Todoist vs TickTick: the two numbers that actually decide it

Todoist Pro costs $59.99 a year. TickTick Premium costs $35.99. Same category, same job, and one of them asks two-thirds more money for it, which is a bigger gap than any feature argument on the first page of Google.

Both prices come from Apple's own listings, checked on 15 August 2026, and both apps are free to download.

Almost every comparison you'll find tours the features for two thousand words and lands on the same shrug about it depending on your workflow. That's true and useless. The decision usually gets made by two numbers instead, and you can check both in about a minute.

One disclosure first. We make Kudos, a free to-do app, so both of these compete with us. Kudos is not in the comparison table below, because a to-do list with XP and streaks is a different product from either of these and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

The numbers side by side

Two things in that table deserve more than a row each.

Where the free tiers stop

This is the number nobody leads with, and it's the one that decides it for most people, because almost nobody pays for a to-do app on day one. You use it free. You hit a wall, and that wall is what makes you reach for a card.

Todoist's free plan gives you five personal projects, three filter views, five collaborators and 5 MB uploads. Five projects is not many. Work, home, a side thing, a trip and one shared list, and you're done.

TickTick's free plan runs to nine lists with unlimited tasks inside them, according to HabitBox's testing, along with a basic calendar view and a habit tracker capped at around five habits. That's a later wall.

So the honest framing is this. If you intend to stay free forever, TickTick gives you roughly twice the room before it stops you and asks for money. If you expect to pay anyway, the ceiling matters much less and the $24 a year matters more.

What TickTick has that Todoist doesn't

TickTick bundles three tools most people otherwise install separately: a habit tracker, a Pomodoro timer and an Eisenhower matrix view that sorts tasks into urgent and important quadrants. The calendar is stronger too. It supports drag-to-schedule, which makes planning a week feel less like data entry.

That bundling is not in dispute. Todoist concedes it on its own comparison page, which acknowledges TickTick's built-in calendar, habit tracking, Pomodoro timer and notes, and then argues that the bundle costs you focus.

Both things can be true. Whether it's a bargain or a distraction depends on a question only you can answer: would you actually use a habit tracker, or would you look at it twice and never again?

What Todoist has that TickTick doesn't

Todoist's advantage is capture. Type a task as a sentence with a date buried in it and Todoist parses the date out, which sounds small until you've added forty tasks in a week. Zapier singles this out as Todoist's clearest edge, along with separate start and deadline dates and a much larger integration catalogue.

Be careful with integration counts. Zapier put it at more than 80 against TickTick's seven in February 2025, and 2sync's June 2026 piece claims over 150 for Todoist. The number moves and the sources disagree, so treat the direction as reliable and the figure as approximate.

Todoist is also the more widely used of the two by a distance. The gap is close to three to one. Its 127,966 App Store ratings against TickTick's 45,010 tell you which app has the larger community behind it, though TickTick holds the marginally higher average at 4.9 against 4.8.

Who should pick which

Here's where a comparison earns its keep, so I'll be specific rather than diplomatic.

Pick TickTick if you want one app instead of three, you're price-sensitive, or you expect to live on the free plan. Nine lists beats five projects, $35.99 beats $59.99, and the habit tracker and timer are genuinely there rather than promised. Rambox, HabitBox and 2sync all reach some version of this conclusion, and on the numbers they're right.

Pick Todoist if you add tasks constantly and in a hurry, you need it to connect to other software, or you share work with other people. Natural language capture and the integration catalogue are real advantages that compound daily, and the larger user base means more third-party support and more answers when something breaks. If the other person is your partner rather than a colleague, the sharing question turns into a different one, which is what each app tells the other of you when a task moves.

Pick either if you're deciding between them and paralysed. They are both good. The gap between these two apps is much smaller than the gap between using one and using neither, and a month with the wrong one costs you $3.

What neither of them is for

Both apps assume the hard part is organising the work. Often it isn't. No amount of nesting projects inside filters will make a task easier to begin on a bad evening.

If your list is already accurate and you still don't start, a better project structure won't help. That's a different problem, and it's the one we wrote about in why tiny wins beat perfect plans: the fix is shrinking the first step until refusing it feels absurd, not sorting the backlog again. The same goes for a list of twenty-seven items that makes four finished tasks feel invisible, which is a reporting problem rather than a planning one.

Neither Todoist nor TickTick is trying to solve that, and neither should be blamed for not solving it. It's just worth knowing which problem you actually have before paying $59.99 to fix the other one.

If you want a sense of how differently an app can approach the same day, our look at Finch covers one built entirely around making the small daily action feel like it's for somebody else.

The short version

TickTick is the better deal. It is also the better all-in-one, while Todoist is the better pure task manager and the safer bet if other software has to talk to it. The free tiers are where the real decision gets made.

Check both prices in your own app store before you commit. Ours were right on 15 August 2026, and prices in this category move.