18th Jun, 2024
Choose the best to do list application for your needs handling tasks at work. Our selection and recommendations come from our expertise in reviewing hundreds of task apps, let's get started.
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Task management applications come in many shapes & sizes.
Handling your task management can be one of the best ways to reduce stress, calculate what's important, and prioritize what your week looks like as a busy professional, stay-at-home dad, or teacher. Picking the best to-do list app can be difficult thanks to how many options are available when browsing the App Stores.
Many of them look the same but have a wide variety of abilities. So we've distilled the best of the task management apps and put them together in a list to best suit you.
A task management app is software that helps you list your tasks and manage them into organized lists. Commonly known as a to-do list app, millions of people use task management apps every day to better their schedule & plan their day.
Many people use task management apps in tandem with systems like Getting Things Done by David Allen, Eat That Frog by Brian Tracey, or the Bento Methodology, to better help them capture and organize tasks effectively.
The best task management, according to us, is Todoist. Todoist presents the most all-around features that allow for an easy way to capture tasks and organize them ahead.
Tool | Best For | Pricing ($) |
---|---|---|
All round task management | Free, $4 per month, annually | |
All-round use with calendar & habit tracking | Free, $3 per month, annually | |
Busy professionals looking for planner abilities | $19 per month, annually | |
AI-powered planning for tasks & projects | $19 per month, annually | |
Mindful task management & calendar planning | $16 per month, annually | |
Task management and personal projects | $49.99 macOS, $19.99 iPad, $9.99 iPhone | |
Collaborative tasks for teams and individuals | $8 per month, annually | |
Holistic task planning | $7.50 per month, annually |
Here are our recommendations for the best task management apps:
Todoist is an all-round task management app that is great for everyone.
As a recommendation, Todoist is easy to use and comes with projects, inbox, scheduling, list and board views, upcoming calendar views, and a healthy balance of smaller features. Capturing tasks is easy, managing tasks ahead of time with upcoming ones makes life easier & organizing projects and tasks into Kanban-style views makes life easier.
Using Todoist is easy and tends to be one of the more recommended tools if you're looking for something that isn't specific or specialist but does a good job of managing tasks in a traditional sense. Todoist is planning to add calendar mode in the next few months.
If you're looking for something that meets most of the needs, Todoist is brilliant. It is best suited for someone looking for something robust, easy to use, and without any advanced features like planner functions, guided planning & extensive integrations. We'd happily recommend Todoist to a busy professional or a retired gardener.
This is one of the more friendly task management apps on the market.
TickTick, much like Todoist, is a great all-round task management app.
Features like Kanban board (desktop), smart lists, calendar modes (premium), and habit tracking that allow you to better coordinate what you're working on. A lot of people say that compared to Todoist, TickTick brings more value as an all-around task app. TickTick is easy to use, with themes to customize projects and a simple nature to planning tasks. The habit tracking abilities are another bonus that a lot of people like to have with task management and come alongside your tasks, but not distracting them.
TickTick is also very well priced at $4 per month making it a much more approachable pricing than some of the other more powerful tools that include calendar abilities if you wanted to upgrade just for the calendar access that now syncs with Google Calendar.
TickTick is best for those who are looking between Todoist and this for something that will help you plan your week using solid task management methodologies. TickTick goes that step further with more views like calendar & timeline than Todoist and brings habit tracking as a bonus feature that many people like to keep within their task management hub.
Akiflow is perfect for time-poor, busy professionals.
One of the best to-do list apps on the market it also falls as a daily planner app that has been growing in popularity in the last few months. Daily planners like Akiflow want to focus more on the calendar and promote concepts like time-blocking that help to plan the day and Akiflow brings this ability to the forefront. Akiflow brings tasks, calendar & task consolidation which allows you to bring all your tasks from other apps into Akiflow for easier management of them all in one dashboard.
This is perfect for those who want something that will better help them manage what's important and reduce context-switching. Akiflow also has guided planning meeting scheduling and sharing that comes in apps like Calendly.
Important to remember that Akiflow is $19 per month (billed annually) meaning if budget is an issue, then Akiflow is instantly ruled out. But if budget isn't a worry, then Akiflow is a solid to-do app for those busy professionals who want to manage everything in one including meeting scheduling links.
Motion is an AI-powered task management application with project abilities.
Features like AI re-scheduling make Motion special for those who hate scheduling their priorities and time. Simply upload a task and give it some details and Motioon's system will start to organize what a day will look like recommended by their AI system. This has helped many people take the weight out of task administration which brings people's productivity down every day. Motion is one of the only AI-focused apps doing this.
As one of the better task management apps, Motion also brings light project management which helps you to plan tasks in collaborative views that you can keep to yourself or you can share with others Motion will invest more into this plan soon.
If you're okay with the price, Motion offers a great combination of AI features, meeting scheduling, and project management that might just make it an assistant for better managing the daily routine. Motion is best suited for busy professionals that want to better get some structure to their work day and want to remove more of the manual aspects of task management like organizing and allocating times for tasks.
Sunsama is one of the more mindful to-do list apps on this list.
It wants to help you to organize your week ahead with a focus on zoomed-out planning. Guided planning is one of the special elements of Sunsama that allows you to add your tasks and schedule them ahead. Sunsama brings a beautiful design that allows you to manage your tasks, calendar, and tasks from other apps in one base. Specifically, the sidebar that allows you to plot your schedule, manage your backlog of tasks, and use automation to better task flow makes life a lot easier too.
If you're struggling with your current task management system then Sunsama will give you a better way to plan with a focus on zooming out with weekly objectives, pomodoro timers, and task focus on quality versus quantity.
If you're in a rut with your task management app or system right now and see yourself constantly hitting burnout, then Sunsama could help rewire how you work.
Things 3 is one of the most attractive to-do apps.
Things is focused on yourself for planning tasks and light projects. It has features like capture, project management for individuals, scheduling tasks, Apple Calendar connection, section headers, and smaller features like "This Evening" that allow you to separate tasks and allocate them for the evening ahead. The simple nature of Things combined with the powerful features that allow you to better plan allows it to be a good solution.
A lot of people like Things 3 thanks to the pricing that offers one-off licenses that if bought on all devices total $79.99 (macOS, iPad & iPhone) and allow you to keep that license.
Things 3 is best for Apple-centric individuals, those who want to set and forget, avoid subscriptions, and use a well-built fluid task management app that offers a good set of features for managing tasks and light projects for your work.
Superlist is a great to-do app for teams and individuals.
Superlist offers a collaborative way to add tasks and share them within notes in small and medium-sized teams. It is a good way to capture tasks, plan them, and send and assign tasks to other team members. Superlist has a feature called projects that allows you to create a list that serves as a list and a note. This will enable you to add tasks and organize them as a team, but also coordinate notes alongside regular text formatting. Superlist also has some task integrations with apps like Microsoft To-Do and more.
Superlist is great for individuals who want a free tool that does a good amount in the subscription. If you want to begin to share tasks with a small team then Superlist is good and works well for collaborating on tasks and assigning them to others. If reminders are important to you Superlist offers free reminders as part of the basic package.
Timestripe wants to help you better schedule your goals with tasks.
The task management app allows you to add goals not just for this week, but for the next few weeks allowing you to plan and look more holistically at how you plan your day. Having your weekly objectives alongside your monthly goals can better help you assign tasks that might be more suitable to do and produce a more accurate trickle-down.
It also has abilities like "Climbs" which helps you to insert a recommended habit into your routine like "Read 5 Books in 21 Days" which will better align your focus with tasks that you need to tick off to complete what's on the habit objective.
For those who want something more zoomed out, Timestripe is going to help them plan their tasks with their goals in mind. Having goals next to your tasks can better help you achieve success going by the saying "what gets measured gets managed".
Timestripe is also not as expensive as apps like Akiflow and Motion but gives you a unique approach to task management.
The to-do list app on iPhone is called Reminders. It comes free to all iPhone and macOS users and once signed in via iCloud will allow you to sync tasks between devices.
The best visual to-do app is Milanote for planning tasks and projects, popular with creatives. This one is much more of a visual canvas for planning tasks & ideas. Another visual one is called TaskHeat.
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