Todoist Review

If you’ve got things to do, Todoist wants to help. With over a billion tasks ticked off, it’s one of the world’s leading task list applications. We’ll see what it has to offer in this Todoist review.

Built by a globally distributed team, Todoist has been around since 2007, so it’s a well-established platform.

It has big companies on its books, too, including Apple, Facebook and Netflix. If you’re a Netflix customer looking to kick it in front of the screen, read our how to watch Netflix on your TV guide.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Alternatives for Todoist

Features

As with all task list applications, you can create tasks and tick them off as you finish them. You can set a due date and priority for each one and set up reminders to make sure you don’t forget to do things on time.

You can invite other people to share your projects and assign tasks to them, making it a useful tool for organizing team-based projects as well as personal to-dos.

If you need motivation, Todoist takes an unusual approach. As well as letting you tick tasks off, it has a karma system to keep you going and track how much you’ve done.

It lets you pick a daily goal, which you work toward as you get things done. You also get bonus karma for hitting your goals and using various features. If you leave overdue tasks undone, your score can drop, though, so be careful. 

Fortunately, you can set it to not count weekends, so you don’t need to worry about upsetting your work-life balance. Check out our article on the benefits of working remotely if you need help with that.

It’s a good system, and it’s the first of its kind that we’ve seen. It’s more involved than Wunderlist’s dings and more closely connected to your performance than Asana’s celebrations. Read about those in our Wunderlist review and Asana review.

If you don’t like karma and prefer to do things at your own pace, you can switch it off.

There are many categorized templates to help you get started. There are a lot for areas such as management, development, education and others. If you’re not sure how to get the best out of Todoist, checking out a few of those can be helpful.

It integrates with over 50 platforms. You can share data with even more apps via the Zapier service, too. You can also work with tasks on Google Calendar.

Paying users can attach files and have as many as they need. There’s a file-size limit of 100MB, though. If that’s not enough, read our best cloud storage for large files article.

There are several color schemes, including a dark theme if you want to reduce glare from your screen.

Todoist is available on most platforms, with desktop versions for Windows and macOS, mobile versions for Android and iOS, third-party Linux clients and wearable versions if you have a smart watch. There are also email plugins to help you convert emails into tasks automatically and browser extensions for Google Chrome, Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

If you’re thinking about changing your browser check out our Chrome review or Firefox review to see which is ahead of the competition. Our most secure web browser article has even more tips.

Security and Privacy

Todoist stores data on Amazon Web Services and encrypts data in transit and at rest. Read our description of encryption to learn why that’s important.

It has a human-readable privacy policy that says it complies with the General Data Protection Regulation, as do third parties it shares your data with. Read our cybercrime article for more about the perils awaiting you online.

Todoist has a lot of features for a to-do list application and strong security. If you want to work with more than a simple list view though, take a look at the best project management software.

Todoist Features Overview

User-Friendliness

Todoist welcomes you into the app with a sample project that has a few tasks in place. Helpfully, those tasks show you its basic features and work as a hands-on tutorial. Complete them and you’ll understand much of what it can do.

Even if you don’t, Todoist is straightforward, so you won’t have trouble figuring out how to use it. The interface is simple and easy to explore. It reacts quickly to input and we didn’t encounter bugs while using it.

It isn’t perfect, though. Sometimes, we wanted to get out of a menu by clicking elsewhere, and the hint images on the sample project looked like things to click rather than things to hunt for, but those aren’t major issues.

For an example of an application with an outstanding interface, take a look at our monday.com review.

Creating tasks is quick, and you can drag them around to change their order or drag one onto another to create a subtask. There’s an undo button that appears after you make a change, so you don’t have to worry about messing up.

If you want to work like a ninja, it has a set of keyboard shortcuts, so you can move around the interface without having to reach for the mouse.

Cost

Todoist has a free plan, as well as a two-month free trial if you want to test out its premium features. You need to enter card details for the trial but not for the free plan. The paid plans are cheap, as the table below shows.

When we were setting up the free plan, Todoist tried to direct us to enter card details, but there’s an “open web app” link you can use to skip this step.

The paid plans offer more features, but the free plan, which allows up to 80 projects and five team members is great for individuals or small teams working on a project together. You need a paid plan for relatively basic things, such as comments and file uploads, but not everyone needs those. You also get analytics on the Premium plan. 

At the enterprise level, you get priority support, team billing and the ability to define roles for your team members.

Todoist accepts credit cards and PayPal. If you have 50 or more team members, invoicing is available, too.

Educators and students get 70 percent discounts, while nonprofits get 50 percent off. Educators may also want to read our Basecamp review because they get it for free. For more freebies, check out our best free project management software article.

Free per user Details	FREE
Premium per user Details	$ 3.00/ month
Business per user Details	$ 5.00/ month

Service & Support

Todoist isn’t difficult to use and it provides a simple user guide to help you. There’s also a starter project that shows you how to do the basics. Beyond that, it’s so simple that you can likely figure most of it out on your own.

If you get stuck, there’s a support link in the menu that takes you to a help page. From there, you can access an FAQ and a good selection of searchable articles that explain Todoist’s features. There’s plenty there, but if you still can’t find what you’re looking for, you can get in touch with Todoist directly via a contact form.

We asked a question about two-factor authentication and got a response in just under an hour that said we could get it via Google if we connected our account with Todoist. That’s an impressive response time, but if you want an even faster one, check out our Wrike review.

Todoist gives you plenty of guidance and responds quickly to queries, so it scores well here.

Final Thoughts

Todoist is simple, effective and has a lot of features to help you get things done. Everything works well, and it has enough extras to make it stand out from the many to-do apps on the market.

It’s also bug-free and feels robust and quick to respond to your inputs. You can use it on almost every device, too. It’s a great choice for anyone looking to boost their productivity and help them get things finished faster.

Todoist is a fantastic tool, but task management software is basic.

If you’ve tried Todoist, please let us know what you thought about it in the comments. Thanks for reading.