Todoist for iOS and Android review: How to get things done

Ian Betteridge September 10, 2015

There are a million and one task-management apps with varying degrees of complexity, but few offer the same power and range of platforms as Todoist. At its simplest level, Todoist allows you to create projects that are just lists of tasks. Projects can have subprojects, letting you group different categories (such as home projects and work projects) together, and tasks can have labels – allowing you to group together all your phone calls or emails.

Todoist for iOS and Android review: How to get things done

The design of Todoist on both Android and iOS is simple and elegant. It’s easy to get to grips with quickly, and includes the ability to share projects with other users. You can then delegate tasks within the shared projects to other people, making it ideal for teams or families.

todoist-phone

Todoist has two levels of service: free and premium. Premium costs £18 per year, but adds a slew of features that anyone serious about managing tasks is likely to want. You get reminders of upcoming tasks, either by mobile, email or SMS, as well as location-based notifications on Android and iOS. Tasks can have notes and even documents attached to them, which is particularly useful if you’re dealing with a shared task list.

Premium also adds custom filters, which are a dream for power users. You can filter tasks by a wide range of criteria, including who is assigned to a shared task, when it’s due or its project. Importantly, you can chain all of these together to create something like a filter that shows all of your assigned tasks due in your work projects over the coming week.

The drawback with filters is that they’re not exactly plain English. For example, if I’m using a tag called “@life” to split out my life and work tasks, it means creating a filter of “!:to_others: & !@life”. There’s very little you won’t be able to do with filters, but compared to something like Omnifocus’ Perspectives, which perform a similar function, they’re pretty hard to use.

However, Omnifocus is only available on iOS and Mac, while Todoist works on pretty much any platform – either via a dedicated app or web browser. Todoist also lets you share to do lists, and there’s even a business account option for teams.

Overall, Todoist is a close-to-perfect product if you want to manage tasks across a wide range of platforms, especially if you want to share them. Whether you’re a family wanting to share tasks or a business team wanting to be able to delegate, Todoist is a really good product.