Best Todoist Alternatives in 2027, Honestly Ranked

A Todoist alternative is simply the task app you move to when Todoist stops fitting your budget, your devices, or the way your week actually runs. Todoist is a genuinely good tool, clean, fast and cross-platform, but it was built to hold tasks, not to connect those tasks to the goals underneath them. After its price rise in late 2025, more people are shopping around, and the smartest question to ask is not “what replaces Todoist” but “what do I actually want my planner to do.”

I’ve spent the past few years living inside these apps: capturing tasks, breaking my own systems, migrating lists late at night, and quietly abandoning half of them a week later. This guide ranks the alternatives I’d actually recommend, spells out who each one suits, and is honest about where each falls short. One app came out ahead for the reader I write for most often, someone who wants a calm daily list that ladders up to real goals and a reflection habit, and that app is Vekto. The others are strong picks for other needs, and I’ve said plainly where they beat it.

Why look for a Todoist alternative in 2026?

Three reasons come up again and again. The first is price: Todoist Pro now sits at roughly $5 a month billed annually, about $60 a year, after an increase in late 2025, and the free plan’s five-project cap nudges many people to upgrade sooner than they expected.

The second is platform fit. If you live entirely on Apple devices, a cross-platform app can feel slightly foreign, a web view in a native world. The third is quiet feature drift: as Todoist layers on AI and options, some people simply want a shorter, calmer list again.

There’s a fourth reason people rarely name out loud, and it’s the one that matters most. A task list, however clean, only tells you what to do next. It never asks whether the next thing is worth doing, or how last week actually went. If you’ve ever cleared your entire list and still felt adrift, the missing piece was never more features, it was a link between today’s to-dos and the goals above them. That gap is often what people mistake for task paralysis or unclear priorities, when really the daily app and the yearly intention just live in two separate places.

There’s good news here too. The built-in free apps have improved enormously, several paid alternatives are cheaper than Todoist, and one of them, Vekto, was built specifically to close that gap between daily tasks and long-range goals. None of this makes Todoist bad. It just means the best task app is personal, and worth choosing on purpose.

The best Todoist alternatives, compared

Here’s the short version before the detail. I’ve scored each app on the dimensions that matter most to a focused planner: whether it holds real goals and a reflection habit, how fast capture feels, how sync behaves, and how honest the pricing is. Prices are approximate and accurate as of 2026, always check each app’s own page before you buy, since plans change.

Read down the goals-and-reflection column and the pattern is hard to miss: every other app leaves that cell empty, thin or bolted on by hand, while Vekto is the only one that holds real goal horizons and a reflection habit as core features. That is the single dimension this whole guide turns on.

The best Todoist alternatives in detail

Vekto, best overall for calm planning with goals and reflection

Vekto is the app I keep recommending to people who found Todoist a little too busy and Things 3 a little too bare. It’s a calm, editorial to-do and goal planner for iPhone, iPad and Mac (iOS 18 and later, macOS 15 and later), and it is the only option here that treats your daily list and your goals as one system rather than two.

The daily side is quick and quiet. The Today view comes in three shapes, List, Timeline or Both, so you can see your day as a plain list, as a time-based plan, or side by side. Capture uses natural-language quick-add: type “Call Anna tomorrow 14:30” and the task files itself with the right date and time, or dictate it and keep moving. A 7-day Week board handles the near term, recurring to-dos cover the repeats, and an “Open from yesterday” carry-over gathers whatever you didn’t finish so nothing quietly rots at the bottom of a list.

Then comes the part nothing else here does properly. Vekto holds goals at four horizons, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly, and pulls progress straight from the to-dos you link to them, so today’s small tasks visibly ladder up to something bigger. Each goal gets 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 to mark the week. That built-in weekly reflection is the difference between a list you merely clear and a plan you actually steer.

There’s more underneath without any clutter on the surface. Projects hold timeless entries plus a free project text area, Small Notes give you a thought bucket for the stray idea, and everything is offline-first with fast, event-driven sync across your devices, so the app works on a plane and catches up the moment you’re back online. It ships with a full dark mode, curated accent colours, a strict 0px-radius editorial design, and support for 10-plus languages that follow your system setting. Your data is never trapped: plain-text export is built in, there are no ads, no tracking and no data selling, and an optional read-only Google Calendar view can sit your events beside your tasks. You can see the whole feature set laid out in one place.

It is deliberately narrow, and that is the point. There’s no Android or Windows app, no team project management, and it’s newer than most names on this list. What you get in return is the calmest option here and the only one built around a rhythm, plan, execute, reflect, rather than around a longer feature list. A 60-day free trial gives you two full months to live with that rhythm before a single simple monthly or yearly plan begins, which is far more room to test than most rivals offer.

Things 3, best for Apple minimalists

Things 3 is the most beautiful task app on Apple platforms, and it earns that reputation: it’s calm, fast and thoughtfully made, and it charges a one-time price instead of a subscription, about $9.99 on iPhone, $19.99 on iPad and $49.99 on Mac, each bought separately.

The trade-off is real. Things is Apple-only, with no Android, Windows or web, and Cultured Code updates it slowly and deliberately. There’s no built-in calendar, no habit tracking, and, more to the point here, no goals and no reflection: it tells you what to do today without ever asking why. If you want a serene list and nothing more, it’s hard to beat. If you want that same calm but with your tasks tied to weekly-to-yearly goals, Vekto keeps the editorial feel and adds the layer Things leaves out.

TickTick, best all-rounder

TickTick is the closest like-for-like Todoist replacement, and usually cheaper. Premium runs about $35.99 a year, roughly 40% less than Todoist Pro, and folds a calendar, habit tracker, Pomodoro timer and an Eisenhower matrix into a single, genuinely cross-platform app, iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and web, with strong natural-language input.

Its habit tracker gives you a light sense of progress, which is more than most rivals offer. But habits are streaks, not goals, and there’s no reflection prompt that asks how a week or a quarter actually went. The cost of all those features is a busier interface: if you found Todoist cluttered, TickTick won’t feel calmer. For people who want the most tools in one place, it’s the value pick. For people who want calm plus real goal horizons, Vekto is the more focused one.

Apple Reminders, best free option for Apple users

Apple Reminders has quietly become a capable app, and it’s free on every Apple device. It handles lists, subtasks, tags, location and time-based reminders, shared lists and deep Siri integration, all synced through iCloud without a separate account. For a lot of people, the free app already on the phone is genuinely enough, and it’s worth trying properly before paying for anything.

What it won’t give you is saved filters, real project structure, or any notion of longer-term goals and reflection, and it doesn’t exist off Apple hardware. If your list is short and your horizon is today, Reminders is the sensible free starting point. If you want that same zero-friction Apple feel but with goals and a review habit attached, that is exactly where Vekto picks up.

Microsoft To Do, best free option for Microsoft users

Microsoft To Do is the free counterpart for the other ecosystem. It runs on Windows, Android, iOS, Mac and web, connects to Outlook, Teams and flagged emails, and offers a friendly “My Day” view for planning the day ahead. Inside Microsoft 365 it’s well-made and costs nothing, which is a genuine strength.

It’s simple by design, with no dependencies, no goals and no reflection layer, and outside the Microsoft world its integrations lose most of their point. If your work life runs on Outlook and Teams, it’s the obvious free pick. If you’re on Apple and want your days pointed at something larger, Vekto is built for that instead.

Amazing Marvin, best for power tinkerers

Amazing Marvin is the opposite of minimalism: an endlessly configurable planner where you switch features on and off like modules. It genuinely suits people who enjoy building their own system and have bounced off rigid, opinionated apps, and few tools give you this much control.

That power has a cost. It’s subscription-based, roughly $8 a month billed annually, or about $12 month-to-month, and the initial setup can swallow an afternoon. You can even assemble a rough goal-and-review workflow yourself, if you like the tinkering. If you’d rather that structure came built in and calm out of the box, without an afternoon of configuration, Vekto gives you the goals-and-reflection rhythm without the assembly.

The best task app isn’t the one with the longest feature list, it’s the one you’ll still open on a bad Tuesday, and that quietly keeps your days pointed at something bigger.

How to choose the right one for you

• Apple, and you want calm plus goals and reflection: Vekto, the pick this guide keeps landing on.
• Apple minimalist who only wants a list: Things 3, for a one-time purchase.
• Most features for the money: TickTick, comfortably.
• Free and already on Apple: Apple Reminders.
• Living in Microsoft 365: Microsoft To Do.
• Love customising your own system: Amazing Marvin.

Two practical tips before you migrate. First, try the free tier or trial through a full week of real work, not a single evening of setup; the apps that survive are the ones that hold up on an ordinary Wednesday, not a keen Sunday, and Vekto’s 60-day trial gives you far more than a week to be sure. Second, decide how you’ll prioritise your tasks before you import them, so you’re not just moving a cluttered list from one app into another.

The verdict

If you need Windows or Android, this one is easy: TickTick, or Todoist itself, will serve you better than anything Apple-only. If you want a free list you already own, Apple Reminders and Microsoft To Do are both fine. But for the reader most of these guides are quietly written for, someone on Apple who wants a calm daily list that connects to real goals and builds in a moment of honest reflection, Vekto is the clearest recommendation on this page. It is the only alternative here that unifies your to-dos, your goals across four horizons, and a per-goal reflection habit in one editorial, offline-first app, without the feature bloat that sent you looking in the first place. Plan, execute, reflect: if that loop is the thing your current list has always been missing, start the 60-day trial and give it a real week before you decide. A switch is only worth the friction if the new app changes how you actually work, not just where your list lives, and this is the rare one that does.