Todoist Review: Features, Pricing, Setup Guide & Tips
Todoist Review: Is It Still Worth Paying For After the 2025 Price Hike?
Todoist spent years as the default answer to “what’s a good, simple to-do app.” Then, starting December 10, 2025, Doist raised prices across the board: Pro went from $4 to $5 a month on annual billing, and Business went from $6 to $8 per user. Neither increase is dramatic in isolation, but it’s worth asking directly whether the app underneath the price tag has kept up.
Our take: Todoist’s free plan is still one of the more usable free tiers in task management, but its most-cited limitation — no reminders — hasn’t changed, which means most regular users still end up paying. The real question in 2026 isn’t whether Todoist is good; it’s whether $5 a month for an individual, or $8 per seat for a team, is still the right amount to pay for what is fundamentally a well-built but feature-conservative task list.
How AppFinderX Evaluated Todoist
This review is research-based. It draws on Todoist’s official pricing and help documentation, Doist’s own announcement of the December 2025 pricing change, and independent user feedback aggregated across review platforms and pricing trackers, cross-checked for consistency. We focused on the free-to-paid decision point, what specifically changed with the price increase, real-world cost for individuals and small teams, and how Todoist’s feature set holds up against both simpler and more automated competitors.
What Changed in December 2025
Doist’s own pricing update notice confirms the increase applies to renewals on or after December 10, 2025, and frames it as funding continued investment in team-facing features — team workspaces, calendar and board layouts, and team insights. In practice, existing users didn’t see the new price immediately; it applied at each account’s next renewal date, so some users are still transitioning onto the new pricing as of mid-2026.
The scale of the increase matters more for teams than individuals. A solo Pro user absorbs an extra $12 a year on annual billing ($48/year → $60/year). A 10-person team on Business absorbs an extra $240 a year ($720/year → $960/year annually) — a jump worth budgeting for if you manage the subscription for a team rather than yourself.
Where the Free Plan Runs Out
Todoist’s free tier (sometimes labeled “Beginner” in its own materials) is genuinely usable for light task management: 5 active projects, 5 collaborators per project, 3 filter views, 5MB file uploads, and a week of activity history, with no time limit on the plan itself.
The plan runs out in one specific, well-known way: no reminders. For an app whose core job is helping you not forget things, the absence of due-date and location-based reminders on the free plan is the single biggest reason people upgrade. If you’re disciplined about checking your task list manually every day, the free plan can genuinely last. Most people aren’t, and that’s exactly the gap Pro is priced to close.
Beyond reminders, the free plan also caps you at 5 projects — restrictive the moment you’re running separate lists for work, a side project, and personal errands — and gives you only a week of activity history, which matters less day-to-day but removes your ability to audit what you completed further back than seven days.
What Pro Actually Unlocks
Pro, at $5/month billed annually ($7/month paid monthly), removes the reminder limitation entirely and raises the project cap to 300 — effectively unlimited for any individual user. It also adds full activity history and reporting, custom filters beyond the free plan’s three, automatic backups, and Todoist’s AI Task Assist feature, which can suggest task breakdowns and next steps from a task description.
The honest assessment: reminders and the project cap increase are what most people are actually paying for. AI Task Assist is a genuinely useful addition but not the reason most upgrades happen — it’s a value-add on top of a decision that reminders alone usually justify.
Where Todoist Falls Short
It’s a task list, not a planner or scheduler. Todoist tells you what’s due; it doesn’t put your tasks on a calendar or automatically find time for them the way AI-scheduling tools like Motion or Reclaim do. If your actual problem is “I have more tasks than hours and don’t know when to do them,” Todoist alone won’t solve that — you’d need to pair it with a calendar-blocking habit or a separate scheduling tool.
Project management features are thin by design. There’s no native Gantt chart, no resource management, no time tracking, and dependency tracking is limited. Todoist is intentionally a task manager rather than a project management platform, which is the right choice for individuals and very small teams but a real limitation for any team coordinating multi-week projects with dependencies.
The free-to-Pro reminder gate feels dated in 2026. Competitors like Microsoft To Do include reminders for free, and TickTick’s free tier is comparably generous. Todoist’s choice to gate something this basic behind a paid plan is a longstanding design decision, not a new one, but it’s increasingly out of step with what’s free elsewhere in the category.
Business pricing is per seat with no lower-cost tier for small teams. At $8/user/month annually, a 3-person team pays $288/year for essentially the same core task-management experience as Pro, plus shared workspaces and admin controls. For very small teams that mostly need shared visibility rather than governance, that can feel like a lot of per-seat overhead for features they’ll use lightly.
Pricing and the Real Cost of a Team
Todoist’s official pricing, current as of Doist’s December 2025 update:
| Plan | Price | Best Fit |
|---|---|---|
| Free (Beginner) | $0 | Individuals with light task management needs who don’t need reminders |
| Pro | $5/month billed annually ($7/month monthly) | Individuals who want reminders, unlimited practical project capacity, and AI Task Assist |
| Business | $8/user/month billed annually ($10/user/month monthly) | Teams needing shared workspaces, roles/permissions, and centralized billing |
Hidden costs to watch for: Business pricing is per seat, so cost scales linearly with headcount rather than flattening at higher team sizes the way some competitors’ tiered team plans do. Monthly billing carries a real premium over annual — $7 vs. $5 for Pro, $10 vs. $8 for Business — so teams or individuals who prepay annually save roughly 30% over paying month to month. There’s no published enterprise tier with volume discounting; large teams simply keep paying the per-seat Business rate.
Real-world cost example: A freelancer on Pro, billed annually, pays $60/year — a low, predictable cost for reminders and unlimited practical project capacity. A 6-person team on Business, billed annually, pays $48/user/year × 6 = $288/year. Move that same team to monthly billing and the cost rises to $720/year — a difference worth planning around if cash flow, not total cost, is the constraint.
Todoist vs. the Alternatives
Choose Microsoft To Do if you want a genuinely free task manager with reminders included and you’re already inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem — you’ll give up Todoist’s more powerful natural-language input and cross-platform polish, but you won’t pay anything.
Choose TickTick if you want a close feature match to Todoist (including reminders on a more generous free tier) at a comparable or slightly lower price, and you don’t mind a less established brand.
Choose Motion if your actual problem is time, not task tracking — Motion’s AI auto-scheduling puts tasks directly onto your calendar and reshuffles them as your day changes, which Todoist doesn’t attempt to do, though Motion costs several times more per month.
Choose Todoist if you want the most refined natural-language task entry in the category, genuinely reliable cross-platform sync, and you’re comfortable paying a modest monthly fee specifically for reminders and full project capacity.
Who Should Use Todoist
- Individuals who live by a task list and want fast, natural-language task entry (“submit report next Friday 3pm”) without a steep learning curve.
- Freelancers and solopreneurs who need reminders and more than 5 active projects but don’t need full project management or team features.
- Small teams that want shared visibility into task ownership without adopting a heavier tool like Asana or Zoho Projects.
- Anyone already deep in the Todoist ecosystem with existing projects, labels, and filters built up — the switching cost of leaving is real once your system is established.
Who Should Skip Todoist
- Teams managing multi-week projects with dependencies, who need Gantt charts, resource allocation, or time tracking — Zoho Projects, Asana, or ClickUp are better fits.
- Anyone whose core problem is calendar time, not task tracking — Todoist won’t schedule your day for you the way Motion or Reclaim will.
- Extremely budget-conscious individuals who don’t mind checking a list manually — the free plan works, but only if you can live without reminders.
- Teams of 15+ where per-seat Business pricing adds up fast without volume discounting — worth comparing total annual cost against flat-rate competitors before committing.
Tips and Tricks for Getting More Out of Todoist
- Lean hard on natural-language due dates. Typing “pay invoice every 1st of the month” or “call client tomorrow 2pm” creates recurring tasks and reminders in one step — most new users under-use this and manually set dates instead.
- Use labels for context, not just projects for category. Projects organize what the task belongs to; labels (like @waiting-on or @15-min) let you filter across projects by how you’ll actually work, which is where Todoist’s filtering power pays off.
- Set up a weekly review filter combining overdue and due-this-week tasks. A single saved filter that surfaces both prevents tasks from quietly aging out of sight, which is Todoist’s most common failure mode for undisciplined users.
- If you’re on Business, use team roles deliberately rather than making everyone an admin. The permission structure exists specifically to keep shared projects from becoming unmanageable as the team grows.
AppFinderX Verdict
Todoist’s December 2025 price increase didn’t change what the app does — it’s still a fast, well-designed task manager built around natural-language input and cross-platform reliability, not a project management or scheduling tool. What it changed is the math on whether the free plan is worth outgrowing.
For most individuals who actually use reminders daily, $5/month billed annually is a reasonable price for a tool that’s genuinely pleasant to use and unlikely to disappear (Doist remains an independent, bootstrapped company, which reduces the risk of a surprise acquisition reshaping the roadmap). For teams, the calculus is less clean: $8/user/month for Business is fair for what it includes, but it’s worth confirming your team actually needs shared workspaces and admin controls rather than just wanting visibility, which cheaper or free alternatives can often provide.
Buy Todoist Pro if reminders and unlimited practical project capacity are worth $5 a month to you — for most consistent users, they are. Skip it if your actual bottleneck is calendar time rather than task tracking, in which case an AI-scheduling tool is solving a different, and for some people more pressing, problem.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Todoist’s prices actually go up in 2025?
Yes. Starting December 10, 2025, Pro rose from $4 to $5/month (annual billing) and Business rose from $6 to $8/user/month (annual billing), applied at each account’s next renewal date.
Is Todoist’s free plan good enough to skip paying entirely?
It can be, if you don’t need reminders and can stay within 5 active projects. For most people who rely on due-date reminders, the free plan isn’t sufficient long-term.
Does Todoist do time-blocking or calendar scheduling?
Not automatically. It offers calendar layouts for viewing tasks alongside your schedule, but it doesn’t auto-schedule tasks into open calendar slots the way Motion or Reclaim do.
Is Todoist Business worth it for a small team?
It’s worth it if you need shared workspaces, team roles, and centralized billing. If your team just wants shared task visibility without governance features, it may be more than you need.
Is Doist likely to be acquired, changing Todoist’s pricing or roadmap?
There’s no indication of this. Doist has remained an independent, bootstrapped company without outside venture funding, which is worth noting for buyers concerned about acquisition-driven pricing shifts common elsewhere in SaaS.
