Is Todoist worth it in 2024? Our Review

Best Features, Pros, Cons & Pricing

Todoist is one of the world’s most popular to-do list applications, and it has grown rapidly over the last 10 years as the go-to tool for both personal and work users managing their tasks. The application allows users to set reminders, add items to projects, and offers various views to help manage tasks.

Many people find Todoist a more approachable solution for task management, striking a balance between powerful features and ease of use. In our reviews, we have also favored it due to its approachability and ease of getting started for both work and personal life.

What is Todoist?

Todoist is a task management app for iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. Millions use it to manage tasks and reminders, add calendar events, and organize daily schedules.

Todoist allows you to organize tasks in Kanban boards and calendar view and includes quick capture abilities for on-the-go capture of tasks, links, and ideas. Teams use it with a dedicated team workspace experience for small-to-medium-sized teams.

How does Todoist work?

The concept of Todoist is quite simple. You add a task and can organize it using due dates, reminders, project allocation, and priority levels, helping you determine when and where to complete the task. Each task can have extensive details, such as a due date, location-based reminder, or time-based reminder.

Todoist even allows users to send emails directly into the app, use templates, and more, making it a powerful tool for task management.

Todoist provides many ways to capture tasks, including Siri, integrations with Google Home and Alexa, and through devices like iPhones, Android phones, Macs, Windows, and via the web. Its accessibility is excellent across platforms. You can organize tasks in different areas: “Today” helps you focus on the day’s tasks, “Upcoming” gives a view of the next seven days, the inbox captures tasks for later sorting, and projects allow for more detailed organization. Additionally, tasks can be further filtered by custom views, such as sorting by priority or project within the “Today” section, making it easy to manage your workload.

Todoist also supports collaboration, allowing you to share projects and lists with others, assign tasks, and collaborate effectively. Hidden within the premium features are more powerful capabilities like filters and labels, which can be useful for those who follow task management systems like David Allen’s “Getting Things Done.”

These premium features allow users to filter tasks based on labels, locations, time windows, and other attributes, making it easy to quickly access specific tasks.

In the “Upcoming” view, tasks can be organized in either a simple list view or a Kanban-style board view, which is popular among many users. We’ve tested this feature, and it performs very well, with smooth functionality. One of the most impressive premium features is the calendar integration. You can connect Todoist with Google Calendar, allowing you to time-block tasks and see them alongside your important events, making it an excellent tool for planning ahead.

Team workspaces, another paid feature, allow you to share tasks with others, which we found very useful for collaboration. Overall, Todoist provides a broad range of functionality that caters to both individual and team users.

Who is Todoist best for?

Todoist can be used by anyone due to its approachability and ease of use. In past reviews, we've found it to be a solid offering for both personal and work purposes.

Typically, users adapt well to the application when tailoring it to their needs. For example, we've seen it used as a garden organizer for managing plants and vegetables, as well as a daily planner for work. It's versatile enough to fit various needs.

Todoist works well for individual users and also offers team functionality, allowing users to manage workloads collaboratively by assigning tasks and organizing deadlines. This feature makes it accessible for anyone looking to incorporate it into their daily routines. As both the team and individual features have expanded, users can find a balance between powerful capabilities and a more streamlined experience, depending on their preferences.

Pros:

• Todoist is fast and reliable, allowing you to manage and use it on a wide range of devices. Its mobile application and desktop one perform reliably, so you don’t have any speed issues.
• Reasonably priced: Todoist's pricing is reasonably fair compared to some of the daily planner applications on the market. It will soon add calendar abilities, which will make it a lot more attractive in terms of pricing and value for money.
• Comes with a range of views that provide good functionality for both basic users and pro users who want to push the envelope a little bit further with the task application.

Cons:

• Has a reasonable development cycle. It isn’t as fast as some other to-do applications like Motion and Akiflow on the market in adding new features, but they tend to have a much slower development cycle, with good quality features that come out and that make sense to the general use of the Todoist application.
• It is quite basic in terms of its design and function. Some other applications offer much more wide-ranging views and abilities when it comes to customizing the look.

Todoist Features

Here are all the core features of Todoist and how we ranked them:

Task Management (A+)

Todoist is best known for its task management capabilities. It allows users to add tasks and organize them in various ways. Tasks can be managed in three different views: Board, List, and Calendar. These views provide flexibility in how you coordinate and manage your tasks.

There is also a Custom view option, which lets you break tasks down by filters, statuses, or arrange them in any order that suits your workflow. For example, if you prioritize tasks by importance, you can sort them by priority, or organize them by project. Todoist has been refining its task management system for over 10 years, and it is a well-produced aspect of the app that we were impressed with during this review.

Calendar Management (B-)

Todoist doesn’t have a dedicated calendar experience but instead integrates with Google Calendar. While you can't create Google Calendar events directly from Todoist, you can sync Todoist tasks with your Google Calendar.

This allows you to see events in Todoist's Calendar view, whether for today or upcoming tasks. You can also time-block tasks in the Calendar view, a feature many users find helpful. The integration works smoothly, letting you drag and drop tasks, including both all-day items and timed tasks. However, this feature is part of Todoist’s premium package, and users must subscribe to access it.

Team Collaboration (B+)

Todoist has developed strong team collaboration features over the past year.

Team collaboration is organized through "team spaces," which are workspaces dedicated to team members. Within these spaces, projects can be created, and tasks can be assigned.

Team spaces have some limitations regarding how many members can join, but you can assign tasks and use features like "insights" to track the progress of tasks and team members. This is particularly useful for businesses using the Todoist business plan, which offers reasonable pricing. Team workspaces also allow teams to organize projects into separate views, much like the personal premium plan.

In addition to assigning tasks, team members can comment on tasks, upload images, and share additional details. You can @mention team members to collaborate on tasks, and notifications will be sent when updates are made. Todoist also integrates with a team chat app called Twist, which is designed for collaboration and works well alongside Todoist.

Overall, Todoist's features cater to both individuals and teams, offering flexibility in task and calendar management while also promoting collaboration and structure through templates and integrations.

Smaller Todoist Features

Looking at other smaller features inside of Todoist, there are some abilities that a lot of people like, and here they are.

Karma Points

Todoist Karma is a feature that is sort of like building up streaks, allowing you to see how productive you’ve been across a week. You can set things like daily goals and weekly goals of how many tasks you want to complete. Once you complete them, it works towards your karma, building up a score and helping you to keep a streak going.

This is something that collects your karma points and you move into different rankings based on how many karma points you have. It’s sort of like a gamification element of Todoist, and for many people that we’ve spoken to, it allows them to have an incentivization of completing a certain amount of tasks per day and also builds up that bank of points that you have.

For others we spoke to, they haven’t found it as useful because some people can’t correlate the quality of tasks and quantity of tasks and how they truly matter to your productivity.

Natural Language Input

Todoist has a feature called Natural Language Input, which basically allows you to add a task using something like “Call Alex Wednesday at 10am.” Essentially, what that does is it extracts the deadline for the task and brings it into the details of the task without you having to click 20 times to get all of that up. This is something that works well. Once you learn this Natural Language Input, even narrowing it down to things like “Tom at 10am,” it helps you to add tasks faster and more smoothly. Some people don’t like this, but luckily, Todoist allows this to be switched off in settings, so all you have to do is go over there and find that option for Natural Language not to be on. As we’ve been using this application for years internally, it actually works very well, and you do get used to it over time.

Recurring Tasks

Recurring items is a good way to set something up for a routine. For example, if you do yoga every Wednesday at 10am, then that’s something you can do. You can do it for any day. And it’s nice because Natural Language allows you to even add something like “every other day at 3:30pm, but not Sunday.” As a string of text, this helps to set up a routine without having to do it inside of the custom recurring elements, which is great for organizing what you need to do.

Reminders

Reminders are a useful way to nudge you when you’ve got something coming up, and on mobile, this is so important. Todoist recently made free reminders accessible, which means you don’t have to have the premium plan to access reminders. So when you quick-add something, you use “exclamation mark 30 minutes” and it’ll nudge you 30 minutes before. This is a helpful feature and something that people get on well with. When we initially reviewed it, some of the features like location-based reminders weren’t accessible as part of the basic pricing. But in premium, you can set a location as a reminder to nudge you on your mobile device, and you can even set up email reminders if it’s something that you want a nudge on while you’re handling your email.

AI Tools

Todoist does have some artificial intelligence features, but to be honest, they’re not as impressive. When we tested these, they essentially did small things for you, like make your task more actionable or create a bunch of subtasks based on the title.

But all of these were sort of pointless because they didn’t really create anything as valuable. So we’re keeping an eye on what they produce in terms of AI features in the future as this wasn’t particularly impressive.

Templates

Todoist offers a feature called templates, which allows users to either borrow or create task templates based on effective systems. For example, users can utilize templates for Getting Things Done (GTD), weekly reviews, or other processes built within team workspaces. Templates provide a good starting point for building out your Todoist workflow and can save time. You can also create and save your own templates with a premium subscription, enabling you to reuse them whenever needed.

Habit Tracking

What was impressive is their habit tracking ability. You can now track a habit and it will keep an eye on streaks. This is perfect for those who want the implications of a habit system and want to kick things off—maybe get 30 days of meditation under their belt, but don’t want to join a habit-tracking application from scratch. This can be done easily in the settings and integrations.

Filters & Labels

Filters and labels is another feature that is accessible in premium and much more popular for those who are more GTD-based. For example, if you have a bunch of labels and attributes, you can mix them up in filters to essentially get a combination of things that you might need to do as part of a scenario. Here’s a good example that matches to the Getting Things Done concept by David Allen.

Say you’re taking a five-minute journey in a taxi and you are wanting to get some work done. If you tagged anything with “on-the-go” and the task duration is 15 minutes, which is the amount your taxi is on, and it’s tagged to today, you could potentially create a filter to set this up. This might take a little bit of time to learn, but there is a new AI filter feature which will help you to save time creating a filter.

But that’s the concept: using filters based on scenarios. For example, you can have a much more basic one like every time you go into a coffee shop, any label items at a coffee shop, and you can get the work done associated with a coffee shop.

Feature Focus

Todoist: Team Workspaces

Teams that don't want fully-fledged project management applications like monday.com might prefer something lighter, like Todoist. This application positions itself as a task management experience but allows you to manage your tasks in a board view and, more recently, a calendar view.

This is really popular for those who don't want anything too complex when it comes to task management. Maybe a smaller team or a business that only really uses tasks and doesn't need the ability to manage fully fledged project management software might find Todoist to be a really suitable option.

Feature Focus

Todoist: Today Calendar

How does the Todoist Calendar work?

Premium Todoist even allows you to integrate with Google Calendar. This integration enables time blocking, a popular method among those who prefer visual task management. The "Upcoming" view provides a week-ahead look at your tasks, allowing you to adjust and manage your workload effectively. This is perfect for visual planners.

Feature Focus

Todoist: Boards

How do Boards work in Todoist?

Todoist boards are one of the most versatile features of Todoist.

They allow you to organize in a Kanban-like view, enabling you to manage all the most important work. You can choose from various views using their custom view function, which allows you to add sorting and filtering. This narrows down your options to things like grouping, which you can organize in any manner you like, including sorting and filtering options like due dates, priorities, and labels. There's also a range of abilities, such as whether to view completed tasks and the general ability to move items between different places, which is perfect for narrowing things down.

A lot of people like this feature because you can switch any of your lists into board views. Most importantly, you can go to the upcoming area and see all of your upcoming tasks inside this board view. You can always switch it back to list and calendar views at any given time, making it much easier. However, this board view, introduced a few years back, has really helped revolutionize Todoist in terms of making it a much more collaborative workspace, not just for yourself but for small teams, allowing for moving stuff into relevant locations and assigning work to other people.

Feature Focus

Reminders in Todoist

How do reminders work in Todoist?

Todoist reminders help users set reminders for a task and be notified when the task is due. This is perfect for those who want to get captured on the go but reduce the worry around reminders and being nudged about completing the item.

What makes Todoist a good ADHD to-do app?

Todoist is one of the most popular task management apps, and many people say it is one of the more well-known tools for those with ADHD, thanks to the abilities within.

Todioust is a simple yet powerful way to schedule tasks, and it allows for an excellent way to organize them as well as capture them, something that those with ADHD will like as when you're out and about, you can use a range of extensions or a fast app to capture the tasks. Someone who uses CarPlay by Apple would find that saving tasks can be quickly done with a Siri command. It is perfect for capturing a thought, and with plenty of extensions, it could connect with another app to help save the note.

The freemium nature of Todoist helps get things going. Still, behind the premium, there are features like reminders, habit tracking extensions, lists, and filters, as well as the new calendar view, which helps to plan your tasks in a time-blocking manner, which you see inside of apps like Motion, that comes at a more affordable price too than the likes of Motion.

Pros for ADHD

• Quick capture for tasks & notes
• Good project list management
• Comes with a premium calendar feature for time-blocking

How much does Todoist cost per month?

Todoist has a few pricing options for individuals and teams:

Is Todoist free?

Todoist offers a free plan with five personal projects & unlimited tasks.

Deal: Todoist

Get 2 months free Todoist

Use our link here to get started with Todoist.

Todoist

Todoist is one of the best to-do list applications with all-round natured features.

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Should I get Todoist?

So, you're here for the Todoist verdict: Should you get Todoist, and should it be your to-do list application? Well, Todoist is best for a wide range of people. I keep saying it, but it is a really great all-around application that I would recommend to my mother-in-law and busy professionals looking to organize their workday ahead.

Todoist presents a simple, natured experience with reliable applications and a good balance between task projects and some collaboration abilities. If you're considering Todoist, it's because you want to organize your tasks.

It isn't because you want to manage projects in an advanced way, nor is it because you want the collaboration features you get with apps like Slack. It's because you're going to use Todoist to manage what's ahead. And with the upcoming launches of calendar abilities in Todoist, I think that will take it into the realm of planning and scheduling as a market, which should be an interesting next step.

So, I would recommend Todoist for those who want an all-around to-do experience, one that probably meets 90% of the criteria people look for in a task management application for managing their day-to-day routine and tasks.