I have been using Todoist off and on since 2020. It is a fantastic task management application with fantastic support. The question is, is it with the $48/year USD they are charging? That’s what I hope to answer today! Let’s get started!
As you can see the interface Todoist has is fairly simple. The middle of the page are your tasks, the left sidebar contains your navigation between different lists and the top bar contains your search, account settings and add task button.
When you add a task via the button on the top, you get a pop up window and you can type in anything you’d like and natural language processing will take care of everything. As an example let’s type in the following:
Water the plants every day at 3pm @Gardening !!3
What this will do is create a task titled “Water the plants” that is scheduled for every day at 3pm. 3pm a reminder will notify you on all of your devices. This will also label the task with a Gardening label, if you don’t have one yet, this will create the label. Lastly, this will set the priority to 3 on the task. Which you can see below:
It is super nice how this works with natural language. You can put tasks in certain projects by using the pound symbol and in sections inside of projects by using this format: #Project Name /Section Name where you put a forward slash between the Project name and the Section Name. It makes entering tasks into projects super simple.
On Todoist’s free plan you can have up to 5 projects to categorize your tasks as well as 3 filters and 5 collaborators. The free plan has a lot of features it is lacking though, for example:
- Reminders. You get the basic one, shown above, included in the free plan but additional reminders are in the Pro and Business plans.
- Unlimited activity history. The free plan only gets 1-week activity history.
- Themes. You just get the basic red theme.
- Auto Backups to Todoist’s servers. In case of failure of sync they back up your tasks for you.
- Shared Team Inbox. If you share tasks with a team, this will be an inbox all of you can see of all of your tasks.
- 100MB File Uploads. Files can be attached to the comments on any task and the free plan is limited to 5MB.
The biggest ones most people have an issue with are Reminders, Filters, & File Uploads as these are the most limiting of the options above.
I upgraded for the reminders as at the time, I needed those reminders. I started using File Uploads recently but even when I used them, I barely used them.
For me, Todoist includes too many features that I don’t use. As you can see from the screenshots, I use my iPad as my primary computer. I do have Windows PCs I can use but I either use them for work (only) or I rarely boot them up. So I am primarily an iPad & iPhone user.
Using Todoist is a good experience from the iPad. You can clearly see the descriptions, labels, due date & time, and projects from the Today View page. All of my favorite filters & labels are available on the left side as well.
Overall, Todoist is a fantastic application. It was released back in 2007 and they have come far from then. In 2023 do I recommend Todoist? It depends on your use case. For me, the subscription cost outweighed the features so I use Things 3.
Todoist has a lot of features though I do not believe they are worth $48/year or $4/mo especially since they seem to be targeting business/enterprise customers in their latest update(s).
When there are plenty of individuals asking for other features like:
- Start Dates/Deadlines.
- Calendar Integration (directly inside of Todoist).
- Better sync reliability
- Reminders using natural language (meaning you can say “remind me in 2 hours” and it sets a reminder, right now you have to click/tap around for that).
- Ability to remove the titles in filters so it doesn’t show your filter that could say something like
no date | overdue | !(@show_within_day | @show_within_week) | (@show_within_day & due before: +1 day) | (@show_within_week & due before: +7 day)which is an unreadable mess.
I was really put off by this latest update with the private beta, especially with how they hyped it up on Thursday of last week. I was hoping it would be a redesign of Todoist with a lot of those items above solved as well as several issues that I was having when I was using the app (stopped using it as of May 1st)-
- Lack of Background Syncing on iOS. They confirmed this is a known thing and something they “hope to add to the future” as of February 28, 2023.
- I can’t add tasks via Shortcuts or Siri because then I have to remember to open the app after I add the tasks and I may not always remember to do that so that is not a valid workaround for me.
- Reminders still come through even when a task is marked as completed.
- Reminders still coming through is purely annoying.
Between these 2 things and then the sync being unreliable and them focusing more on business/enterprise customers than individuals is very upsetting as an individual user who doesn’t collaborate with anyone using Todoist.
My Conclusion
Todoist is perfect if you need sub-tasks or sub-sub-sub-sub-etc. tasks, if you use Kanban view, if you collaborate with other todoist users, and need to have attachments and use devices that run different operating systems (e.g. Apple + Windows, Windows + Linux, etc.).
For me, I am using Apple Reminders on iOS 17. I will be posting a review soon and when I do I will link it. Even though its support on Windows is horrendous, I don’t use Windows much so I do everything via my iPad & iPhone so Apple Reminders works well for my use especially with the updates they added in iOS 17.
What do you think? Do you like Todoist?