Todoist Review (2026)Free Reminds You at Due Time, Not Before
By Daan Haket · Tested hands-on · written with an AI assistant · who does what
The free plan's 5-project cap, and reminders that fire only at the moment a task comes due, push most serious users to Pro quickly — but Pro is genuinely cheap. Throughout this review we weigh it against Asana.
individuals and small teams who want a fast, elegant task manager that gets out of the way.
you need full project management with timelines, workloads and dependencies — this is a to-do app, not a PM suite.
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Tested by our team on 20 October 2026 on a new free Beginner account: Daan created the account and our AI assistant ran the test in his browser. We built one project with tasks, a sub-task, a section, a priority and a date typed in plain words, then created projects until the free plan's limit appeared.
How we tested
- Created a project from My Projects
- Added three tasks in succession
- Entered a task containing the word today
- Added a subtask through the parent task details
- Created a Later section in the project menu
- Set the second task to priority 1 and displayed the completed third task
- Created five projects and attempted a sixth
- A new account started at '0 projects' with a 'Free' label; the Inbox does not count as a project.
- Typing 'Review today' was recognised while typing: Todoist highlighted 'today', removed it from the task name and saved a task called 'Review' due Today, and the Today view counted 1.
- A sub-task added through the task details sat indented under its parent, which then showed a '0/1' counter. A section 'Later' came from the project menu with its own Add task.
Pricing (2026)
✓ Pricing re-verified 25 Sep 2026
Free Beginner plan: 5 personal projects, 3 filter views, 5 MB uploads, one week of activity history and one automatic reminder per task. Pro $5 a month billed annually ($60 a year) or $7 billed monthly, with 300 personal projects, custom reminders, calendar layout, task duration, deadlines and full history. Business $8 per user a month billed annually ($96 a year) or $10 monthly, plus local tax, adding a shared team workspace with 500 team projects and up to 1,000 members and guests. Plans change — always verify the live price on their site.
Category context: Operations & Workflow. Across the 52 tools in this category that we researched with a public US-dollar price, the median entry price is $27 a month (lowest paid plan as listed, per seat where the vendor prices per seat). Todoist’s entry price of $5 a month sits below that median. Compare pricing conditions in the Software Cost Atlas →
What the pricing page doesn’t say
In our test on 20 October 2026 the sixth project was not created: the attempt opened a 7-day Pro trial offer instead. It's a personal/team task manager, not a full project platform, so don't expect Gantt-level PM.
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What Todoist does
Task manager for individuals and small teams: quick capture, due dates and projects across devices. A to-do app, not a project suite with timelines or dependencies.
What buyers report about Todoist
Hands-on: tested 2026-10-20Reported by buyers: G2, Capterra and Product Hunt, read August 2026
Themes from the buyer-review sites listed at the foot of this page, read in August 2026. We tested Todoist ourselves on 2026-10-20, but one test is a narrow sample, so here is what other buyers report. We summarise it here because the complaints are usually the part a vendor page leaves out.
- • Fast capture, natural-language scheduling and recurring tasks that just work, consistently across every device — 4.5 on G2 across 816 reviews.
- • Pro on annual billing is reasonable for what it does.
- • The December 2025 price rise damaged trust with long-time users, and reviewers say so directly.
- • The free tier is now 5 active projects, 5 MB uploads and 3 filters — reviewers call it a demo, and compare it unfavourably with Microsoft To Do, which is free with no project cap.
- • It is behind on AI and automation relative to newer tools.
- • Basic planning features like start dates are still missing, and some useful ones sit behind paid tiers.
The free plan reminds you when a task is due, never before
Free covers up to 5 projects and gives every scheduled task one automatic reminder, which fires at the moment the task comes due. Pro is about $5 a month on annual billing (around $7 monthly) and Business about $8 per user a month annually (around $10 monthly). That is $60 and $96 a year respectively, with a 40% surcharge for paying monthly on Pro and 25% on Business (2026). The reminder limit is about timing rather than absence, and that distinction is the whole upgrade case.
Todoist's own documentation splits reminders into four kinds — automatic, custom, recurring and location. Free gets the automatic one: schedule a task for four o'clock and it tells you at four o'clock. What Pro buys is the interval before, a custom reminder set thirty minutes ahead of the call or the morning before the renewal, and more than one of them on the same task. If you act on things at the moment they surface, the free tier genuinely does the job.
If you need warning — prep time, a document to read first, a decision to make before the deadline rather than at it — that is the feature you are paying for, and no amount of discipline substitutes for it. The five-project cap does the rest. Most people organise by area of life rather than by project — work, home, a side venture, errands, somebody else's admin — and five goes quickly.
Between the cap and the reminder timing, the free plan is best understood as a generous trial rather than a permanent home. Which is fine, because Pro is genuinely cheap. Sixty dollars a year for something you open several times a day is not a decision that needs a spreadsheet. The honest question is not whether it is worth the money, but whether you will still be using it in six months.
That is a question about habits, not about software. Take the monthly rate for the first quarter if you are unsure; $2 a month is a cheap way to find out. Business at $8 a user adds the team layer. The step from $5 to $8 is 60% per person, and it is worth it only if you actually assign work to other people rather than merely wanting them to see your list.
Know the boundary in both directions. This is a personal and small-team task manager, and it is very good at that. It is not a project platform: no dependencies, no critical path, nothing Gantt-shaped. If you need to know that slipping task B moves the launch date, you need a different category of tool, and no Todoist tier becomes one.
What we found running Todoist ourselves
The first findings are at the top of this page. The rest:
- A completed task disappeared from the list and came back struck through under Display > Completed tasks; the project counter showed 4 open tasks.
- From the fourth project the sidebar showed 'USED: 4/5', then 'USED: 5/5'.
- The sixth project was not created. The attempt went straight to 'Try Pro for free': yearly billing at €5/month ('SAVE €24'), 'Due today (7 days free) €0' and 'Due 27 Oct 2026 €60/year', for 300 projects and 150 filter views. The projects page then said '5 projects' with 'Need more projects? ... Upgrade'.
- The 'Try Pro for free' window also appeared once, unasked, while creating the very first project.
Mail in the first 14 days
Measurement running until 2026-11-02T23:00:00Z (last observed 2026-11-02T02:18:01.612935Z).
17 emails in the 14-day window so far; first email after signup: unknown (exact signup time not recorded); 0 with an explicit offer.
Retained inbox and junk only; removed or archived mail is outside this observation. Ambiguous supplier attribution is excluded. Day numbers use elapsed 24-hour periods since the recorded signup date at midnight Europe/Amsterdam; the signup hour is unknown. Offer flags quote literal subject/body text. Replies in our own correspondence (support tickets, our comment requests) are excluded; one-time codes, our own address, our account name and our name are replaced in brackets.
| Day | Time (UTC) | Sender | Literal subject | Folder | Offer evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Day 0 | 2026-10-20 15:08:55 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | Verifieer je e-mailadres | junk | |
| Day 1 | 2026-10-21 03:12:05 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | [our name]’s task(s) for 21 Oct 2026 → 1 overdue | junk | |
| Day 2 | 2026-10-22 03:06:12 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | [our name]’s task(s) for 22 Oct 2026 → 1 overdue | junk | |
| Day 3 | 2026-10-23 03:06:50 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | [our name]’s task(s) for 23 Oct 2026 → 1 overdue | junk | |
| Day 4 | 2026-10-24 03:06:43 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | [our name]’s task(s) for 24 Oct 2026 → 1 overdue | junk | |
| Day 5 | 2026-10-25 03:06:12 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | [our name]’s task(s) for 25 Oct 2026 → 1 overdue | junk | |
| Day 5 | 2026-10-25 05:37:23 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | Stop typing. Start capturing. | junk | |
| Day 6 | 2026-10-26 03:07:14 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | [our name]’s task(s) for 26 Oct 2026 → 1 overdue | junk | |
| Day 6 | 2026-10-26 06:23:07 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | The quickest way to clear your head | junk | |
| Day 7 | 2026-10-27 03:04:26 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | [our name]’s task(s) for 27 Oct 2026 → 1 overdue | junk | |
| Day 8 | 2026-10-28 03:02:28 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | [our name]’s task(s) for 28 Oct 2026 → 1 overdue | junk | |
| Day 9 | 2026-10-29 03:05:39 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | [our name]’s task(s) for 29 Oct 2026 → 1 overdue | inbox | |
| Day 10 | 2026-10-30 03:04:57 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | [our name]’s task(s) for 30 Oct 2026 → 1 overdue | inbox | |
| Day 10 | 2026-10-30 06:27:03 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | 👋 [our name], let us walk you through Todoist | inbox | |
| Day 11 | 2026-10-31 03:04:44 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | [our name]’s task(s) for 31 Oct 2026 → 1 overdue | inbox | |
| Day 11 | 2026-10-31 06:10:12 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | Become hyper-organized with more projects 🚀 | inbox | |
| Day 12 | 2026-11-01 03:04:45 UTC | Todoist team / todoist.com | [our name]’s task(s) for 1 Nov 2026 → 1 overdue | inbox |
What this test does not show:
- The one-week activity history (that needs a follow-up a week later)
- Filters (3 on Beginner) and reminders
- Ramble (voice), Todoist Assist and the calendar connection
- Working together in a team workspace
- The monthly price of Pro (we only saw yearly billing: €5 a month, €60 a year)
- Whether the 7-day Pro trial asks for a payment card
Most of our reviews are researched rather than run — how we review explains which is which, and why we do not pretend otherwise.
How to actually use Todoist
Decide first whether you need warning or only notice, because that is the line the free plan draws. Schedule a task with a time and free reminds you when it comes due; a reminder set for some interval before — thirty minutes ahead of a call, the morning before a renewal — is a Pro feature, as is putting more than one on the same task. If you act on things at the moment they surface, free is fine indefinitely.
If you need lead time, find that out in week one rather than after a month of building a system on it. Set up your projects by area of life rather than by task, and see how fast you reach five. Work, home, a side project and errands is already four for most people, so the cap tends to bind sooner than it sounds. In our own test on 20 October 2026 the sidebar counted 'USED: 5/5' and the sixth project opened 'Try Pro for free' (7 days free, then billed yearly) rather than being created; the Inbox does not count as a project.
If you upgrade, take Pro monthly for the first quarter rather than annually. The difference is about $2 a month, and what you are buying with it is the option to walk away once you find out whether the habit stuck — which is the only real risk at this price. Move to Business only if you actually assign work to other people; at $8 a user it is 60% more per head, and shared visibility alone is not worth that.
Where this section comes from: our research notes (132 words)
Todoist's own documentation — Introduction to reminders (https://www.todoist.com/help/articles/introduction-to-reminders-9PezfU), which defines the automatic, custom, recurring and location reminder types and states that multiple custom reminders require Pro or Business — together with the plan comparison on the pricing page (https://todoist.com/pricing), which lists task reminders under Beginner and custom task reminders under Pro Pricing re-read 25 September 2026 on todoist.com/pricing with the currency set to USD and both billing toggles: Pro $5 a month billed annually ($60) or $7 monthly, Business $8 ($96) or $10 plus local tax, and the plan comparison (5 against 300 personal projects, 3 against 150 filter views, 5 MB against 100 MB uploads, one week against full history, 5 people per personal project on every plan, 250 people per team project and 1,000 team members and guests on Business).
The natural comparison is TickTick or Microsoft To Do — other task managers. Weigh it against Asana on the job you actually need done.
Frequently asked questions
Is paying monthly for Todoist Pro much more expensive?
It comes to $24 a year more. Read 25 September 2026 with the page set to USD: Pro is $5 a month on annual billing, charged as $60 up front, or $7 on monthly billing, which is $84 over twelve months. Business is $8 per user on annual billing ($96) against $10 monthly ($120), plus local tax on both. Monthly costs more but binds you for one month at a time, which makes it the sensible way to find out whether the habit sticks before paying for a year.
What exactly does the free plan cap?
Five personal projects, three filter views, 5 MB per uploaded file and one week of activity history (plan comparison on the pricing page, read 25 September 2026). Archived projects do not count towards the project limit, according to the page's own tooltip, so finished work can be parked instead of deleted. In our test on 20 October 2026 the sixth project was blocked with a 7-day Pro trial offer, not created. Pro lifts those limits to 300 projects, 150 filters, 100 MB uploads and full history, and adds the calendar layout, task duration, deadlines and custom reminders. Free also gets limited Ramble sessions where Pro and Business get unlimited ones.
Can I share projects with other people without paying for Business?
Yes, within limits. The comparison table (read 25 September 2026) allows 5 people per personal project on every plan, the free one included. Business adds something different: a shared team workspace with up to 500 team projects, 250 people per team project, up to 1,000 members and guests, team roles and permissions, and centralised billing. A team created without paying gets 5 projects, per the page's tooltip. A household list shared by three people fits in personal-project sharing; permissions and one invoice for a team are what Business is for.
Is this a hands-on review of Todoist?
Yes. We tested Todoist ourselves on 2026-10-20; the section above says what we tested, what we found and what we did not test, and where a figure comes from the vendor's own documentation instead. Most of our reviews are researched rather than run; we say which is which. We name what each tool is good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.
- Buyer reviews on G2, Capterra and Product Hunt, read August 2026.
- Re-verified 25 September 2026 on todoist.com/pricing, currency set to USD, both billing toggles.
- A dated screenshot of that pricing page, kept on this site as the receipt.
- Our own hands-on session with Todoist (2026-10-20), written up in full further down this page.
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