Apps like Things 3, but with goals and reflection

If you love Things 3 for its quiet, uncluttered feel but wish it could also hold your bigger goals and give you room to reflect, you are not stuck. Things 3 is a superb list, yet it stops at the task. The good news: one of the calmest apps like Things 3 keeps that same restraint and adds goal horizons and weekly reflection in the same place. This guide compares the honest options, and it makes the case for Vekto as the pick that changes the least about how Things 3 feels while adding the most of what it lacks.

What makes Things 3 feel so calm?

Things 3 feels calm because it does less on purpose. It is an Apple-only task manager built on a clean typographic layout, gentle animations, and a tight structure of Areas, Projects, and a single Today view. There are no dashboards, no scores, no feeds. You capture a task, schedule it, and see only what matters now. That restraint is genuinely excellent, and it is why people stay for years. Any honest alternative has to respect it rather than bury you in features, which is the bar the rest of this list has to clear.

It is also a one-time purchase, not a subscription. On Apple’s App Store the apps are sold per device: $9.99 on iPhone, $19.99 on iPad, and $49.99 on Mac, with sync included and no recurring fee (Things 3 on the App Store). Buy all three platforms and you are near $80 once, which many long-term users still find cheaper than a subscription over several years. Credit where it is due: that pricing is a real strength, and we will come back to how Vekto’s single plan compares.

What does Things 3 leave out?

Two things, mostly: long-range goals and structured reflection. Things 3 has no goal horizons (weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly) and no prompt to look back on how a week or a quarter actually went. You can fake a goal with a Project and a reflection with a note, but the app was never built to ask, “Did this move the thing you care about?” For pure execution that is fine. If you want planning and review living in the same calm place, you will feel the gap every quarter. Our wider list of Things 3 alternatives covers more ground; here we stay on the goal-and-reflection angle, because that is the one gap most Things 3 lovers actually notice.

The best apps like Things 3 for goals and reflection

Short version: if you want to keep Things 3’s calm and finally add real goals with per-goal reflection, Vekto is the best fit. Sunsama is strongest for a daily planning-and-shutdown ritual; TickTick for habits and a generous free tier; Todoist for the widest cross-platform reach. The table below compares design and focus, goal support, reflection, and pricing so you can see why the recommendation lands where it does. Only one row keeps the Things-3 feel and adds goals plus reflection at the same time.

Vekto: keep the Things 3 calm, add goals and reflection

Vekto is the closest thing to “Things 3 with goals and reflection built in.” It keeps the instinct that made Things 3 worth loving: a strict, editorial, 0px-radius layout with nothing blinking for attention, and it is offline-first, so the app opens and responds instantly and then syncs across your devices with fast event-driven sync in the background. Capture is just as quick, with natural-language quick-add and dictation, so you type or say “Call Anna tomorrow 14:30” and move on. The Today view can show a plain List, a Timeline, or Both, and an “Open from yesterday” carry-over pulls anything you did not finish into today instead of letting it quietly rot at the bottom of a list.

What Things 3 does not do, Vekto makes the center of the app. Goals live at four horizons, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly, and each one shows progress drawn from the to-dos you link to it, so a goal is not a static wish, it moves as you work. Every goal carries its own reflection in one of three styles: free text when you want to write, guided questions when you want a prompt, or a simple 1-5 rating when you just want a pulse check, with an optional nudge at the end of a period so the review actually happens. Around that sit a 7-day Week board for the near term, Projects with timeless entries and a project text area for the things that are not really tasks, small Notes as a thought bucket, and recurring to-dos for the routine. It ships with light and full dark mode, curated accent colors, plain-text export, and support for 10+ languages, and it does not run ads, sell your data, or track you.

Like Things 3, Vekto is Apple-native across iPhone, iPad, and Mac (iOS 18 and macOS 15 or newer), which is a large part of why it feels this fast and this quiet. If you genuinely need Windows or Android, that is the one honest reason to look elsewhere, and we say so plainly below. But if you are a Things 3 lover already living on Apple, native is not a compromise, it is the point. See the full Vekto feature list if you want the details before weighing it against the others.

Sunsama: for a daily planning and shutdown ritual

Sunsama is genuinely great at one thing Vekto does not try to be: a coached daily habit. In the morning you pull tasks in and time-block them; at night a guided shutdown asks you to review the day and write a short reflection, and it pulls tasks from Todoist, Asana, and your calendar so you plan in one window. If your problem is finishing the day, that ritual is worth real money. The catch is cost and cadence: it runs about $20 a month billed yearly, or $25 billed monthly (Sunsama pricing), and the rhythm is daily, not seasonal. If your goals live in quarters rather than days, that daily ceremony can feel heavier than the calm you came from Things 3 to keep.

TickTick: for habits and a capable free tier

TickTick bundles tasks, a calendar, a Pomodoro timer, and a habit tracker into one app, and its free tier is genuinely useful for everyday lists, with Premium at about $36 a year (TickTick). That breadth is a real strength if you like one app doing many jobs. It is also the opposite of the Things 3 instinct: habits give you streaks, not goal horizons, and there is no reflection prompt that asks how a week or a quarter actually went. If you think in daily consistency it fits well; if you came here for calm plus goals plus review, the density quietly works against you.

Todoist: for the widest cross-platform reach

If your one real frustration with Things 3 is that it never leaves Apple, Todoist is the safe default. It runs on everything, has fast natural-language entry, and a free tier that covers up to five active projects, and that reach is a genuine advantage nothing else here matches. But it measures completed-task counts and a Karma score, which are metrics, not reflection, and it has no goal horizons either. So it solves the platform problem while leaving the goal-and-reflection gap exactly where Things 3 left it. If cross-platform is the real question, read our Things 3 vs Todoist comparison.

Things 3 helps you finish the day. Goals and reflection tell you the day was worth finishing, and Vekto is the calm place to keep both.

Which alternative should you pick?

• You want calm plus goals plus reflection in one place. Choose Vekto, the pick that keeps the Things 3 feel and adds goal horizons with per-goal reflection styles.
• You keep dropping the day. Sunsama’s morning plan and evening shutdown are built for exactly that.
• You want free and feature-rich. TickTick packs habits, calendar, and Pomodoro into one app.
• You need it on Windows or Android too. Todoist gives you reliable cross-platform capture.
• You mostly love Things 3 as-is. Keep it, and pair it with a simple weekly review in a notebook.

The verdict: Vekto for calm planning with goals and reflection

For the reader who came here from Things 3, the recommendation is straightforward. If your must-have is Windows or Android, pick Todoist and move on with a clear conscience. For everyone else, and that is most Things 3 lovers, Vekto is the best pick, because it changes the least about how Things 3 feels and adds the most of what Things 3 leaves out. You keep a daily list you can trust, a 7-day board for the near term, offline-first speed, and natural-language capture, and you gain goals from the week out to the year, each with a moment of honest review. It is one calm app instead of a task manager plus a spreadsheet plus a journal, and its pricing is deliberately plain: a 60-day free trial, then a single monthly or yearly plan, no ads, no tracking, no data for sale. If the missing piece in Things 3 was quarterly goals and honest reflection, Vekto is the one built to fill it. The motto says the whole method out loud: plan, execute, reflect.