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Todoist blends the simplicity of a personal to-do list with the depth of a robust work management platform, letting you organize, track, and analyze every corner of your life. Uncluttered and remarkably intuitive, it runs seamlessly across virtually every device, offering offline access, smooth team collaboration, and smart features like natural language input. While its free plan easily handles basic everyday tasks, upgrading to a Pro plan unlocks its full productivity potential. Thanks to its unmatched versatility, rich feature set, and polished user experience, Todoist earns an Editors' Choice award for personal task management and an exemplary five-star rating.
Todoist has three tiers of service: Beginner (free), Pro ($5 per person per month, billed annually), and Business ($8 per person per month, billed annually). One-week and two-week trials are available for the Pro and Business plans, respectively. Both require a payment method, but you can cancel immediately after signing up. For this review, I tested the Pro plan.
With a free account, you can create up to five personal projects and collaborate with up to five people on each one. This plan supports basic task reminders, list and kanban views, third-party integrations, up to three custom filters, and a week of activity history, among other things. You also get limited access to the AI-powered Ramble feature, which lets you create tasks using your voice. If all you want to do is manage some simple household tasks, Todoist’s free plan can handle that without issue. However, significantly more features are available with a subscription.
The Pro plan significantly expands feature limits, for example, by unlocking 150 custom filters and 300 personal projects. It also introduces a calendar view, custom reminders, deadlines, task duration tracking, unlimited activity history, a variety of AI features, and more. If you’re serious about task management, the Pro plan is your best option.
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Todoist’s Business tier, unsurprisingly, targets larger teams. It gives every member of your team all the features from the Pro level. But more importantly, it accommodates up to 1,000 team members and guests across a shared workspace and 500 projects. With this plan, you can assign permissions and roles, file projects in team folders, and share templates, to name just a few features. If you’re planning on using Todoist at your company, the Business option is the way to go.
Todoist’s premium plans cost much less than some competitors, such as Asana ($10.99 per user per month, billed annually), but the same as some others, such as OmniFocus ($5 per month). Todoist doesn’t offer a one-time purchase option, unlike Things 3. You can accomplish a lot with Todoist for free, but some other apps are a bit more generous. Asana’s free plan, for example, includes a calendar view and supports file uploads of up to 100MB, both of which Todoist locks behind a paid plan.
Todoist has apps for every major desktop (macOS, Linux, and Windows), mobile (Android and iOS), and smartwatch (WatchOS and WearOS) platform. It's a cloud-based service, so all your tasks and notes sync automatically (and reliably) to every instance. If you use the app offline, any changes will sync the next time your device connects to the internet.
If you've ever used a to-do app long-term, you know that you end up looking at your list of tasks a lot. Suffice it to say that you don't want it to be an eyesore. Todoist has not only a highly functional design but also a visually pleasing one that supports custom color themes and a dark mode. Just don't expect background images or anything more stylized. It's far more enjoyable to use than alternatives such as the somewhat cumbersome TickTick.
Whereas project management apps and even some work management apps, such as Asana, can initially overwhelm you with a myriad of buttons and toggles, Todoist doesn't. It's thankfully straightforward and uncluttered, letting you focus on your tasks in the default list view or on the optional calendar and kanban boards.
Still, you should set aside a little time to figure out how to create tasks, schedule due dates, add comments, mark tasks as complete, and learn other core functions. You gradually discover its depth the more you use it.
Tasks are at the heart of Todoist, and they're easy to create. Simply click Add task and input as much or as little information as you like. This could include just a name, or comments, a date, a description, a deadline, labels, a location, reminders (including geolocation-based ones), a priority, and subtasks.
One of Todoist’s main features is its robust natural language support. For example, if you want a task to repeat every Monday, you can just type "every Monday" or shorten it to "ev Mon" right next to the task name. Todoist then creates a new instance of the task due next Monday whenever you mark the previous one as complete.
You can add tasks to projects to group related ones together. For example, I created a project for my personal tasks to separate them from work-related ones. Projects can have distinct descriptions, names, and colors. You can also start with a project template if you don’t want to make your own; many different templates are available across a variety of topics, from personal projects, such as moving, to work-related tasks, such as a hiring pipeline.
Alternatively, you can sort your tasks by labels. For example, rather than creating a dedicated project for Personal tasks, I added a "Personal" label to them. Then I filtered my tasks by that label using the Display button visible in any task view. You can also filter tasks by assignee, deadline, and priority, or sort them however you want from the same menu.
Beyond filters and projects, different tabs and views also help you organize tasks. Your Inbox shows all your tasks, while Today focuses on just what’s due now. Upcoming lays out everything ahead. With each tab, you can swap between calendar, kanban, and list views from the aforementioned Display menu. Meanwhile, the Reporting tab gives you a bird's-eye view of your tasks, so you can easily filter them by completion status, project, recently added, and more, as well as export this information to a markdown document.
If you're into gamification, Todoist lets you set daily and weekly goals and monitor progress toward them to earn Karma points. These don’t really do anything, but you do get badges depending on how many you accumulate, which you can also collect by using various Todoist 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 others to one of your projects. Invitees need a Todoist account to start collaborating.
Once a collaborator accepts your invitation, you can assign them tasks. They also have the power to assign tasks to you. You can also add comments to any task to share information with your collaborators. Todoist lets you customize the alerts you receive in the account settings section so you don't see one for every little change. For example, I turned off notifications for tasks assigned to me because I regularly check in for new tasks myself. In the settings, you can also specify whether you want to get notifications via email, the mobile app, or not at all.
As for third-party integrations, Todoist works with a variety of automation, messaging, note-taking, time-tracking, and other productivity apps. The connections are easy to set up and work as expected.
With the Slack integration, for example, you can send a task to your Todoist account simply by using a command. You can connect Gmail or Outlook to turn any email into a task, and sync task due dates to Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar. Browser integrations 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 things you need to research. For example, I’ve been meaning to read this article on storing condiments, so I installed Todoist’s Google Chrome extension, right-clicked on the page, and selected Add to Todoist to create a new task. As always, the usefulness of these integrations depends on your particular workflows.
Todoist provides a suite of AI features under the Todoist Assist umbrella. Individual features include Email Assist, Filter Assist, and Task Assist. Email Assist automatically converts emails into Todoist tasks. Filter Assist lets you set up filters using natural language. Lastly, Task Assist helps you set up tasks by providing AI-generated suggestions.
Your mileage may vary with these features, but I found Filter Assist most useful. That's convenient because Filter Assistant is the only AI assist feature you can use for free. I also tried using the Filter Assist tool to create a filter for high-priority tasks due in October and beyond, which Todoist created without issue. Filter Assist even shows you a preview of the filter you build, highlighting the tasks it would apply to.
As mentioned, Ramble is an AI-powered voice-to-tasks feature. Think of Ramble as an extension of Todoist's natural-language support for creating tasks. Simply describe a task in your own voice, and Ramble creates a relevant task you can later adjust. As long as you speak clearly, this tool generally works well. Still, as someone who doesn’t often use speech-based features, I wish I could just describe my task over text. Sure, Todoist supports natural language, but that means it can translate “every Monday” into a task that repeats every Monday, not that it can make sense of an open-ended description. For example, when I told Ramble, “I need to replace my air conditioner filter in six months. Wait, no, five months,” it set up a task due in five months. I would like to be able to type something similarly unstructured instead.
That said, I like how focused Todoist’s AI features are and how they don't intrude on the experience. Asana, for comparison, is much more heavy-handed about pushing AI, branding itself as an “OS for human-agent teams.” That sort of billing kills my interest; I primarily just want to be able to track personal and work tasks.
Todoist’s privacy policy is fairly standard, so don’t expect much in the way of privacy. The company collects a variety of information from account registration data to IP addresses, including all user content (such as filters, projects, and tasks). Then, Todoist retains wide latitude to use your data however it sees fit, whether that’s improving its services or for other analysis. Todoist anonymizes your information when possible and doesn’t use it for training its AI models, at least.
I couldn’t find any evidence of major Todoist hacks or leaks in recent memory, so you likely don’t have to worry too much about the security of your information. However, like with any online service, I generally recommend not sharing anything too sensitive with it. It supports multi-factor authentication, which I recommend using.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Todoist)
Todoist
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
Combining an inviting design with seamless cross-platform reliability, Todoist makes creating, organizing, and collaborating on tasks completely effortless. Powerful features like natural language parsing, custom views, and smart AI tools give you total flexibility over how you track your life, while an uncluttered interface ensures you never feel overwhelmed. While its generous free tier easily covers basic household to-dos, upgrading to the Pro plan unlocks the app's full productivity potential. For its near-perfect balance of simplicity, power, and value, Todoist remains an undisputed Editors' Choice winner and earns a rare, well-deserved five-star rating.
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About Our Expert
I’ve been writing about consumer technology and video games for over a decade at a variety of publications, including Destructoid, GamesRadar+, Lifewire, PCGamesN, Trusted Reviews, and What Hi-Fi?, among many others. At PCMag, I review AI and productivity software—everything from chatbots to to-do list apps. In my free time, I’m likely cooking something, playing a game, or tinkering with my computer.
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