Google Tasks is the to-do app most people already have. It's free, it lives inside Gmail and Google Calendar, and it syncs with the account you already use for everything else.
I used it for months. Then I stopped. Not because it's bad. Because it stops at exactly the point where task management starts to matter.
What Google Tasks Gets Right
Let's be fair first.
Google Tasks is genuinely free. Not freemium, not trial-based. Free. It shows up in the Gmail sidebar, so adding a task while reading an email takes two clicks. Tasks with dates appear on your Google Calendar automatically. The mobile app is clean and fast.
For light use, that's a real workflow. Email comes in, task goes on the list, date lands on the calendar. Done.
Where It Runs Out
The problem shows up when your tasks stop being errands and start being work.
Everything is a flat list. Google Tasks gives you lists and subtasks. That's the entire structure. There's no way to see what's in progress versus what's just sitting there. A task you started yesterday looks identical to a task you've been avoiding for three weeks.
There are no notes. Task descriptions exist, but there's nowhere to capture a thought that isn't attached to a task. So you end up with a second app for notes, and now you're maintaining two systems again.
There's no record of your consistency. Completed tasks vanish into a collapsed list. There's no view that answers the question I actually care about: have I been showing up every day, or have I been coasting?
There's no export. If a client or manager asks what you got done this week, Google Tasks has no answer for you. The data is in there. You just can't get it out in a usable form.
What I Wanted Instead
When I built Taskaro, the spec was basically "Google Tasks, but it grows up with you":
- A kanban board with Todo, In Progress, and Done columns, so the state of your work is visible at a glance. On the web app, this is the primary view.
- A calendar week view, so deadlines are laid out by day instead of buried in a list.
- A notes section for quick capture. No folders, no structure to maintain.
- A contribution graph showing 90 days of task activity, like GitHub's streak grid. One glance tells you whether you've been consistent.
- PDF export for tasks and notes, for the weekly report your manager keeps asking about.
Same Google sign-in you're used to. Everything syncs between Android and web through your Google account.
The Honest Trade-off
Google Tasks wins on two things: it's completely free, and it lives inside Gmail. If your task list is "buy milk, call dentist, renew passport," stay with Google Tasks. Seriously. You don't need more app than that.
Taskaro's free tier gives you 3 tasks per day and 3 notes. That's enough to test the workflow, and for a lot of people it's enough forever. Pro removes the limits and adds PDF export and stats for $3.49 per month, or $26.99 per year.
So the real question isn't which app is better. It's whether your tasks have outgrown a flat list. Mine did. If yours have too, you already know it, because you've been feeling the friction every time you open the sidebar and see a pile of undifferentiated tasks staring back.
Switching Takes About Five Minutes
There's no import wizard and you don't need one. Open Taskaro, sign in with the same Google account, and type in the tasks that still matter. If a task has been sitting in Google Tasks for a month and you can't be bothered to move it, that's useful information too.
Start fresh, keep it small, and see if seeing your work as a board instead of a list changes how you work through it. It did for me.