Software Reviews

Todoist (for iPhone)

With a clean UI and features galore, the Todoist iPhone app is a top to-do list app, especially if you pay for the premium version.

Todoist is a powerful to-do-list app that puts task-management prowess at your fingertips. Productivity enthusiasts are likely to count it among their favorite productivity app, and more casual users will also find plenty to love, too. The free version of Todoist is very capable, but it's much better at the $29-per-year Premium level, which is what I've reviewed here. If that price—which is quite competitive in the space—is within range of what you're willing to pay, then download Todoist to your iPhone today. It's an Editors' Choice to-do-list iPhone app.

This review focuses on the Todoist iPhone app and only provides a brief overview of the service as a whole (which is also an Editors' Choice). Refer to PCMag's review of Todoist for more on the complete experience.

Todoist is a freemium service, like most other apps in the to-do list space. You can download it to your phone for free and use all its basic features, including creating tasks, adding due dates, and organizing tasks into lists. You'll also get a taste of some of the more advanced features, with limitations in the free version. The free account lets you make up to 80 projects for organizing your tasks, and you can share a project with up to five people.

Todoist iPhone app

A Premium membership, at $28.99 per year, unlocks features that many people with productivity on the brain will want to use. You get task labels and reminders, location-based reminders, and the ability to add notes and upload files. It adds full collaboration capabilities, labels and reminders, the ability to add tasks via email, and more. You can organize and even color-code up to 200 projects and have up to 25 people in each of them with a Premium account as well. Some of these features, I feel, should be in the free app. Seeing as Apple's stock Reminders app has location-based reminders for free, I'd like to see those included in Todoist for free as well, even if it has to be limited.

A competing service called charges nearly the same as Todoist for its Pro account, about $27 per year. Wunderlist charges more for its Pro account, $49.99 per year or $4.99 per month, which is pricey. Remember the Milk, one of the oldest collaborative to-do apps, has a Pro subscription for $39.99 per year.

Very small businesses looking for a task-management app would do fine with Todoist,, or Wunderlist, as they all have a business-grade plan. But another app worth considering is Asana. Asana costs a lot more, about $100 per year per person, but you get a much more than simple to-do lists. Asana is a complete workflow management tool in addition to being a very filled out task-management app. It might be overkill for personal use, but it's an Editors' Choice for communication and collaboration tools for small businesses. PCMag has not evaluated Todoist for Business.

Design and Features

The Todoist iPhone app loosely mirrors what you see in the Todoist Web and desktop apps, only the format is slightly reconfigured for the smaller screen. Your main view is your tasks, which you can sort however you like. I set my default to show tasks due today and overdue. There's also a view to see tasks due in the next seven days.

A collapsed left-side menu gives you access to projects you're managing and organizational tools such as labels and filters. From the left menu you can reach the app's settings, where you can personalize Todoist's color scheme if you're a Premium member. You can also customize which notifications you get and how. Todoist has standard push notifications on iPhone as well as the option to instead receive your notifications by email. For example, you might prefer to get a notification via email if an invited collaborator declines to join your list if it's not the kind of pressing information you want interrupting you at random.

One thing you can't customize is the badge count. In Wunderlist, you can change the badge count on the iPhone app to mean tasks that are due today or are overdue, or unread messages on shared lists, but in Todoist the badge count only means the number of due and overdue tasks.

A quick action button in the lower right corner of the main dashboard lets you add a task with ease. Just type a task, like "Call the realtor," and add as much or as little information to it as you want. Todoist supports natural language input for assigning due dates, so if you write "Call the realtor today at noon," the app will automatically assign a deadline and reminder for that time. You can turn off this natural language parsing if it gets in the way.

There are other typing conveniences, too. Adding a pound or hash symbol assigns a task to the project of that name, such as #Work, and type-ahead suggestions help ensure you get the name right. You can also add comments to a task, assign a priority level, and even assign it to someone if you want to collaborate on a task list. More on collaboration in a moment.

The app responds well to touch. Swiping a task left to right marks it complete, and right to left brings up options for postponing the due date to a later time. A green band and white check mark appear for the former and a yellow band with calendar icon the latter. Those visual cues confirm your action, so you're never left guessing what a swipe means.

Syncing and Apps for Other Platforms
One of Todoist's selling points is that it has apps for so many platforms. In addition to having an iPhone app, there are apps for Android, Web, Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile, Mac, and plugins for Gmail, Thunderbird, and Chrome. Additionally, Todoist plays well with other apps, with a long list of integration options on Todoist's website.

Todoist is a cloud-based service, so all your tasks and notes from one app automatically sync to all the other places where you have Todoist installed. Having used the app for more than a year, syncing was reliable, but I often had to force syncs in the browser and frequently update the version of the app that was running. The iPhone app refreshes quickly, with a simple pull-down gesture forcing a sync when necessary.

If you invite collaborators into a project (sometimes called a list in other apps), they'll need to sign up for a Todoist account, but they don't need to upgrade to Premium. With collaborators on board, you can assign tasks to one another, add comments to tasks that everyone can see, and so forth. You'll know when other collaborators mark tasks as done, too. You can get notifications for just about every level of activity on a shared project.

As mentioned, up to five people can collaborate on a project for free, whereas Premium members can have up to 25 people on a project. It doesn't have to be the same five or 25 people in different projects. For example, you might have a household project shared among a partner, a parent, and three kids, as well as a work project shared with five of your colleagues.

Todoist iPhone app

Good Karma
Todoist has one unique feature that I love called Karma. It's a report that shows your productivity (that is, how many tasks you crossed off) in the current week based on your color-coded projects. The Karma report is limited to Premium users.

In the report, you can see at a glance whether you're focusing on the right things. Let's say you have a goal to get one task done per day from your blue Personal project but three tasks per day from your red Work project. Looking at the graph will tell you immediately whether you're meeting your goals, or whether you're getting distracted from red tasks in favor of doing blue tasks (probably so you can feel busy, even though you're not prioritizing effectively). It might also draw your attention to which days of the week you tend to get the most done or other trends about your own productivity.

The report is a powerful function. No other todo list app I've seen has anything like it. It's similar to a very lightweight version of a reporting tool you might see in a full-scale project management app.

A Super iPhone App for Task Masters

With a paid Premium account, Todoist is one of the most feature-rich to-do apps I've used on the iPhone. It also has a simple and functional interface, support for collaboration, and apps for many platforms so that you can get to your to-do list no matter where you are. For all those reasons, Todoist's iPhone app is an Editors' Choice.

If you aren't willing to pay for Premium and find Todoist's free level of service is too limiting, you should consider Wunderlist's free version instead. But if you're in the market for a serious to-do app that's rich with features and collaboration opportunities, and you don't mind paying a few bucks a month, Todoist is excellent.