Todoist Review 2025: Why It Survived My App Purge

Hi, My Name Is Ananya, and I Am a Productivity App Addict

I need to confess something. Over the past six years, I have used the following task management apps: Todoist, TickTick, Things 3, OmniFocus, Notion, Asana (for personal tasks, which is insane), Microsoft To Do, Apple Reminders, Google Tasks, Taskade, Any.do, Remember the Milk, Habitica, and for one very dark week, a bullet journal that I abandoned because my handwriting is terrible.

Every switch followed the same pattern. I would read a review (ironic, I know), get excited about some feature I was missing, spend an entire weekend migrating my tasks, feel productive for about two weeks, and then start noticing things I missed about the old app. The cycle took roughly three months. I was not actually getting more done. I was getting a dopamine hit from the act of reorganizing my tasks into a new system. The setup was the product. The productivity was the illusion.

Last January, I decided to stop. I deleted every task app except one. I chose Todoist. Not because it was the best at any single thing. But because after six years of switching, it was the one I kept coming back to. The one that was still there, still working, still doing its job without demanding that I restructure my entire life around it. I have now used Todoist exclusively for eleven months, which is the longest I have stuck with any productivity app. Here is what I have learned.

The One Feature That Matters

If Todoist had nothing else, the natural language input would be enough. Type "Call dentist tomorrow at 2pm p1 #Health" and Todoist creates a high-priority task in your Health project, due tomorrow at 2 PM. No dropdown menus. No date picker. No tapping through three screens to set a priority. Just type what you mean in plain English, and the app figures it out.

I timed myself. Creating a detailed task in Todoist -- with a date, time, priority, and project -- takes about four seconds. In TickTick, the same task takes nine seconds. In Notion, it takes at least fifteen because you have to navigate to the right database, open a new entry, and fill in multiple property fields. Those seconds matter when you are adding tasks throughout the day. The faster the capture, the more likely you are to actually capture things instead of telling yourself you will remember them later. You will not remember. You never do. Nobody does.

The natural language parser understands more than you would expect. "Every last Friday" creates a monthly recurring task. "In 3 days" does the math for you. "Next week" defaults to Monday. "Every weekday at 9am" sets up a Monday-through-Friday recurrence. Once you learn the syntax (which takes about a day), adding tasks becomes almost frictionless. And frictionless capture is the entire point of a task manager. Everything else is decoration.

What It Gets Right by Leaving Out

Todoist does not have a built-in calendar. It does not have note-taking. It does not have whiteboards, databases, wikis, or time tracking. It does not try to be your second brain, your project management suite, or your life operating system. It manages tasks. Period.

After using Notion as a task manager (which is like using a Swiss Army knife to butter toast), the relief of an app that does one thing well is hard to overstate. I open Todoist, I see my tasks for today, I work through them, I close the app. There is no temptation to spend thirty minutes redesigning my project template instead of doing actual work. There is no rabbit hole of linked databases and relation properties. There is a list of things to do and checkboxes to check.

The organizational system is simple but flexible enough for real life. Projects are containers. Sections divide projects into groups. Sub-tasks break big tasks into smaller ones. Labels let you tag tasks across projects. Filters let you create custom views. That is the entire system. You can implement GTD with it. You can implement time blocking with it. You can ignore all methodology and just dump tasks into an Inbox and sort them later. Todoist does not care about your system. It adapts to you instead of demanding that you adapt to it.

The Karma System Is Silly and I Love It

Todoist has a gamification feature called Karma. You earn points for completing tasks, maintaining streaks, and using the app consistently. Your score determines your "level," which progresses from Beginner through Intermediate, Professional, Expert, and eventually Enlightened. It is objectively silly. I am a grown adult. I do not need digital points to motivate me to do my laundry.

Except apparently I do, because the Karma system works on me in a way I find mildly embarrassing. When I see my daily streak at 47 days, I feel a genuine reluctance to break it. When my score dips because I let tasks pile up, I feel a small pang of accountability. The weekly productivity report -- which shows how many tasks I completed and how it compares to my average -- gives me just enough feedback to notice my patterns without becoming a data obsession.

I am contradicting myself. I said I valued minimalism, and here I am enjoying gamification. What can I say. The human brain is weird, and Todoist found a way to exploit its weirdness in a way that actually makes me more consistent about processing my tasks. I will take the contradiction.

Where Todoist Falls Short (and Why I Mostly Do Not Care)

No time tracking. If you need to know how long you spent on a task, Todoist cannot tell you. You will need Toggl or Clockify or something similar. This bothers freelancers who bill by the hour, and it does not bother me at all because I do not want my task manager to also be a time tracker. Different jobs for different tools.

No notes. A task in Todoist has a title, a description field, comments, and attachments. It is not a document. You cannot write a meeting agenda inside a task, or embed a spreadsheet, or create a wiki page. Again, this is a feature for some people and a limitation for others. I keep my notes in Obsidian. Todoist handles my tasks. They talk to each other through a Zapier automation, and the separation keeps both tools clean.

Reminders are paywalled. This is the one pricing decision that genuinely annoys me. The free tier does not include reminders. In a task manager. A task manager without reminders is like a calendar without dates -- it technically works, but you are missing something pretty basic. TickTick includes reminders on its free tier. Apple Reminders is literally named after the feature. Todoist charging four dollars a month to unlock "hey, remind me about this" feels petty for a company that otherwise gets the free-to-paid balance right.

The collaboration features are lightweight. Shared projects work fine for couples managing a grocery list or a small team tracking simple tasks. But if you need task dependencies, workload views, Gantt charts, or resource allocation, Todoist is not the tool. It knows this. It is not trying to compete with Asana or Monday. But if your team starts growing and your project complexity increases, there will come a point where Todoist's simplicity becomes a ceiling rather than a feature.

The Price Is Right (Mostly)

Free tier: five projects, basic task management, five collaborators per project. Enough for casual personal use. The limits push you toward paying, but the core experience is fully functional.

Pro at four bucks a month (billed yearly) or five monthly: 300 projects, 150 filters, reminders, calendar view, AI assistant, and 100MB file uploads. This is where most serious users land. Forty-eight dollars a year for a tool I use literally every day feels like a bargain. I spend more on coffee in a week.

Business at six per user per month: adds team workspace, admin controls, team billing. Reasonable for small teams. Not competitive with Asana or Monday for larger organizations, but Todoist is not trying to win that fight.

For comparison: TickTick Pro is $36/year (cheaper), Things 3 is a one-time $50 for Mac plus $10 for iPhone (cheaper long-term but Apple-only), and Notion is free for personal use but demands significantly more setup investment.

Todoist vs. the Competition: Quick and Honest

Pros and Cons

Does Any Todo App Actually Matter?

I have been going back and forth on this question for the entire time I have been writing this review. On one hand, Todoist makes me more organized. I forget fewer things. I process my obligations more consistently. My life runs more smoothly with it than without it.

On the other hand, the most productive person I know uses a plain text file. Just a file called "todo.txt" on her desktop, edited in Notepad. No priorities. No recurring tasks. No Karma score. She ships more work than anyone I have met. When I asked her about it, she shrugged and said "I just write down what I need to do and then I do it."

I think the honest truth is that the tool matters less than the habit. The best task management system is the one you actually use every day, whether that is a $48/year app with natural language parsing or a Post-it note on your monitor. Todoist works for me because it is fast enough that I do not resist using it and simple enough that I do not spend more time managing my system than working through it. If the same is true for you, it is worth every penny. If you are switching task apps every three months looking for the perfect one -- trust me, I have been there -- the problem is probably not the app.