Todoist is one of the best task managers ever built. I'm not here to tell you it's bad.
But if you're reading this, you're probably feeling what I felt: the app that was supposed to simplify your life is now something you have to manage.
Labels. Filters. Sections. Karma points. Priority levels 1 through 4. Natural language parsing. Integrations. Collaboration features you'll never use because you work alone. A sidebar with more options than your actual to-do list.
Todoist is powerful. It's also become a productivity tool for people who enjoy productivity tools.
What Todoist Gets Right
To be fair: Todoist earns its reputation.
Natural language date input works beautifully. Type "call dentist every Tuesday at 3pm" and it just understands. It's available on every platform: web, Android, iOS, Mac, Windows. If you need to share projects with a team, it handles collaboration cleanly. The interface is polished and the free tier is genuinely usable for light workloads.
For power users who live inside their task manager, Todoist is hard to beat.
Where It Gets Heavy
The problem isn't the features. The problem is that all those features are always visible.
Every task has priority flags, labels, due dates, recurring options, subtasks, and comments. Every project has sections, filters, and collaborators. You start with a clean list and six months later you have 12 labels, a saved filter called "Today (Not Someday Maybe)" that took 20 minutes to configure, and a growing suspicion that you're managing the system more than you're doing the work.
This is the productivity trap. You optimize the tool instead of doing the thing.
What Taskaro Does Differently
Taskaro is built around three questions:
- What needs to get done? Kanban board with Todo, Done, Cancelled and Overdue columns.
- When is it happening? Calendar week view that shows your deadlines laid out by day.
- Am I showing up consistently? A contribution graph that shows a year of task activity, like GitHub's streak grid for your work.
Plus a Notes section for quick capture that doesn't need a folder structure or naming system, and Focus Mode, a timer you start from one of your tasks instead of retyping it into a separate app. That's the entire app.
Available on Android and web. Sign in once with Google, everything syncs. No team features, no integrations, no filters to configure. Just the work.
The Price Difference
Todoist Pro runs around $4/month. Taskaro Pro is $3.49/month, or $26.99/year.
That gap sounds small. Over a year it's $48 vs $26.99 for a personal productivity app you use by yourself. That's the right comparison to make.
Both have a free tier to test with before committing. Todoist's free tier limits how many projects you can create. Taskaro's free tier gives you 3 tasks per day and 3 notes. Enough to know within a week whether the workflow fits.
Side by Side
| Feature | Todoist | Taskaro |
|---|---|---|
| Primary view | List, with a board layout on Pro | Kanban board, free |
| Built-in focus timer | No | Yes, Focus Mode (2 sessions/day free) |
| Notes, separate from tasks | Task comments only | Yes, flat notes section |
| Natural-language dates | Yes, best in class | No, date picker only |
| Labels, filters, saved searches | Yes, extensive | No, deliberately |
| Consistency stats | Karma points and streaks | Year-long contribution graph |
| Collaboration | Yes | No, solo only |
| Platforms | Web, iOS, Android, Mac, Windows | Web and Android only |
| Free tier | Unlimited tasks, 5 projects | 3 tasks/day, 3 notes |
| Paid plan | About $4/mo | $3.49/mo or $26.99/yr |
What Each App Is Actually Good At
Todoist wins when you need:
- Team collaboration and task delegation
- Natural language date input
- Integrations with Slack, Google Calendar, and other tools
- iOS and desktop apps
- Deep customization through labels and filters
- Anything shared with another person
Taskaro wins when you need:
- A kanban board built in, not an afterthought
- A calendar and contribution graph built in
- Something you can open every morning without configuring anything
- A notes section that isn't just comments on tasks
- A focus timer attached to the task, not a sixth app
- A lower monthly cost for solo use
If you're also looking at TickTick, TickTick vs Taskaro covers that fork.
The Honest Take
Todoist is the better app if you need power. Taskaro is the better app if you need it to stay out of your way. If Taskaro is not the answer either, the Todoist alternatives roundup covers TickTick, Things 3 and the genuinely free options.
The question to ask yourself isn't which one has more features. It's which one you'll actually open tomorrow morning without dreading what's inside.
Start with Taskaro's free tier. If you miss Todoist's features, you'll know within a week. If you don't, you just saved yourself a lot of system maintenance time.