The 3 Best To-Do List Apps of 2025

Todoist is the best to-do list app because, despite its minimalist appearance, it’s powerful without being overwhelming. Navigation is a breeze with this app, thanks to its intuitive interface, and it offers lots of useful tools and tutorials to help new users learn the ropes without sucking up too much time. It even has a simple AI Assistant that’s actually helpful for performing tasks and providing pointers.

As with every app we tried, the calendar capabilities weren’t perfect. While major improvements have been made since we first started covering this category and Todoist now offers integration with various calendar applications, we’ve only tested it with Google Calendar. The Calendar integration is available to all users, but only paying subscribers can access the weekly layout in addition to the monthly layout.

It’s easy to get started. Todoist provides a thoughtful user experience from the moment you make an account. To start, it asks questions about your familiarity with to-do list apps (beginner, intermediate, and expert) and what you’ll use the app for (including personal, business, and education).

Whether you’re on mobile or desktop — or, honestly, even the web app — it’s quick to get the lay of the land, as Todoist seems to anticipate your initial moves and any questions you may have as you navigate. And though it has plenty of templates to help you get started, you don’t have to use them. Unlike other apps we tested, such as Notion, Todoist isn’t dependent on templates to have a positive, successful experience.

It’s reliable, customizable to your needs, and a pleasure to use. Todoist offers reliable automatic syncing across devices, and it works well online and offline, syncing just a bit quicker than TickTick, our budget pick. It’s customizable without being overwhelming, thanks to organizational features like color coding, themes, and integrations with other apps.

Todoist is also compatible with a variety of project management and organization techniques, such as the Getting Things Done method, the Pomodoro Technique, the Eisenhower Matrix, and the KonMari Method. Completing tasks and subtasks is genuinely enjoyable, with a satisfying click, a charming chime, and even a burst of confetti that provides a motivational serotonin boost.

Adding new tasks is simple. The talk-to-text input method makes it easy to switch between typing and dictating. Its natural language input was a very close second to that of TickTick, with just a few more errors. When writing “work out for 60 minutes today at 12:30,” Todoist caught the time of day but not the duration, despite the in-app tutorial indicating that this should work. Similarly, setting reminders using Siri was tricky — you had to say phrases just right, or it got confused.

That said, these minor hiccups didn’t really detract from our experience, as evidenced by the app’s top scores in our UI tests. And the layout is extremely focused, thanks to a bottom navigation bar, Quick Add and Quick Find features, and a ring around your profile picture that tracks your progress toward your daily completed tasks goal (if you’ve set one). The sidebar is also customizable — you can even hide it if you want, though this may lead to Projects being out of sight and, therefore, out of mind.

The interface is straightforward and intuitive. Todoist’s modern, uncluttered design is as easy on the eyes as it is on the brain. Any wayward tasks are automatically dropped into your inbox. So you can always check (and double-check) there to ensure nothing has fallen through the cracks and move them to your Projects later. Tasks can be itemized within different Projects and customized with color coding and 150 filter views.

Sorting Projects and to-dos is as simple as dragging and dropping — which is also helpful if you need to move tasks from one project to another — or moving things around in the settings menu. You can also select a priority of 1 to 4 for each task (with 4 being the least important and 1 being the most) and then sort by priority.

Compared with our other picks, this app’s text formatting options are more limited, with no ability to increase font size. It has other accessibility features, however, like multiple color themes, including dark mode, and 18 language options, which is double the amount offered by Things 3 but about half the amount offered by TickTick.

It’s powerful and feature-packed. Todoist’s simple layout belies the depth of its feature list and the sheer amount of stuff you can do with it — not to mention what it can do for you. Pro subscribers can import tasks from their email.

Another helpful function is widgets, which are available on Apple and Android devices for both free and Pro plan subscribers. Notifications reliably go through and are stored in the app under a little bell icon, as well, so you can always go back and check them later to ensure you haven’t missed anything.

We were particularly delighted by the ability to set personal goals that grow the more you use the app. For example, our goal for the first day was to complete five tasks. Checking them off was very motivating, thanks to pie charts that filled up as we got closer to our goal. The Smart Quick Add feature maximizes the helpfulness of labels, as you can just type “@labelname” to tag a task.

Setting Todoist apart from our other picks is its AI Assistant, which can be a helpful tool if you want to further maximize your productivity. But unlike other AI-enabled apps we tested, like Motion, it’s more of a supplemental feature than a necessity to get full functionality out of the app.

You can bring a friend (or five). With the launch of Todoist’s Business plan, Pro users are now limited to the same five guest collaborators as Beginner plan subscribers, rather than the previous 24. We don’t love this change, but it still beats TickTick’s two collaborators and Things 3’s zero. Users can easily share Projects (like grocery lists) with anyone via email by clicking the sharing option up top. (If you absolutely need more than five collaborators, consider TickTick’s Premium plan.)

Assigning tasks and subtasks is equally user-friendly with the embedded drop-down menu, and we liked that you can assign while waiting for collaborators to accept invites for an uninterrupted workflow. You can add, edit, tag other users, and emoji react to comments. However, this could still be a little more streamlined, and we wished the app had the ability to thread responses. Deleting comments was easy, and we appreciated that Todoist asked us to confirm before zapping them out of existence.

The Pro plan is worth it — and fairly priced for what you get. For $5 monthly or $48 annually, Todoist Pro gives you an impressive amount of features. Unlike free users, who can get reminder notifications only for a task’s due time and date, paying subscribers get access to unlimited reminders: As soon as you add a task, you can implement reminders, making them recurring, based on your location or based on the morning or afternoon.

Pro users can also add task durations, access more themes and custom views, and have a higher file-upload capacity.

Customer service is a cut above the average. Considering you’re paying a fee, we were happy to see that the customer service is better than what you would get from totally free apps. Todoist has an array of troubleshooting capabilities, including a forum for questions, a help page, and a customer support contact page.

After using the latter to ask a question of its support team, we had to answer a few automatically generated questions to get to the correct contact form, but that was the worst of it. Once we submitted a query, we were immediately issued a ticket, and we received an emailed response within three business days containing straightforward advice and supplemental tutorials.

You can try Pro before you buy it, but it’s not straightforward. Technically, Todoist Pro doesn’t have a free trial — essentially, the Beginner plan could be considered a free trial — but there are some workarounds if you want to try before you buy. If you sign up for an annual subscription and cancel within 30 days of purchase or renewal, you can get a full refund. But this doesn’t apply for monthly subscriptions.

Removing the app from our devices didn’t delete our content, and we appreciated that we could cancel an account without having to jump through any hoops, whether on the mobile or desktop app (though the web app is the easiest experience).

Flaws but not dealbreakers

You’ll likely need to use Todoist’s paid plan. The free plan is more restrictive than TickTick’s. However, even on the Pro plan only some features are unlimited — Pro users are capped at 300 projects, with five users per project. We also don’t love that free plan users are only permitted manual backups, whereas Pro users’ data gets backed up automatically.

Todoist is still lacking in some areas. We were frustrated that to-dos didn’t disappear from our calendar after checking them off in the app — after contacting support, we learned we had to manually enable this option, which could only be done on the web app.