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 Premium level is absolutely the way to go. If you need an app to organize your tasks, either by yourself or in collaboration with others, Todoist will keep you happy and productive. It’s an Editors’ Choice winner.
Asana, our other Editors’ Choice pick in this category, straddles the line between to-do list app and work-management app. You certainly can use it for both. 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, Premium ($4 per month or $36 per year), and Business ($6 per person per month or $60 per person per year). The company gives discounts to students, educators, and nonprofit organizations.
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 up to 80 projects. 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.
Premium is worth $36 per year, however, if you want those features we just mentioned. With this tier, you also get productivity reports, automatic backups, email forwarding, calendar sync, project templates, an activity log, and priority support. 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, priority support, along with everything that comes with the Premium account.
How Do Todoist’s Prices Compare?
Similar to-do list apps charge around the same or more. Any.do, for example, charges more than Todoist for an account when you pay monthly ($5.99) and about the same when you pay for a year upfront ($35.88).
Toodledo charges $3.99 per month or $35.88 annually for a Standard plan, and $5.99 per month or $59.88 annually for a Plus plan. One hitch with Toodledo is that you can only collaborate with paying members.
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. Again, Asana is more of a work-management system than a traditional to-do list app, so more typically used in business settings than as a personal to-do list app, although you certainly can use it that way.
What’s New in Todoist?
Since we last reviewed Todoist, the app has added a Board view. Within the realm of productivity software, dozens of apps have embraced the concept of boards, which is based on kanban boards, so it’s no surprise that Todoist now has them, too.
As they relate to task-management, boards are a way to view tasks and move them through a workflow. Imagine you have a physical board, divided into columns called To Do, Doing, and Done. Next you take a pile of sticky notes and write tasks on each of them with as much detail as you like, and you stick all the notes in the To Do column. As you (and your collaborators) start working on the tasks, you move them to the Doing column. When you complete a task, you move its sticky note to the Done column.
The columns you create don’t have to be called To Do, Doing, Done, and there can be more than three of them. It’s a flexible system that you can use in any number of personal or professional ways.
Todoist has recently added new sorting and grouping options as well. Sorting and grouping tools let you see 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.
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.
Setting Up Todoist
Setting up the app is straightforward. First, you create projects. Projects can be color-coded to help you differentiate among them. Then 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. Tasks can also have reminders and labels, sometimes called tags in other apps. Labels can be whatever you want, and you can assign each one a color. Reminders are plentiful. Email notifications, push notifications, alerts by SMS, and location-based reminders (Premium only) are all available.
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.
Once you’ve set up your Todoist account and have a good number of tasks written down, you might create a custom filter—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, for example, you can 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 how you can use labels to add what Allen calls context to any task. That way, you focus on only the tasks that are relevant in any given time or place.
Natural Language Input and Quick Actions
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 “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 other Fri,” “ev 15th,” and so forth.
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.
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 Premium.
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
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, only because I am a bit of a reports and data geek. With a Premium account, Todoist tracks what you get done and generates a small productivity report that it updates daily. It also gives you a score, which it calls a Karma Score. To use this feature, you set a goal for how many tasks per day you hope to complete. If you aim to check off three tasks per day, then any day when you hit that mark counts as a success. The more successful days you have, the higher your Karma. You can tell Todoist to ignore certain days of the week and even use a vacation mode option to pause your Karma tracking.
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.
Todoist or Not Todoist?
The paid Premium 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 those reasons, Todoist Premium 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 PCMag’s tips for better, more-effective to-do lists.
