Best To-Do List Apps Compared: How to Choose

Halfway through a meeting you remember three things: the dentist’s call-back, a slide your manager asked for and the car insurance renewal. By lunch, one of them has gone. A to-do app is meant to stop that, and choosing one turns on something plainer than a feature list.

The best to-do list apps pass two tests: a task goes in within a few seconds on any device you carry, and the list is where you plan your week. For most readers the free app on an account they already use passes both. Paying makes sense only when it fails one of them, or lacks something you can name.

Which one, in six common cases (the reasons and each app’s catch follow below):

• Every phone, tablet and computer in your household is an Apple one: Apple Reminders.
• Your day runs through Gmail and Google Calendar: Google Tasks.
• Your employer provides Microsoft 365, or you want a free app on Windows and Android: Microsoft To Do.
• Your phone and computer come from different makers, and you want quick task entry everywhere: Todoist or TickTick.
• You use only Apple devices and would rather pay once than subscribe: Things.
• Your task details need encryption the provider cannot read: OmniFocus.

Each verdict uses the approach for choosing productivity apps by the problem you need solved: name what is going wrong, then pick the smallest tool that fixes it, so there is no single overall winner here.

Why a slow entry box costs you tasks

Every extra step between a thought and a saved task makes you a little less likely to save it. In two 2023 experiments at University College London, Gavin Chiu and Sam Gilbert found that when setting a reminder took a few extra clicks, people set fewer reminders and remembered less as a result. The reason is that writing something down is a small cost-benefit decision, made many times a day. Psychologists call handing a future intention to a note or an alert intention offloadingcognitive offloading: Using something outside your head, such as a note, a calendar alert, a search engine or a chatbot, to cut the mental work a task needs. It usually helps you do the task, though you may remember less of what you handed over.Full entry in the glossary, and in these studies people weighed the effort of each reminder against the risk of forgetting. Raise the effort a little and more intentions stay in your head, where they slip.¹

The study

Moderate evidence

When saving a reminder meant closing a pop-up again and again

Adults dragged numbered circles in order while holding in mind occasional instructions to drop a particular circle at a different spot once they reached it. They could set a reminder by nudging that circle toward its target side. In the high-effort condition, each reminder also meant closing a pop-up window several times. People set fewer reminders at every memory load when reminders took more effort, and their accuracy fell as the task got harder, instead of staying near perfect as it did with easy reminders.¹

In everyday terms, the high-effort condition resembles a reminder app that makes you tap through needless steps before it will save. The limits are the ones in the note above: a screen task lasting minutes, one research team and no real appointments. It shows that effort matters, not how much effort any particular app demands.

Tasks also tend to arrive at bad moments. A survey of information workers at one organization, run in 2019 and again in 2020 by researchers at Microsoft and Amazon, pointed to the central role physical and digital tools play in handling task information that arises at inopportune times, across work and personal life.² Picture remembering, on a crowded bus, that your passport runs out next spring. An app that opens to a one-line box keeps that task; one that asks for a project, a label and a priority before it will save is the app you will not bother with next time.

A list is not a plan: why the weekly review matters more than the app

A to-do app stores tasks, but finishing them is linked to planning, which no app does for you. In a 2023 field study of 208 working adults recruited in Austria and Germany, Lars Uhlig and colleagues found that weeks which began with a short planning session ended with fewer unfinished tasks and less rumination about work after hours, according to people’s own weekly reports.³

Each Monday, participants chose the week’s most important work goal, split it into steps with a day and place for each, named a likely obstacle for every step and wrote an if-then backup to match. It took a median of about eight minutes. The design has a weakness the authors state themselves: everyone had two weeks without planning followed by five weeks with it, so there was no separate control group, and part of the change could come from time passing, repeated questionnaires or people’s expectations. Work engagement showed no clear change.³ Read it as promising evidence from real jobs, not proof.

The authors’ explanation is practical rather than motivational: the benefits seemed to come from understanding the task better and thinking through obstacles in advance, not from working harder. Inside an app, the difference is easy to see. “Budget report” sits on a list for weeks. “Tuesday: pull last year’s figures; Wednesday: draft the summary; if finance hasn’t sent the numbers by Wednesday noon, then chase them by phone” gives each step a day and a fallback.

1. Catch it: one line, saved in seconds, from wherever you are when the task occurs to you
2. Plan the week: pick a goal, give each step a day, and write what you will do if the likely obstacle turns up

So judge an app by how easy it makes that Monday session: a view of the coming week, dates on individual steps, and a place for a note on what you will do if something slips. Task apps also tend to handle one planning aid poorly. In a 2024 analysis of the features of popular task apps, a University College London team led by Yoana Ahmetoglu found that research-backed strategies for estimating how long tasks take were rarely implemented to a good standard.⁴ That gap matters because of the planning fallacyplanning fallacy: The tendency to underestimate how long your own tasks will take, even when you know similar tasks ran late before. Estimating from your track record on past tasks, rather than from the plan, tends to correct it.Full entry in the glossary, the pull to underestimate your own tasks. Where your app lets you set a duration, use it, and compare it with how long the task really took.

The best to-do list apps on price, devices and sharing

Each row below was filled in from the maker’s own product, pricing and help pages on 27 September 2026, and covers the details that most often decide a switch. Prices are what those pages showed in US dollars that day; app-store prices are converted into local currencies and vary from one country to another, so look at your own store before paying.

We found no independent head-to-head test of these apps. Every cell is therefore the maker’s own account of its product, and the verdicts further down are our judgment, built on those pages and on the research earlier on this page.

The table cannot tell you whether your tasks can leave. Todoist exports each project as a CSV file on every plan, but that file leaves out completed tasks.¹⁶ Things offers its full database as a SQLite file, a machine-readable format, or, on a Mac, printing each list to PDF.¹⁷ Whatever you choose, test the exit during your trial rather than on the day you need it.

Myth

The right to-do app will get your tasks done.

Fact

No study has compared to-do apps head to head. The research links finishing tasks to how people plan, not to which app holds the list.

Matching a to-do app to your devices and your household

Three questions settle most choices: which devices you use, who else has to see the list, and whether you would rather subscribe or pay once. Each case below gives a pick and the one limit to check before you move years of tasks across.

Every device in your household is an Apple one

Use Apple Reminders. It is already on every device, and a shared grocery or chore list lets everyone add, tick off and be assigned items. The catch is the edge of Apple’s world: everyone you collaborate with must be signed in to an Apple Account with Reminders turned on in iCloud.⁵ Apple says Reminders on iCloud.com can also be used for collaboration with a web-only account, which helps a household member without an iPhone.¹⁸

Your day runs through Gmail and Google Calendar

Use Google Tasks. You can create a task from an email in Gmail and work with your tasks inside Google Calendar, so there is no separate app to learn. On a work or school account, access to Tasks is controlled by your administrator, Google says.⁶ It suits one person’s list; for a list the whole household edits, Microsoft To Do or a cross-platform app works better.

Your employer provides Microsoft 365

Use Microsoft To Do. Microsoft says it is free and works with Outlook tasks.⁸ Its lists can be shared with an invitation link. Check one limit before you plan a family list on it: Microsoft lists two supported cases, sharing between personal accounts and sharing within the same workplace or school, and a work account sharing with a partner’s personal account is not one of them.⁹

Your phone and computer come from different makers

Consider Todoist or TickTick. Both offer apps for phones and computers from different makers, and TickTick lists NLP, short for natural-language processing, among its free features.¹¹¹² Test each free plan against your real lists first, because both have limits you may reach (see the table). If you outgrow either, the paid plan is a subscription you will pay every year, so count it over several years.

You would rather pay once than subscribe

Consider Things, if every device you use is made by Apple. It is a one-time purchase per platform with free sync between your devices, but it does not run on Windows, Android or in a web browser, and it cannot share lists or collaborate in real time.¹⁴ It is a strong fit for one person on a Mac and an iPhone, and the wrong one for a family list.

Your task details need to stay private

Consider OmniFocus. The Omni Group says your data is encrypted as it leaves your device, and that the sync server never has your encryption passphrase. Treat that as the vendor’s own account rather than an independently verified fact. It also warns that if you lose all your devices and forget a separate passphrase, your database cannot be recovered.¹⁹ Keep that passphrase in a password manager.

A no means the app asks too much of you, whatever it can do. Three quick checks during the trial settle most of the rest.

The bottom line

A to-do app earns its keep in two moments: the few seconds after a task occurs to you, and the short session at the start of the week when you give each step a day. Start with the free app on the account you already use, and pay only to fix a shortfall you can name: mixed devices, a one-time price or encryption.