Todoist vs TickTick 2026: Which One Wins?

Quick Verdict

TickTick wins for most people, and it’s not particularly close. Todoist is the prettier, more polished app that somehow keeps charging more for less. If you live inside the Google ecosystem and never touch a calendar, Todoist is fine. Otherwise, save the money and the headache.

Todoist *** (3/5) — beautiful, overpriced, stubborn about features TickTick **** (4.5/5) — ugly duckling that does basically everything

The Night I Snapped

It was 11:47pm on a Tuesday. I was eating cold leftover pad thai standing over the sink, staring at my phone, and I had just missed the third bill reminder in two months. Not because I forgot to set the reminder. Because I set it in Todoist and then never opened Todoist. The notification came, I swiped it away, and the actual task — pay the electric company — just… sat there in an app I apparently don’t open unless I’m already stressed.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about task apps. They only work if you actually live in them. So I decided to pick one and commit. For real this time.

I’d been bouncing between Todoist and TickTick for like three years. Whichever one I was using, the other one seemed better. Classic.

Todoist: The One That Looks Like It Has Its Life Together

I went back to Todoist first because it’s the app everyone recommends, and I wanted to like it. And honestly? It’s gorgeous. The natural language input is still the best in the business. Type "every second friday pay rent" and it just… gets it. No fiddling with date pickers. I set up 40 tasks in about 20 minutes and felt like a productivity god.

Then I hit the wall.

Reminders. That’s the wall. On the free plan, you get exactly zero reminders. Not "limited." Zero. You can have a task due at 3pm and Todoist will just… not tell you. You have to remember to check the app, which is the exact thing a reminder is supposed to fix. This is genuinely insane to me and it’s been true for years.

Also I tried to add a filter for "tasks due today with a high priority that I haven’t started" and it wanted me to learn a whole query syntax. I’m a professional. I’ve written SQL. I still closed the app and made another coffee. There’s a reason.

The support thing — I emailed them once about a sync issue between my phone and desktop. Got a response four days later that basically said "have you tried updating both apps." Yeah. I had.

TickTick: The One That Looks Like a Spreadsheet Had a Baby

TickTick is not pretty. Let’s be clear. It looks like an app designed by someone who cares deeply about features and not at all about your eyeballs. The default theme is this washed-out grey-blue that reminds me of a dentist’s waiting room.

But here’s what happened. I set up the same 40 tasks. Took about 25 minutes because the natural language parsing isn’t quite as smart. Then I realized — reminders are free. Calendar view is free. The built-in Pomodoro timer is free. Habit tracking is free. There’s a little "Eisenhower matrix" view that I thought was a gimmick until I used it to figure out that I’d been treating "renew car registration" like it was as urgent as "reply to client email." It wasn’t.

The thing that made me keep it: TickTick actually showed me my tasks on a calendar. I hadn’t realized how much I was mentally juggling until I saw a week laid out and went "oh, Thursday is completely full, why did I say yes to that meeting."

Fair warning though. The widgets are ugly and useless. And I once accidentally set a task to repeat every day for 400 days because I misread the "repeat" menu, and there’s no easy way to undo that in bulk. I had to delete 400 tasks one at a time. That was a bad afternoon. My fault, but still.

The Parts Nobody Talks About

Todoist’s "karma" system is a trap. It gamifies your productivity with a little points counter that goes up when you complete tasks on time and down when you don’t. Sounds fun. What actually happens is you start avoiding adding tasks you know you’ll miss, which is the exact opposite of what a task app is for. I once delayed paying a parking ticket so it wouldn’t hurt my karma. Great system.

TickTick’s premium tier has a weird pricing thing where they push the annual plan hard and the monthly option is kind of buried. It’s $35.99/year, which is honestly cheap, but the app makes you feel like you’re being upsold constantly until you cave. The nag screens are relentless.

Also — and this is niche — TickTick’s "smart lists" feature has a bug where if you have more than ~200 tasks in a list, the sort order just kind of… drifts. I mentioned this in a support ticket and got a response two days later that said "we’re aware of this issue." That was six months ago. Still drifting. I’ve learned to live with it.

Todoist’s customer support, for the record, is friendlier. Just not faster.

What I Actually Use Now

TickTick. Been about eight months. I’m not switching again.

The reason is dumb and simple: it’s the only one that actually interrupted me at the right time. The reminders work on the free tier, the calendar shows me my week, and the Pomodoro timer keeps me off Reddit for 25-minute chunks. Todoist is the better-designed app. TickTick is the one that actually does the job I’m paying it to do.

I still miss Todoist’s natural language input about once a week. But I don’t miss paying $48/year for reminders, which is what Todoist Pro costs now. That’s almost $50 to be told when things are due. In an app whose entire purpose is telling you when things are due.

Pros & Cons

Todoist

• Best-in-class natural language input, genuinely magical once you’re used to it
• Prettier UI, less clutter, nicer mobile widgets
• Solid collaboration features if you share lists with a partner or team

• Zero reminders on the free plan — this alone disqualifies it for a lot of people
• Pro tier is creeping up in price and still feels feature-light compared to TickTick
• Filters require learning a query syntax nobody asked for

TickTick

• Reminders, calendar, Pomodoro, and habits all free
• The calendar view alone changed how I plan my week
• Cheaper premium tier with more actual features

• Interface looks like it was designed in 2011 and never updated
• Natural language parsing is noticeably worse than Todoist’s
• Support is slow and sometimes just acknowledges bugs instead of fixing them

Pricing at a Glance

| Tool | Starting Price | What You Actually Get | |——|—————|———————-| | Todoist | Free / $5/mo ($48/yr) | Free gives you tasks with no reminders. Pro unlocks reminders you’d assume were free. | | TickTick | Free / $3/mo ($35.99/yr) | Free gives you reminders, calendar, Pomodoro. Premium adds themes and bigger uploads. |

FAQ

Q: Is Todoist free to use? A: Technically yes, but the free tier has no reminders, which makes it more of a "to-do list you look at" than a "to-do app that tells you things." So… barely.

Q: Which app is better for ADHD? A: TickTick, almost every time. The reminders fire reliably without you having to remember to check, and the Pomodoro timer is built in. Todoist is too easy to ignore.

Q: Can I import my Todoist tasks into TickTick? A: Yes, and it works fine. Takes about ten minutes. Just don’t expect your project structure or filters to survive the trip intact.

Q: Is TickTick’s premium plan worth it in 2026? A: For $36/year, yeah, if you use the calendar or habits. If you just need reminders, the free tier covers you and you never need to upgrade.