Todoist is top-notch to-do list software that lets you geek out on organizing, tracking, and analyzing all the tasks in your life. It offers extremely intuitive apps for practically every platform, lets you collaborate with others, doesn’t require an internet connection, and even supports advanced features like natural language input. The free version is reasonably capable, too, though most people are better off paying for the feature-packed Pro tier. Given its exceptional capabilities and ease of use, Todoist earns our Editors’ Choice award for personal task management and an exemplary five-star rating.
How Much Does Todoist Cost?
Todoist has three tiers of service: Beginner (free), Pro ($5 per person per month), and Business ($8 per person per month). You get a discount with each plan if you pay for a full year in advance. Prices for the annual subscriptions haven’t changed in the past couple of years.
(Credit: Todoist/PCMag)
With the more-than-adequate free account, you can create up to five personal projects and collaborate with up to five people per project. This plan also supports up to three custom filters, list and kanban task board views, file uploads of up to 5MB, one week of activity history, and third-party integrations. However, this tier holds back a few features, such as an AI assistant (which helps you craft more useful tasks and filters), multiple calendar layouts, task duration tracking, and deadlines.
Most people should upgrade to the Pro plan, which unlocks those aforementioned features. This tier also supports 100MB file uploads, 150 filter views, automatic backups, custom task reminders, and unlimited activity history. At this level, you can manage up to 300 projects and collaborate with five people per personal project.
The Business account includes everything from the Pro account. It supports 300 personal projects per member, and each member is eligible to participate in 500 total personal or team projects. Each team project can support up to 250 people. Team member and team guest limits top out at 1,000 each. This tier also gets you centralized billing, priority support, and a team inbox.
Similar to-do list apps charge around the same or a little less. Toodledo has four versions: Free, Standard ($4.99 per month), Plus ($7.99 per month), and Business (custom pricing). One hitch with Toodledo is that you can collaborate only with one other member with the free account. TickTick offers a free account as well as a paid Premium plan ($3.99 per month). It’s not as nice to use as Todoist, however.
If your needs lean more toward collaborative professional work, we recommend Asana, our other Editors’ Choice winner for the category. Asana’s free tier gives you a good feel for the experience and might even be all you ever need. Paid accounts start at $13.49 per person per month, which is more in line with business-grade tools. Again, Asana is more of a work management system than a traditional to-do list app for personal use.
Getting Started With Todoist
Todoist has apps for every major platform: Android, iOS, iPadOS, Linux, macOS, WatchOS, Wear OS, and Windows. It’s also available on the web. Todoist is a cloud-based service, so all your tasks and notes sync automatically (and reliably) to every instance you use. If you use the app offline, changes sync the next time your device connects to the internet.
Additionally, you can add a plugin to Gmail and Outlook that lets you turn any email into a task. You can also sync due dates to Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar, as well as connect with any calendar that supports outside subscription feeds. Browser plug-ins let you save web pages as tasks. The name of the web page becomes the task title, which you can change, and Todoist saves the page’s link, too. This is useful for creating a list of articles you want to read, jobs you want to apply to, or companies and people you need to research.
(Credit: Todoist/PCMag)
As for third-party integration options, Todoist works with a variety of messaging, note-taking, time-tracking, and other productivity apps. With the Slack integration, for example, you can send a task to your Todoist account simply by typing in a few simple words.
If you’ve ever used a to-do list app long-term, 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 you don’t want to look at the app that’s supposed to be helping you stay on top of everything. Todoist has not only a highly functional design but also a visually pleasing one that supports custom color themes. Don’t expect background images or anything more stylized, but dark themes are available.
A huge part of what makes Todoist successful is its ability to pack in tons of features without feeling overwhelming. Its interface design keeps the experience simple and light. Just note that it might take a little time to figure out how to use all the core features, such as creating tasks, scheduling due dates, adding comments, and marking tasks done. You gradually discover its depth the more you use it.
Creating Task Lists
Setting up the app is straightforward. First, you create projects. You can color-code these to help you differentiate them. Projects let you separate your personal to-do list from your work tasks and compartmentalize lists, like a grocery shopping list. You can also create projects for one-time events, such as buying or selling a house.
(Creidt: Todoist/PCMag)
Next, you add tasks to your projects with as much or as little detail as you need. Tasks can have subtasks. You can reorder tasks and subtasks by dragging and dropping them; just be sure you don’t have a sorting option active, which disables manual sorting. 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 by time or geolocation are available for Pro and Business users, although free users still get automatic task reminders.
If you need help setting up projects, you can explore Todoist’s template gallery. It has 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 and Sorting
Once you set up multiple tasks, you might want to 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 deadline of today) and Upcoming (tasks with deadlines in the coming days). Any Overdue tasks will also show up here. 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 collect tasks labeled Home with a high priority rating. If you follow the Getting Things Done method of productivity, you can use labels to add context. That way, you focus on only those tasks relevant at any given time or place.
Todoist offers custom sorting and grouping, too. These tools organize tasks 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. Toggling custom sorting and grouping is fast and simple via a drop-down option at the top right of the interface.
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 to let you view your tasks as cards in columns that you name however you want. In the image below, the columns relate to different subcategories within the project (a shopping list).
(Creidt: Todoist/PCMag)
For task management, the columns of a board can relate to a workflow. In other words, you can move the task card from one column to another as the state of the task changes. Imagine columns 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 it to the Done column.
Alternatively, you can choose the Calendar view, where you see the tasks you have set up each week. If you have tasks with both an assigned date and time, you see that information within specific time intervals. This feature can be particularly useful for keeping track of appointments, basic targets for completing tasks, and meetings. Tasks without an assigned time appear at the very top of each day. You can also switch the Calendar view from weekly to monthly to see all of a day’s tasks in its square.
You can further simply any of these views by applying filters for a task’s Date, Deadline, Label, and Priority (if you set any). For the Date and Deadline filters, you can choose between a handful of preset options: today, this week, the next 7 days, this month, or the next 30 days. You can even select “no date” for all those tasks you didn’t set a specific day for. For reference, here’s how Todoist differentiates between Dates and Deadlines.
What happens to tasks when you don’t complete them by their deadlines? Well, Todoist will ask if you want to reschedule all those tasks. You can choose exactly when you want them to show up on your list again, such as the following Monday. It works on all your overdue tasks in one fell swoop, too.
Natural Language Input and Quick Actions
When you are 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, for instance, you can type “every Monday” or even shorten it to “ev Mon” right alongside the task name. Todoist will then create a new instance of the task due 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. Todoist highlights such text to indicate when it recognizes it as a date. You can even go a step further and type “every Monday at 9 a.m.” to assign a time to a task. If you’re trying to type a word into the name of your task that’s not a date, like “Watch the movie Friday the 13th,” simply press backspace once—the highlight disappears.
(Credit: Todoist/PCMag)
You can add other details through shorthand, which means you don’t have to pick up your fingers from the keyboard while you write down your tasks. To assign a new task to a particular project, use a # symbol before the project name. In shared projects, you can add a + sign before someone’s name to assign a task to them. The @ symbol lets you add labels.
If you use voice assistant apps, such as Google Assistant or Siri, 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’s due date to today, tomorrow, next week, in a month, or any other date you choose.
Collaboration Features
Whether you want to share a grocery shopping list with someone in your home or need to closely coordinate a work project from start to finish, Todoist can help. To collaborate in Todoist, you first must invite collaborators to one of your projects. Invitees need to sign up for a Todoist account but don’t need to upgrade to the Pro tier.
Once a collaborator accepts your invitation, you can assign them tasks. They also have the power to assign tasks to you. You can upload a file and add comments to any task to share information with your collaborators. Todoist also lets you customize the alerts you receive if you don’t need to know about every little change. You can change these settings via the the account settings section, as well as choose whether you want to get them via email, mobile, or not at all.
Backups and Productivity Reports
Todoist keeps automatic backups of your data. When we explored this section of our account, we found a list of backups with clear time and date stamps. You can download any of them and get a zipped CSV file for each of your projects from that date and time, which you can use to restore your data or move it to another app. Similarly, you can download CSV files from other apps and import them into Todoist.
(Credit: Todoist/PCMag)
The app tracks what you get done and generates a productivity report that it updates daily. You can view the report by daily 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. For instance, you can set a goal to complete three tasks every weekday, skipping weekend activities. The more often you hit your goal, the higher your Karma score.
Verdict: Perfect for Personal To-Do Lists
Todoist is an exceptional personal to-do list app with an inviting and functional user experience that extends across every major platform. It’s adept at letting you create, view, and organize your tasks in a way that makes the most sense, enables easy collaboration, and even helps you stay on track with simple productivity reports. The free version may end up being enough for your needs, too, though upgrading to the paid Pro tier lets you experience the app’s full power. For all these reasons, Todoist is an Editors’ Choice winner and receives a rare five-star rating.
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The Bottom Line
With a superb interface, apps for every mainstream platform, and effective collaboration tools, Todoist is the to-do list app to beat.
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