as a goal to complete three tasks every weekday, skipping weekend activity. The more often you hit your goal, the higher your Karma score.
Todoist App Integrations
In addition to having an app for all the major platforms, Todoist offers a range of plugins and integrations. They make it easier to add tasks to your to-do list from a different app.
For example, you can add a plugin to Gmail and Outlook that lets you turn any email into a task. You can also install a browser plug-in for Chrome and Firefox that lets you save web pages as tasks. The name of the web page becomes the task title, which you can change, and the page's link gets saved in the task, too. It's a useful implementation for creating a list of articles you want to read, jobs you want to apply to, or companies and people you need to research. There's a function for Safari that does the same thing, but it's a part of the Todoist macOS app rather than a separate plugin.
In terms of syncing due dates to another calendar, there are quick buttons for integrating with Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar, plus a calendar link so that you can connect with any calendar that supports an outside subscription feed.
Other integration options include Slack, so that you can send a task to your Todoist account by typing in a few simple words of text, and dozens of other options.
Is There Anything Better Than Todoist?
The paid Pro version of Todoist is one of the most feature-rich to-do apps on the market. It has a simple and functional interface, great collaboration capabilities, and apps for nearly every device so that you can get to your to-do list no matter where you are. For all these reasons, Todoist Pro is an Editors' Choice winner for to-do list apps.
Whether you choose Todoist or another app, you can get some helpful hints for making the most of your choice from our tips for better, more-effective to-do lists.
With a superb interface, apps for every mainstream platform, and collaboration support, Todoist is the absolute best to-do list app we've tested.
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