Done With Todoist? 5 Pragmatic Alternatives Built for 2026

Todoist has been the default task manager for a decade, and for good reasons. It's fast, it runs on every platform with a screen, and the quick-add input still feels like magic after years of use. But "default" isn't the same as "obvious." Over the past two years, the reasons to switch have gotten concrete — and they're showing up in your budget, your workflow, and your team's weekly gripes.

In late 2025, Todoist raised prices again in several markets. The Business tier now lands between $9 and $12 per user per month depending on billing term. The Pro plan costs roughly $5 to $6 per month. And the AI assistant — which many expected to be bundled after the acquisition of that tech stack — costs a separate $10 per user per month on top of your subscription. Do the math for a 25-person team: you're looking at $2,700 to $6,600 per year for a to-do list. That's real money, and it's the single most common reason we hear from teams evaluating an exit.

The product itself hasn't stood still either, but not always in flattering directions. Todoist has been layering on features for years, yet core complaints remain: no true native calendar view for drag-and-drop time blocking, sub-tasks capped at three levels on lower plans, and a free tier limited to 5 active projects — workable for a student, suffocating for a consultant tracking multiple clients.

None of this makes Todoist a bad tool. It makes it no longer the obvious choice. That's the bar any serious alternative should clear: not "is it as good as Todoist," but "is the switch worth it."

For this guide, I evaluated 15 candidates against real-world B2B use cases — outbound sales teams, ops departments, engineering squads, and solo founders managing multiple client relationships. I ran each tool for at least two weeks with real projects, tested imports with actual Todoist exports, and weighed what breaks when you move a team, not just a personal list. The five below made the cut.

# What to Look For in an Alternative

Before diving into specific tools, here are the criteria we used. They'll serve you well if you're evaluating options we didn't include.

1. Price per seat, calculated honestly. Don't compare base tiers. Calculate your actual cost: number of seats, annual vs. monthly billing, and which features are gated behind premium plans. Double-check whether AI, calendar views, and automation are included or sold as add-ons — that's the trick Todoist pulled, and some challengers have copied it.

2. Workflow fit, not feature count. A features spreadsheet will always be won by the biggest all-in-one tool. That doesn't mean it suits how your team works. If your culture revolves around calendar time-blocking, you need a tool that opens to a weekly plan. If your team lives in kanban, you need first-class board views. Match the tool to your operating rhythm, not to a checklist.

3. Data portability. You're leaving Todoist partly because of price creep and lock-in dynamics. Don't jump into a tool with weak export options. Look for open APIs, CSV/JSON exports, and a documented migration path. A tool that makes it hard to leave will eventually make it hard to stay.

4. Platform coverage and sync reliability. Your team is probably split across Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. Verify that the tool has native clients for your ecosystems before you commit. Then test sync speed: create a task on your phone and see how fast it shows up on your laptop. Weird sync lag is the kind of annoyance that quietly kills adoption.

5. Longevity and privacy posture. In 2026, "we're VC-backed" is a double-edged sword — some startups are burning cash at an unsustainable pace. Meanwhile, self-hosted open-source tools have become genuinely competitive. Consider what your compliance rules require. Healthcare, finance, and EU-based teams often have data residency needs that a US SaaS default simply can't satisfy.

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# The Top 5 Alternatives

1. TickTick — The Pragmatic All-Rounder

TickTick is the closest thing to "Todoist, but with everything I actually asked for." It offers the same core structure — projects, labels, priorities, natural language dates — but it ships with a real calendar view, a Pomodoro timer, habit tracking, and an Eisenhower matrix built in. It's been steadily polishing these features for years, and the result is a dense but coherent daily hub.

Key differentiator from Todoist: The built-in calendar lets you drag tasks onto specific days, which is still impossible natively in Todoist. You also get the Pomodoro and habits without buying separate apps. And TickTick includes its AI assistant in the Premium subscription rather than charging an extra $10 per seat.

Pricing:

• Free: up to 9 lists, limited calendar, ads.
• Premium: $35.99/year or $5.99/month. That gets you 300 lists, unlimited habits, full calendar, all integrations, and the AI assistant.
• No meaningful enterprise tier. Team sharing works via shared lists (up to 10 collaborators per list), but there are no granular permission roles.

Best for: Individuals, consultants, and small teams under 15 that want maximum features per dollar and a single place for tasks, calendar planning, and daily rituals.

Pros:

• Genuine calendar integration with drag-and-drop task scheduling.
• Pomodoro timer, habit tracker, and whitespace/ambient sounds built in — no extra subscriptions.
• Exceptional natural language parsing for recurring tasks ("every last Friday" just works).
• Affordable: one year of TickTick Premium costs less than two months of Todoist Business for a team.

Cons:

• The interface is busy. Dense modules, multiple panes, and a settings menu that hides everything. Todoist's minimalism is missed here.
• Team features are thin — shared lists but no guest accounts, no custom roles for contractors or clients.
• No self-hosted option, and no offline mode beyond caching recent tasks.

Migration difficulty: Easy. TickTick has a native Todoist importer (Settings → Import → Todoist). Projects, tasks, priorities, due dates, labels, and sub-tasks transfer cleanly. Deeply nested sub-tasks beyond two levels flatten, and comments come over but attachments don't. Plan to reattach a handful of critical files.

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2. ClickUp — The All-in-One Powerhouse

ClickUp started as a scrappy productivity tool and evolved into a full work operating system. Tasks, docs, goals, whiteboards, chat, dashboards, and dozens of views live in one workspace. For teams drowning in app sprawl, it's less "a task manager" and more "a consolidation play."

Key differentiator from Todoist: It replaces multiple subscriptions. A B2B team using Todoist + Notion + a separate goal tracker + a calendar tool can collapse all of that into ClickUp. That changes the cost math entirely — $12 per user per month for ClickUp Business might replace $30+ per user per month across four tools.

Pricing:

• Free Forever: unlimited tasks, 100 MB storage, limited views and integrations.
• Unlimited: about $7/user/month billed annually ($10 monthly). Adds unlimited storage, dashboards, integrations, and AI credits.
• Business: about $12/user/month billed annually ($19 monthly). Adds advanced automations, custom fields, and workload management.
• Enterprise: custom quotes.

Best for: Operations teams, PMOs, and growing startups where project management and docs live in the same workflow. If your team already uses kanban boards and wants Gantt views without buying a separate tool, ClickUp is the strongest fit.

Pros:

• 15+ views including Gantt, workload, calendar, and table — none paywalled behind premium tiers.
• Native docs, goals, and whiteboards reduce tool stack and monthly spend.
• Powerful automation builder without coding skills required.
• Generous free tier that's genuinely usable for a small team.

Cons:

• Performance can drag on large workspaces; the web app feels noticeably slower than native clients on older laptops.
• Steep learning curve — features hide features. Your team will need one to two weeks to develop muscle memory.
• The mobile app is the weakest of the five tools here; quick capture works, but planning on a phone is awkward.

Migration difficulty: Easy to Medium. ClickUp's native Todoist importer handles projects, tasks, priorities, and due dates. Attachments don't transfer in all cases, and the import can create a messy "Everything" catch-all project if you don't clean up your Todoist projects first. We recommend a 30-minute cleanup of archived projects before importing.

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3. Things 3 — The Apple-Ecosystem Favorite

Things has a cult following for a reason: it's the most beautiful task manager on macOS and iOS, designed around Getting Things Done (GTD) principles with Areas, Projects, Headings, and Someday/Maybe views. It's fast, local-first, and completely free of subscription fatigue — you pay once per platform and own it.

Key differentiator from Todoist: One-time pricing and local data. There's no cloud bill, no per-seat charge, and no server dependency. Your tasks live on your own devices. If you sign in with iCloud between platforms, your data flows privately through Apple's infrastructure. At a time when every SaaS tool is hiking prices, Things is a refreshing renegade.

Pricing:

• Mac: $49.99 one-time.
• iPhone: $9.99 one-time.
• iPad: $19.99 one-time.
• Apple Watch: free companion app.

Note: Things 3 is the current version as of this writing, and there are signs Things 4 may arrive with a subscription model. If budget planning matters, confirm the pricing model before committing your team to it.

Best for: Apple-only individuals, contractors, and small teams that care deeply about design and want zero recurring costs. If your company is all-Mac and all-iPhone, Things can be worth it. If anyone uses Windows or Android, it's automatically disqualified.

Pros:

• Gorgeous, snappy interface; the "calm design" isn't marketing fluff — it genuinely reduces visual noise.
• Excellent GTD structure: Areas, Headings, and Someday/Maybe actually work the way David Allen intended.
• Strong quick entry via keyboard and Siri; Shortcuts support is the deepest of any task app.
• Your data stays on your device, no account required.

Cons:

• Apple only. No web app, no Windows, no Linux. This is the hard dealbreaker for mixed-platform teams.
• No real team collaboration — you can share projects via export, but there's no live multi-user editing, comments, or assignees.
• Attachments work, but there's no file preview cloud storage built in; you're relying on iCloud or Drive links.

Migration difficulty: Medium. There's no native Todoist import. The practical route: export Todoist as JSON, convert with a script (open-source converters exist), then import into Things via its HTML/CSV importer. Expect to manually rebuild Areas and Headings, and be aware that recurring tasks and comments don't transfer.

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4. Akiflow — The Time-Blocking Command Center

Akiflow is a different species from Todoist. It's a calendar-first planner that aggregates tasks from your email, Slack, GitHub, Linear, Notion, Todoist itself, and dozens of other tools into a single inbox. From there, you use a command bar (Ctrl+K) to schedule those tasks as actual time blocks on your Google or Outlook calendar.

Key differentiator from Todoist: Todoist shows you a list of things to do. Akiflow shows you a plan — a day where every meaningful task occupies a real time slot. For B2B roles that live in meetings, this difference is transformative. The AI assistant also reads your workload and suggests a next-day plan automatically.

Pricing:

• Starts at $19/user/month billed annually ($29 month-to-month).
• No free tier, but a 30-day trial that gives you full access to every feature.
• Add-on AI features may carry their own cost on certain plans — check current billing details during your trial.

Best for: Founders, sales leaders, consultants, and any professional whose workday is fragmented by calendar events. If your daily complaint is "I planned 9 things and completed 2 because meetings ate my day," Akiflow is worth the price. It also suits teams that want a shared view of everyone's planned day.

Pros:

• Time-blocking is a first-class feature, not a workaround. Tasks are dragged to calendar slots and rescheduled with a keystroke.
• Aggregates tasks from email, Slack, and other apps into one inbox — fewer apps to check.
• Command-bar capture is the fastest quick-add we tested, outpacing Todoist's.
• AI daily planning genuinely reduces planning friction.

Cons:

• Expensive per seat compared to list-based tools. For a team of 20, that's $4,560 annually without touching AI add-ons.
• Desktop-first by design. The mobile app handles capture and rescheduling, but heavy mobile planning feels cramped.
• There's overlap if you already run a rigorous calendar routine in Google Calendar with color-coded blocks. Akiflow becomes another calendar layer to maintain.

Migration difficulty: Easy. Akiflow natively pulls tasks from Todoist via the API — connect your account, and your projects and tasks appear in its inbox. No export/import gymnastics required. You'll spend more time re-blocking tasks on your calendar than on data migration.

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5. Vikunja — The Open-Source, Self-Hosted Option

Vikunja is the alternative for teams that want full control over their task data. It's an open-source task manager (AGPLv3) with a polished web UI, covering projects, tasks, kanban, Gantt, and table views. You can run it on your own server via Docker or one-click cloud deployment — and your data never touches a third party.

Key differentiator from Todoist: Radical ownership. There's no per-seat pricing, no AI add-on upsell, and no data sovereignty debate. For a B2B team with compliance constraints (GDPR, HIPAA-adjacent, client confidentiality), self-hosting your task data is a genuine competitive advantage. The cost model is also flat: pay for your server, not per user.

Pricing:

• Self-hosted: free (AGPLv3). You just need a server or Docker host.
• Vikunja Cloud: about €6-8 per user per month if you prefer managed hosting — but a self-hosted instance on a $10/month VPS can handle a team of 50 with room to spare.

Best for: Development teams, privacy-conscious agencies, and businesses that prefer owning infrastructure. If your team already runs Docker for other tools, Vikunja deploys in under ten minutes, with automatic backups and health checks maintained by the community.

Pros:

• Full control over data, infrastructure, and feature roadmap. No "we're sunsetting this feature" surprises.
• Built-in kanban, Gantt, and table views — effectively a lightweight ClickUp replacement.
• No per-seat fees. Scaling from 10 to 200 users costs the same server resources.
• Active open-source development, strong API, and webhooks that let you wire it into your stack.

Cons:

• You own the operational burden: updates, security patches, backup verification. That's real work.
• UI is functional but lacks the polish of TickTick or Things. Some labels feel cramped, and mobile responsiveness is a work in progress.
• Smaller integration ecosystem. You'll rely on webhooks and the API more than native integrations.

Migration difficulty: Medium. Vikunja supports Todoist JSON import natively — export out of Todoist, then upload the JSON file in Vikunja's settings. Projects, tasks, due dates, priorities, and labels typically transfer. Recurring task rules and reminders often need a manual pass, so budget an afternoon for cleanup.

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# Comparison Table

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# Migration Playbook: Moving Off Todoist Without Losing Your Mind

Switching task managers is 10% data migration and 90% habit migration. Here's the playbook we've refined from helping teams of 5 to 150 move off Todoist.

Step 1: Export everything. In Todoist, go to Settings → Export. You'll get a JSON file containing all your projects, tasks, labels, priorities, and due dates. Choose JSON over CSV whenever your target tool supports it — JSON preserves structure better.

Step 2: Clean your data first. Archive or delete obsolete projects before export. A messy import creates a messier new workspace. This is also a good moment to delete the 400 tasks from 2024 that you'll never do.

Step 3: Run a pilot import. Import a single power user's data into the new tool first. Check recurring task rules, sub-task depth, and due date timezones before committing the team. One team we worked with skipped this step and discovered their "every 2 weeks on weekdays" task rules imported as fixed dates. Catch those issues in a pilot, not in production.

Step 4: Overlap before switching off. Keep Todoist active for at least two weeks after the team moves. Running both tools in parallel is redundant but pragmatic. Tasks that still live in Todoist are read-only references during the transition.

Step 5: Cut over on a Friday. Monday migrations kill productivity. Let the team explore the new tool over a weekend, start fresh on Monday, and keep one weekly sync to discuss workflow complaints during the first month.

Common gotchas:

• Attachments don't export from Todoist. The export file contains links, not files. Re-upload critical attachments manually.
• Comments rarely transfer. TickTick and ClickUp capture them, but Things and Vikunja won't. Decide whether comment history matters or whether you'll keep a read-only export for 90 days.
• Recurring tasks with strict scheduling (like "every! 3rd Thursday") lose their strictness in most importers. Audit all recurring tasks after migration.
• Multi-assignee tasks are fragile. Todoist Business's multi-assignee model doesn't map cleanly to tools without that feature. Split the task into individual assignments instead.

Typical timeline: Individual — one weekend. Small team (under 10) — one week. Mid-size team (10-50) — two to three weeks including pilot and parallel run.

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# Verdict: Who Should Pick What, and Why

Choose TickTick if you want the most direct drop-in replacement with better value. It's the safest recommendation for most people leaving Todoist: similar structure, more built-in features, and a price that's roughly 60% lower.

Choose ClickUp if your team is drowning in app subscriptions and you're willing to invest a couple of weeks in training. It consolidates tasks, docs, and reporting into one workspace — and the cost math works out when you count everything it replaces.

Choose Things 3 if your team is Apple-only and subscription fatigue is your primary motivation. The one-time cost is unbeatable, and the design quality genuinely improves daily focus. Just accept that collaboration is minimal and mixed-platform colleagues are out of luck.

Choose Akiflow if your calendar is your command center. For sales leaders, founders, and consultants whose days are ruled by meetings, time-blocking with a command bar saves hours each week. The per-seat price is high, but for calendar-bound roles it can pay for itself quickly.

Choose Vikunja if privacy, ownership, or compliance drives your decision. Self-hosting gives you total control, flat costs, and no vendor lock-in. It's the most ideological choice on this list — and for the right team, the most lasting one.

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# FAQ

1. Can I export my complete Todoist history, including completed tasks?

Yes. Todoist's JSON export includes completed tasks, but they're archived separately. Your active projects, tasks, labels, and due dates come through intact. Keep in mind that file attachments are not included in the export — you'll need to download critical files manually before deactivating your account.

2. Will my recurring task rules survive the migration?

Simple rules like "every 2 weeks" or "every weekday" generally transfer fine. Complex rules — especially Todoist's strict scheduling ("every! 3rd Thursday") — often don't. Budget 30-60 minutes after import to audit every recurring task and rebuild the complex ones in your new tool.

3. How long does a team migration realistically take?

For a team under 10, plan for about a week: two days for export and cleanup, one day for pilot testing, and a two-day parallel run. For 10-50 people, add a week and a half for role-based training sessions. The technical migration is the easy part; people adapting to a new interface is the bottleneck.

4. Do I need to keep my Todoist subscription active after switching?

Keep it for 60-90 days. Old comments, attachment links, and activity history won't exist in your new tool, so Todoist serves as a read-only archive. Once you're confident nothing lives there anymore, cancel. Set a calendar reminder or you'll discover the renewal charge the same way you discovered the price hikes.

5. Which of these tools support multi-assignee tasks like Todoist Business?

TickTick and ClickUp support multi-assignee and will handle those tasks in import. Things 3 and Vikunja don't — split those tasks into individual assignments before migrating. Akiflow handles assignees through linked shared teams but treats tasks per-person in the calendar view, so plan accordingly.