I switched task apps four times last year. Every switch felt like progress for about two weeks, then I noticed the same friction I thought I'd escaped. Tasks without dates. Calendars that didn't match reality. Plans that only worked when nothing else happened that day.
So I stopped app-hopping and did something more tedious: I ran seven apps in parallel for ninety days, used each as my primary system for a block of time, and kept notes on what broke. This is what I found.
A few things up front, so you know what kind of review you're reading.
First, I built one of the apps on this list (Sodot). I'll call that out in its section and try to be unusually hard on it — the worst thing for a new tool is inflated claims, and the worst thing for a reader is a hidden ad. Compare my criticisms and decide for yourself whether the bias shows.
Second, I care about a very specific problem: turning a pile of tasks into a realistic day. If you just need a digital list to check off groceries, several apps below are overkill and I'll say so. If you plan a week with fifteen moving parts and want to stop lying to yourself about how long things take, keep reading.
Third, everything here was tested on macOS and iOS, with a Windows/Android spot-check. Pricing is April 2026, USD, annual plans.
What I actually measured
Before diving in, here's the scorecard I kept. Not marketing features — the gritty ones:
- Capture friction: how many taps/keystrokes from thought to saved task with a due time
- Reschedule behavior: if I drag a 2pm meeting to 4pm, does the end time follow (1h task → 5pm end), or do I now have a broken range?
- Offline: can I open it on a plane and still edit?
- Recurring reality: weekly recurring tasks that correctly respect an end date, skip weekends, and don't silently reschedule to the past
- Calendar bidirectional sync with Google Calendar — edits either side
- What the mobile app loses compared to desktop
- Export: can I get my data out as something that isn't a proprietary JSON
Nothing here is scientific. It's the same set of chores done on each platform for two weeks and the headache score written down afterward.
The shortlist
If you just want the verdict:
- Best for a solo power user who lives in a list: Todoist, still
- Best free alternative to Todoist: TickTick — more features, worse polish
- Best for kanban-brained people: Trello, if you're okay with Atlassian-tier slowness
- Best for people who want tasks inside their docs: Notion (but it's a tax)
- Best for small teams under 10: Asana or Sodot, depending on whether you want pure tasks or tasks plus calendar
- Best minimal: Any.do
- Best if your tasks are actually events with fuzzy times: Sodot (bias noted)
Now the long version.
Todoist
Todoist is the app most people secretly come back to. I've done two rage-quits in my life, and both times I came back within a month.
What still works in 2026: the natural-language input is better than anyone else's. Type "review PR tomorrow 3pm every weekday @work p1" and the system parses the whole thing, including recurrence and label. I timed capture at 4 keystrokes plus the sentence. Nothing beats it.
Filters are a hidden superpower. (today | overdue) & @deep-work & !subtask is the kind of query most apps can't even represent. If you're the type who enjoys Gmail advanced search, Todoist has a small but serious following for this reason.
What irritated me:
- The calendar view is an afterthought. It exists, but I never caught myself using it to plan.
- Karma/gamification feels dated in 2026. I disabled it within a day.
- Pricing went up again. Pro is $5/month annual, and the free tier is stingy enough that anyone serious ends up paying.
- Board view is functional, not good. If you need kanban, Trello or Sodot will feel nicer.
If you live inside a list and never want to think about time blocks, Todoist is probably the right answer.
TickTick
TickTick is the app I kept recommending to friends who asked "like Todoist but free?" For a year that advice was accurate. In 2026 it's more nuanced.
The free tier is genuinely useful — unlike Todoist's, you can actually live on it. And TickTick tries to be more than a list: it has a calendar view that's better than Todoist's, habit tracking, a pomodoro timer, and even an Eisenhower matrix mode.
The flip side: polish is inconsistent. Settings feel like twelve small tools stitched together. The mobile app has a different visual language on iOS than the macOS app in subtle ways that add up. And the Chinese-origin company runs servers I can't identify clearly from the privacy policy, which matters to some users.
Also, two features that look free on the landing page are paywalled the moment you try to use them daily (calendar subscription and Google sync). That kind of feature-stripe marketing bothers me.
If Todoist feels too spartan and you're not willing to pay yet, TickTick is the right next stop.
Trello
Trello is what everyone remembers using once. It was acquired by Atlassian in 2017 and has been slowly Atlassian-ifying ever since.
What's good: the kanban metaphor still works for brains that think in columns. Drag-and-drop is tactile. Power-Ups let you bolt on calendar views, custom fields, automations — a lot of the things competitors bundle in the box.
What's painful:
- Page loads feel like 2019. Initial board load is routinely 3–5 seconds with a hundred cards. I measured. This is not a hot take.
- The free tier now gates basics like views and unlimited Power-Ups. You can still do useful work on it, but everything nudges you toward Premium at $10 USD/user/month.
- Atlassian's design language has crept in. Trello used to feel friendly; now it feels corporate.
- Mobile is fine but clearly a second priority.
Trello's sweet spot is a small group that wants a shared visual board and doesn't need fine-grained scheduling. The moment you need "show me every task due this week across boards," you'll start looking elsewhere.
Notion
Notion is the most divisive app on this list. People either marry it or bounce off it inside a week.
As a task manager specifically — not as a docs tool, which is a different review — Notion has three modes: simple to-do lists, databases with a "Tasks" template, and the new AI-assisted task feature. The first is fine for five tasks a day. The second is powerful but you'll spend a weekend setting it up, and then another weekend when you realize your original schema was wrong. The third is still rough.
Where Notion shines: tasks living inside relevant docs. A project doc with tasks embedded under each section is genuinely more useful than the same tasks in a separate app. For knowledge work where context matters more than scheduling, that's a killer feature.
Where it breaks: anything time-sensitive. Notion has added calendar views and reminders, but the calendar doesn't feel native — it's a view on a database, and it shows. Real-time collaborative editing is still slower than Google Docs in practice. Mobile is serviceable, barely.
And the pricing: $10/user/month on Plus, with AI features adding more. For a team of five that's real money.
Notion is for people whose tasks are inseparable from their notes. If you keep those worlds apart, the overhead will make you resent it.
Asana
Asana is what PM-heavy teams default to. It nails the list-of-tasks-with-owners view, and it stayed usable while growing big, which is rare.
Strengths: mature multi-view (list, board, timeline, calendar), solid permissions model, decent integrations with the ecosystem tools a company that buys Asana already owns. The new Goals feature, if you use OKRs, is the best in class I've seen.
Weaknesses for a small team or solo:
- The free tier is usable but the good views (timeline, workload) are behind Starter at $11/user/month. That's not small money for three people.
- The app loads a lot. I saw 4–6 second cold loads on the web app with moderate project size.
- Setup is heavy. Asana rewards teams that have already decided how they work; it is hostile to teams that are figuring it out.
- Too enterprise-feeling for a personal tool. I felt like I was logging timesheets.
If your team is bigger than eight people and someone on the team has the title "Project Manager," Asana is a safe bet. Otherwise, it's too much.
Any.do
Any.do is the minimalist pick. Pretty interface, reasonable natural language input, a calendar view that's actually fine. It leans hard into the "one app for personal + family + work" pitch, with shared grocery lists and household tasks.
What I liked: the daily planning prompt in the morning is a nice nudge. The widget situation on iOS is better than most. It feels light.
What hurt:
- The AI features ("Smart Scheduling") felt gimmicky — rule-based suggestions dressed up as AI.
- Premium is $5–6/month and the free tier is pretty narrow.
- Not enough power for anything beyond personal. Team features exist but feel tacked on.
Any.do is what I'd recommend to a friend who wants "the prettiest todo app" and nothing more. It's a genuinely nice piece of design. Just don't expect it to scale past that.
Sodot
Full disclosure again: I build Sodot. Read this section with that in mind and go try it yourself if any of it sounds useful.
What we optimized for, in order:
Kanban and calendar are the same data. Every card has an optional due date and time. The calendar view shows the exact same cards as the board. Dragging on one changes the other. This should be table stakes; in practice almost no app does it well.
AI that drafts tasks from messy input. Give it a PDF syllabus, a pasted email, or "schedule prep for my interview next Thursday" and it proposes 3–10 cards with dates and times. You review, approve, or edit. It's not magic and it's not trying to be.
Honest scheduling semantics. If a task is 10:00–11:00 and you move the start to 3:00 PM, the end moves to 4:00 PM automatically (Google Calendar does this; many task apps don't). Same-day time ranges show as a single "April 15 · 10:00–11:00" chip, not two confusing date labels.
Real-time collaboration without Slack-grade complexity. Multi-user workspaces with assignee-based visibility. Your personal dashboard shows only cards you're assigned to; the workspace dashboard shows everything. Changes sync live over SSE.
It's free for the first workspace, including AI generation within a sensible monthly limit. Paid tiers are for teams and higher AI usage.
What Sodot does not do well yet, because I promised honesty:
- No native mobile app. We have an Expo-based build in progress but the web PWA on mobile is rough — calendar drag interactions on touch need work.
- No public API. Zapier and integrations are "later this year."
- No offline mode. The app assumes a connection. Planes and subways are not a good time.
- Recurring tasks are simpler than Todoist's. We don't yet support complex recurrences like "every second Tuesday except holidays."
- Onboarding for teams is barebones. We're a small team; it shows.
The one thing I'd push you toward Sodot for, over the alternatives above: if you've been bouncing between a kanban tool and a calendar and something keeps getting missed in between, Sodot was built specifically for that handoff. If your pain is different, one of the six apps above is probably the right fit.
A small decision tree
If you want to skip to the answer:
- I'm one person, I want a list, I don't care about calendar → Todoist
- I'm one person, I want more than a list, I don't want to pay → TickTick
- My brain works in columns and my team is three people → Trello, or Sodot if you also want calendar
- My tasks live inside long docs → Notion
- My team is 8+ people and we already bought other Atlassian/Google tools → Asana
- I want the prettiest thing and I'm not doing much → Any.do
- I keep missing things between my todo list and my calendar → Sodot
What I got wrong in previous versions of this review
Writing this in April 2026, I looked back at the version of this comparison I wrote in 2024 — same topic, different apps at the top.
I was too hard on Todoist's pricing; in retrospect, Pro pays for itself if you use filters even casually. I was too easy on Notion as a task manager; I downplayed how much setup cost it carries. I completely missed Linear, which I'm now convinced belongs on any engineering-team list (separate review, coming). And I underrated how much the quality of the calendar view matters, because I was still pretending I could use a todo list without one.
If this review looks different in 2027, that's fine. The point isn't to pick the eternal winner. It's to get less friction this week than last week.
Try Sodot
If you got this far and want to test the app I kept dropping in: sodot.my is the web version, Google sign-in, free to start. If you already have a preferred app, stick with it — genuinely. If you're mid-switch anyway, add Sodot to the bake-off.
— JP
Last updated: April 15, 2026.
