Depplo Score: 8.3 / 10 ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
First Impressions
Opening Todoist for the first time feels almost anticlimactic after testing tools like Motion or ClickUp. There’s no onboarding wizard promising to transform your life, no colorful dashboard packed with widgets. Just a clean list, a quick-add bar, and a handful of views: Today, Upcoming, and your projects. That simplicity is deliberate, and after two weeks of daily use, we came to appreciate it more than we expected to.
Core Features Put to the Test
Natural Language Quick Add
Type “renew domain every year on Aug 1 #Admin p1” and Todoist correctly parses the recurrence, project, and priority in one line. This has been a signature feature for years, and it’s still one of the fastest task-capture experiences available across any productivity app we’ve tested, AI-branded or not.
AI-Assisted Task Suggestions
Todoist has recently layered in AI features: suggested subtasks when you create a complex task, smart scheduling suggestions based on your historical completion patterns, and a duration estimator. In our testing, subtask suggestions were hit-or-miss — useful for generic tasks like “plan a webinar,” less useful for niche or technical tasks where the model lacked context.
Karma and Streaks
The gamified productivity score, tracking completion streaks and daily/weekly goals, remains one of the more effective built-in motivation tools we’ve encountered. It’s a small feature, but the psychological nudge of not wanting to break a 40-day streak is surprisingly effective at building consistency.
Filters and Labels
Power users can construct custom filters using a simple query syntax (e.g., overdue & @waiting) to build saved views across every project at once. This is where Todoist quietly rivals much more complex tools, letting you build a personal command center without ever touching a database or automation builder.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 5 projects, generous for individuals |
| Pro | ~$4–6/month | Reminders, more projects, AI features |
| Business | ~$6–8/user/month | Team workspaces & admin controls |
Todoist’s exact tier limits shift periodically — confirm current project and label caps on their site before choosing a plan.
Pros and Cons
✅ Pros
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❌ Cons
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Who Should Use Todoist
Todoist is the tool we’d recommend to someone who has tried three “powerful” productivity apps, felt overwhelmed by all of them, and just wants a fast, reliable place to write down what they need to do. It’s also a strong pick for individuals rather than large teams — the collaborative features exist, but they’re not the product’s main strength.
How It Compares
Against Motion, Todoist is far less prescriptive — it won’t build your day for you, it just holds the list. Against ClickUp, it’s dramatically simpler and faster to learn, at the cost of much less structural flexibility for large, multi-department teams.
Testing the Quick Add Bar Against Real Chaos
To really stress-test the natural language parser, we tried a batch of deliberately messy, real-world-style inputs rather than clean textbook examples. “Call the printer about invoice next Tues 3pm #Admin” was parsed correctly, date, time, and project tag intact. “Follow up w/ Sarah re: Q3 budget every other Friday p2” correctly built a biweekly recurrence with the right priority flag. Where it stumbled was on ambiguous relative dates like “sometime before the thing next month” — understandably, since even a human assistant would need clarification there. Overall, the parser handled roughly 9 out of 10 realistically messy inputs correctly on the first try, which is a genuinely strong result compared to most competing quick-add implementations we’ve tested.
Living With the Karma System for Two Weeks
We were initially skeptical that a point-scoring gamification layer would meaningfully change behavior for an adult professional user base, but the daily and weekly goal streaks proved surprisingly sticky. By day nine, avoiding a broken streak had become a genuine, if slightly irrational, motivator for clearing a small backlog of overdue tasks before bed rather than letting it slide to the following morning. It’s a subtle nudge rather than a dramatic behavioral overhaul, but subtle, low-friction nudges are often exactly what sustainable productivity habits are built from.
Where the AI Features Currently Stand
It’s worth being upfront that Todoist’s AI additions are still the newest part of the product, and it shows. Subtask suggestions for a task like “organize the annual team offsite” produced genuinely useful starting points — venue, catering, agenda, budget. But for a task like “debug the payment webhook integration,” the suggestions were generic and not particularly actionable, since the model has no visibility into your actual codebase or technical context. This isn’t necessarily a flaw so much as a boundary worth understanding: Todoist’s AI is better suited to organizational and planning tasks than deeply technical ones.
Cross-Platform Consistency
One underrated strength: the experience is remarkably consistent across web, desktop, iOS, Android, and even a functional command-line-adjacent quick-add widget on some platforms. Task syncing between devices was near-instant in our testing, with no meaningful lag or conflict issues even when adding tasks rapidly from two different devices in succession — a small thing, but the kind of reliability that matters enormously for a tool meant to be the single source of truth for your day.
We also spent time testing the collaboration features with a three-person subset of our team sharing two projects. Comments on individual tasks synced instantly, and the activity log made it easy to see who completed what and when, without needing a separate reporting dashboard, and setting up shared labels for cross-project priorities gave us a lightweight way to see everything urgent across the whole team on one screen. It’s not going to replace a dedicated team collaboration suite for larger organizations, but for a small group coordinating a handful of shared responsibilities, it handled the basics without friction or unnecessary complexity getting in the way.
Tips for Getting the Most Out of Todoist
- Learn the quick-add syntax properly. Investing twenty minutes into the full natural-language cheat sheet pays off every single day afterward through faster capture.
- Use filters instead of endless projects. A well-built saved filter (like “everything due today across all projects, sorted by priority”) is often more useful than a proliferation of narrow project lists.
- Don’t over-rely on the AI subtask suggestions for technical work. Treat them as a starting brainstorm for organizational tasks, not a reliable output for anything requiring specialist context.
- Set a realistic daily goal for the Karma system. An overly ambitious goal becomes discouraging fast; a modest, achievable one builds the habit loop that makes the feature actually useful.
The Honest Limitations Worth Knowing Upfront
Todoist is not, and doesn’t try to be, a full project management suite. There’s no native Gantt chart, no resource allocation view, and reporting for teams remains fairly basic compared to purpose-built tools like ClickUp or Asana. If your team’s core need is tracking a complex multi-department product launch with dependencies across a dozen contributors, Todoist will feel thin fairly quickly. Its entire value proposition rests on doing the fundamentals of task capture and personal organization better than almost anyone else, not on scaling into enterprise workflow management — and being honest about that boundary is part of what makes it trustworthy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Todoist handle team projects, not just personal tasks? Yes, shared projects and assignments work well for small teams, though it lacks the reporting depth of dedicated project management platforms.
Is the free plan actually usable long-term? For a single person managing a handful of projects, yes — the free tier’s limits rarely become a real obstacle until you’re managing a genuinely large number of concurrent projects.
Does it integrate with calendar apps? Yes, two-way sync with Google Calendar and a dedicated calendar view are both available, though Todoist still isn’t trying to be a full calendar replacement.
Final Thoughts
In a productivity software market obsessed with adding more — more dashboards, more automations, more AI features nobody asked for — Todoist’s restraint is refreshing. Its recent AI additions feel like sensible extensions rather than a full pivot, and that’s probably the right call. If you want a task manager that gets out of your way and simply works, this remains one of the safest recommendations we can make.
It’s the rare productivity tool we’d recommend without much hesitation to almost anyone, precisely because it doesn’t ask you to change how you think about your day — it just gives you a fast, reliable place to write it down and trust that it’ll still be there tomorrow.
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