Todoist Review 2026 | Still the Best To-Do App? Tasks, Pricing & Karma

Task managers are easy to download and hard to actually keep using. Most people I know have three abandoned to-do apps and a sticky note habit that outlasted all of them. Todoist has survived that churn for over a decade by staying stubbornly simple: type a task, add a due date, done. So I ran six weeks of real work and personal tasks through it, from one-off errands to recurring project checklists, to see if that simplicity still holds up against heavier tools like Notion. This review covers what stuck, what annoyed me, and whether Todoist earns a spot on your phone in 2026.

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What is Todoist?

Todoist is a task management app built around one job: capturing what you need to do and reminding you when it matters. It skips docs, wikis, and databases entirely to stay fast at that one thing, and it has held that focus for well over a decade while plenty of competitors added and removed features trying to find their footing.

• Natural language due dates, type “every Monday” or “tomorrow at 9am” and it parses correctly.
• Recurring tasks for habits, bills, and repeating checklists.
• Projects, sections, and sub-tasks for organizing anything beyond a flat list.
• Filters and labels for power users who want custom views.
• Karma, a light points system that tracks streaks and completed tasks.
• Cross-platform sync across phone, desktop, browser, and even a smartwatch app.
• Templates for common setups like weekly reviews or project checklists.

Where a workspace tool like Notion tries to be everything, Todoist stays deliberately narrow. That focus is exactly why it opens fast and adding a task never feels like a chore, and why it has stayed relevant even as heavier all-in-one tools have crowded the space.

Who is Todoist for?

Who ends up happy with it.

• Anyone managing daily personal tasks who wants speed over structure.
• People juggling recurring responsibilities, bills, habits, medication, routine check-ins.
• Small teams who need shared task lists without a full project management suite.
• Getting Things Done practitioners who want a tool built around quick capture and labels.
• Students and freelancers juggling deadlines across multiple unrelated projects.

It is not for everyone. If you want tasks living next to notes, docs, and databases in one workspace, a heavier tool fits better. If you want your calendar auto-scheduled around your tasks, something built specifically for that will serve you better. And if you manage complex, multi-stage team projects with dependencies and reporting, Todoist’s lighter collaboration tools will start to feel thin fairly quickly.

How much does Todoist cost?

Pricing stays simple across three tiers.

Monthly billing costs more per plan than annual, as is typical across this category. The free plan is genuinely usable long-term for individual task management, not just a taste of the product, and I know several people who have never felt a reason to upgrade past it.

When does it pay off?

Here is my honest read on each tier.

• Free: pays off immediately for anyone with straightforward personal task needs and a modest number of active projects.
• Pro ($4/mo): pays off once you want more active projects, custom filters, reminders on specific tasks, or activity history.
• Business ($6/user/mo): pays off for small teams that want shared projects with some admin oversight and team billing.

Given how low Pro costs, I would not hesitate to upgrade the moment the free plan’s project limit starts to feel restrictive. It is one of the more painless upgrade decisions in this whole category.

How I tested Todoist

I ran six weeks of real personal and work tasks through it, deliberately avoiding a clean test environment in favor of my actual messy schedule.

• Captured every task I would normally text myself or write on a sticky note.
• Set up sixteen recurring tasks covering bills, habits, and routine checkpoints.
• Built filters and labels to separate work, personal, and urgent items.
• Shared a small project with one collaborator to test basic team use.
• Used it across phone, desktop, and browser to check sync reliability.
• Tried the Karma system without gaming it, just letting it track normal use.

I judged it on speed of capture, whether recurring tasks actually fired reliably, whether the organization features held up once the task list got busy, and whether I actually kept using it past the first week, which is where most task apps lose me.

Real test results

What six weeks turned up.

• Task capture: adding a task with a natural language date took seconds and rarely misparsed, even with casual phrasing like “next Fri.”
• Recurring tasks: all sixteen recurring items fired correctly for the full six weeks with no missed reminders and no duplicated entries.
• Sync: tasks completed on my phone showed up instantly on desktop, with no duplicate or lost items across the entire test.
• Filters: once set up, custom filters (like “overdue and labeled urgent”) made triaging a busy day much faster than scrolling a flat list.
• Collaboration: sharing one project with a collaborator worked fine for a simple two-person workflow, but felt basic for anything more layered, like assigning sub-tasks across a bigger group.
• Consistency: the interface did not change or add new clutter mid-test, which is more than I can say for some competitors.

The biggest win was trust. After six weeks I stopped double-checking whether a recurring task had actually fired, because it always had, and that kind of quiet reliability is rarer than it should be in this category.

Todoist vs Notion

The comparison I get asked about most.

Todoist wins on raw speed and reliability for tasks alone, and I never once had to think about how to structure a task before adding it. Notion wins when tasks need to live alongside notes, docs, and project context that a flat task list cannot capture. I use Todoist for anything I need to grab and act on in the moment, and Notion for things that need more surrounding structure and reference material.

Todoist vs Motion

Worth comparing since both target busy schedules.

Motion tries to solve a different problem: not just tracking tasks, but deciding when during your day you do them. Todoist assumes you will decide that yourself and just makes sure you do not forget. Pick Motion if you want an app that manages your schedule for you, Todoist if you want a clear list and full control over your own time.

Todoist vs Taskade

A comparison worth making since both aim for simplicity.

Taskade leans more into AI assistance and team workspace features, while Todoist stays narrowly focused on being the fastest way to capture and track a task. If your priority is raw task speed and a proven, stable interface, Todoist wins. If you want AI-generated task lists and more of a shared workspace feel, Taskade is worth a look instead.

Setting up filters and labels

This is the part of Todoist that rewards a bit of upfront effort.

• Labels tag tasks by context, like “@calls” or “@errands,” across every project at once.
• Filters combine labels, dates, and priorities into custom saved views, like “overdue and @urgent.”
• Priorities (P1 through P4) let you flag what actually matters without cluttering the list.
• Sections inside a project break work into logical stages without creating new projects.

None of this is required to use Todoist well. I ran the first two weeks without touching filters at all and still got value. But once I built two or three filters around how I actually work, triaging a long list got noticeably faster, and that investment paid for itself within days.

Why the natural language parsing matters

This deserves its own section because it is the single feature that makes Todoist feel fast and low-friction day to day.

• Casual phrasing works: “next Tuesday,” “in 3 days,” “every 2 weeks” all parse correctly.
• No date picker required for the vast majority of tasks I added.
• Recurring patterns handle real complexity, like “every last Friday of the month” for a recurring report.
• Time estimates and reminders can be added in the same natural phrase.

Once this becomes muscle memory, going back to a calendar-style date picker in another app feels slow by comparison. It is a small feature that adds up to a genuinely faster daily habit.

The Karma system

A lighter feature, but worth mentioning honestly.

• Points for completed tasks, with bonus points for streaks.
• Entirely optional, nothing in the app requires engaging with it.
• A small motivational nudge on days with a lot of small tasks to clear.
• Not intrusive, no notifications pushing you to check your score constantly.

I went into this expecting a gimmick and came out mildly convinced. It never felt like a forced game layer, just a quiet number that occasionally made finishing a busy day feel a little more satisfying, and it costs you nothing to simply ignore if it is not your thing.

What Todoist is missing

A short, honest list.

• Any real docs or database functionality for people who want one tool for everything.
• Deeper team project features like timelines, workload views, or reporting.
• A stronger board view for people who prefer visual kanban planning over lists.
• Built-in calendar auto-scheduling for people who want their day planned automatically.
• More generous free-plan limits on active projects for people managing a lot of parallel work.

None of these matter if you just want fast, reliable task management, which is exactly what it is built for. They matter more if you were hoping it could replace a broader workspace or project tool, in which case you will hit these gaps within the first week.

Is Todoist worth it in 2026?

Short answer: yes, for anyone who wants task management to be fast and get out of the way rather than becoming its own project to maintain. The natural language dates, reliable recurring tasks, and clean cross-platform sync all held up over six weeks of real use, and the free plan alone covers most individual needs without ever feeling crippled or nagging me to upgrade.

The catch is that it stays intentionally narrow. It will not replace a workspace tool like Notion if you need docs and databases too, and team collaboration stays lighter than dedicated project software built for bigger, more complex teams. But for the specific job of capturing tasks and actually getting reminded about them reliably, Todoist remains one of the best tools you can install in 2026, and after six weeks it is still on my phone’s home screen.