Todoist

So, what's Todoist actually good at? Adding tasks. That's it, and it's a bigger deal than it sounds.

You type "dentist tomorrow 3pm" or "take the bins out every tuesday" and it sorts out the date, the repeat and the reminder for you. No date pickers, no faff.

Honestly, this is the bit that matters most. The moment adding a task feels like filling in a form, you stop doing it. Then you've got an app full of old tasks making you feel guilty.

It's also on everything. Phone, laptop, watch, browser, and even Linux, which hardly anyone in this category bothers with.

And if you're the organised type, filters are great. Think "everything due this week that's priority 1". There's now a Filter Assist too, where you describe what you want in normal words and it builds the filter.

Start dates. There aren't any!

You can say when something's due, but you can't say "don't show me this until the 20th". So that task due in three weeks sits in your list from day one. It's the complaint we saw most in App Store reviews and on Hacker News, and nothing on Todoist's site says it's being fixed.

It also won't plan your day. There's a calendar view (on paid plans), but it's not going to look at your meetings and fit your tasks around them. Daily planner apps do that, and they cost three to five times as much.

And for teams? Fine if "team" means a few of you sharing lists. Not great if your work is full of "can't start this until that's done". There's no timeline and no dependencies, so you'd want a proper project tool.

Start with the free plan. It never runs out, and a week is plenty to know if Todoist is for you.

The wall you'll hit is 5 projects and 3 filters. Work, home and one side project and you're pretty much there.

Pro is $5 a month if you pay yearly. That gets you 300 projects, 150 filters and the calendar view. Their pricing page says yearly works out 20% cheaper than monthly.

Business is $8 a person. We'd skip it unless you really need the shared team space, because that's the main difference.

One thing to watch: Todoist shows different prices in different countries, so the number on their site might not match ours.

Todoist has 4.8 on the App Store from about 129,000 ratings. For an app that's been around this long, that's kind of ridiculous.

So why do people stay? Boring reasons, mostly, which we think is a good sign. Repeating tasks work. Sync works. They never have to fiddle with it.

There's a whole crowd of programmers who kept their tasks in text files or Emacs, got sick of maintaining it all, and moved over.

The unhappy ones mostly want start dates. And then there are people who say every to-do app fails them, this one included, and they end up back on paper. Not really Todoist's fault, that one.