Todoist: What It Is, Pricing and How to Use It (2026 Guide)

What is Todoist?

Todoist is a to-do list and task manager for individuals and teams. You add tasks in plain language (“Send invoice every month on the 1st #Admin p1”), and Todoist sets the due date, project and priority for you. Tasks can be organised into projects, sections, sub-tasks and labels, then viewed as a list, a board or (on paid plans) a calendar.

It is made by Doist, a company whose site footer gives the legal name Todoist Inc. Todoist runs on the web, desktop, iOS and Android and syncs between them. It has also added a set of AI features under the name Todoist Assist: voice capture, pulling tasks out of screenshots and documents, cleaning up forwarded emails, breaking down big tasks and building filters from plain English.

The problem it solves is the gap between remembering something and doing it. Todoist is built around fast capture, so a task goes in within seconds and resurfaces on the right day, rather than living in your head, a notebook or an email you meant to answer.

Who it is for

• Individuals who want a dependable personal system. Todoist works well for anyone following a GTD-style or “today list” approach.
• Freelancers and managers mixing client work, admin and personal errands, who need projects, recurring tasks and priorities in one place.
• Email-heavy professionals who want to turn messages into tasks, by forwarding them to a project (any plan, with Email Assist tidying them on Pro) or through email filters such as SaneBox with its SaneTodo integration.
• Small teams that need shared projects, assignments and comments without a full project-management suite.
• People who plan by voice. Ramble turns a spoken brain-dump into structured tasks.

Todoist is not the best fit if you need Gantt charts, resource planning or detailed project reporting; larger work-management platforms handle that. It also does not schedule your tasks onto your calendar automatically. For that, connect it to an AI calendar such as Reclaim, which can pull Todoist tasks into your focus time.

Key features

• Smart Quick Add. Type a task in natural language and Todoist parses it: dates and recurrences (“tomorrow at 4 PM”, “every other Tuesday starting March 3”), #Project, /Section, %label, +Person for assignees in shared projects, p1 to p4 for priority and {march 30} for a deadline. A redesigned Quick Add that can capture several tasks at once rolled out to everyone in October 2026.
• Projects, sub-tasks and labels. Organise work by project and section, break tasks into sub-tasks, and add descriptions, comments, files and voice notes.
• Views and filters. List and board layouts on all plans; calendar layout on Pro and Business, including a 3-day layout on web and desktop and colour coding by project or label. Custom filters show exactly the tasks you want, such as everything due this week with priority 1.
• Reminders and Deadlines. Task reminders on all plans; multiple and location-based custom reminders on Pro and Business. Urgent reminders show a full-screen alert that bypasses Silent or Do Not Disturb. Deadlines (Pro) separate “when I plan to work on this” from “when it is due”.
• Todoist Assist. Filter Assist creates filters from a plain-English request (all plans, English and Spanish). Task Assist helps break down goals and complex tasks (Pro and Business). Email Assist is the AI layer on top of email forwarding: on Pro and Business it picks out the date and time, adds a description and rewrites the task name; forwarding itself works on every plan. Ramble lets you speak and get structured tasks, and Task Capture Assist (out of beta since October 2026) extracts tasks from text, screenshots, photos and PDFs via Extract tasks in Quick Add. On the free plan Ramble and Task Capture Assist share 10 sessions a month; paid plans are unlimited with fair use.
• Team workspaces. Business adds a shared workspace with team projects and folders, roles and permissions, guests, shared templates, activity logs and Project Insights (also on Pro since July 2026).
• Integrations and AI assistants. Todoist lists 90+ integrations covering calendars, email, communication, automation and voice assistants. It has official connectors for Claude and ChatGPT, an official MCP server (OAuth sign-in) that works with Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, VS Code, Gemini, Cursor and other MCP clients, plus a developer API with webhooks and an official td CLI. All of these are on every plan.

Pricing

At the time of writing Todoist has a free plan and two paid plans. Prices are in USD plus local tax; Pro and Business are per user. The pricing page shows local currencies in other countries.

Plan	Billed monthly	Billed yearly	Key limits and features
Beginner	Free	Free	5 personal projects, 5 people per project, 3 filter views, 5 MB uploads, 1 week of activity history, email forwarding, 10 Ramble and Task Capture Assist sessions a month combined; no calendar layout, custom reminders, task duration or auto backups
Pro	$7/month	$60/year ($5/month)	300 personal projects, 150 filter views, 100 MB uploads, full history, calendar layout, task duration, custom and location reminders, Deadlines, auto backups, Task Assist, Email Assist, unlimited Ramble and Task Capture Assist (fair use)
Business	$10/user/month	$96/user/year ($8/user/month)	Everything in Pro plus a team workspace: up to 500 team projects, 250 people per team project, roles and permissions, shared templates, team activity logs, centralised billing

Pro has a 7-day free trial and Business a 14-day trial. Yearly plans can be refunded within 30 days; monthly plans cannot. Downgrading keeps all data, but projects above the new limit become view-only. Todoist does not offer student, family or nonprofit discounts.

Business teams should note the price rise: from $8 to $10 per user per month on monthly billing, and from $6 to $8 per user per month on yearly billing, applied at each team’s first renewal on or after 10 December 2025.

How to use Todoist: step-by-step

1. Sign up and set up your projects

1. Create an account at todoist.com and install the app on your phone and computer so tasks sync everywhere.
2. Create a few projects that match the areas of your life, for example Work, Admin and Personal. On the free plan you have five, so keep them broad and use labels for finer detail.
3. Inside a busy project, add sections (such as “This week” and “Waiting”) to group tasks.

2. Capture tasks with Quick Add

1. Press Q on web, macOS or Windows (or tap the add button on mobile) to open Quick Add.
2. Type the task in natural language and add the extras inline. For example: Draft Q4 report friday 10am #Work /This week %writing p2.
3. For recurring tasks, write the pattern: Pay rent every month on the 1st #Personal.
4. Add a deadline separately from the planned date with curly braces: Prepare client deck monday {thursday}.
5. In shared projects, assign with +Name. Note that labels now use %; the older @ still works but Todoist plans to retire it by the end of 2026.

3. Build filters and views

1. Open Filters & Labels in the navigation menu and click the add icon next to Filters.
2. Click Try it in the Filter Assist banner, describe what you want (“tasks due this week with priority 1 in Work”), click Send, then Add filter.
3. Switch a project to board layout to move tasks between columns, or, on Pro, to calendar layout to see tasks by day and drag them to reschedule.
4. Start each day in Today and look ahead in Upcoming.

4. Turn emails and speech into tasks

1. Forward emails (all plans): open a project, click the three-dot menu at the top right, choose Email tasks to this project and click Copy email. Forward any email to that address and it becomes a task. On Pro and Business, Email Assist then cleans it up with a date and time, a description and a rewritten task name; it is the one Assist feature you can switch off.
2. Ramble: use it to speak a list of things you need to do and let Todoist turn it into structured tasks. On Android and iOS it is also available from home-screen widgets.
3. Extract tasks: in Quick Add, choose Extract tasks and give it a screenshot, photo, PDF or block of text, such as meeting notes, then check the tasks it proposes before adding them.
4. From an AI assistant: connect the Claude or ChatGPT connector (or the MCP server in another client) and ask it to add or review tasks in plain language.
5. If you use SaneBox, enable SaneTodo there to send emails straight to Todoist.

5. Connect your calendar and other tools

Open the integrations section of Todoist’s settings or its integrations directory and connect your calendar, so dated tasks and events sit side by side. If you want tasks scheduled into your week automatically, connect Todoist to Reclaim instead, which suggests tasks inside your focus time blocks.

6. Set up a team (Business)

Create a team workspace from the Business trial, invite members, and move shared work into team projects. Use roles and permissions to control who can edit, shared templates for repeatable processes, and team activity logs to see what changed.

Tips to get better results

• Capture first, organise later. Send everything to the Inbox via Quick Add and sort it once a day; speed of capture is what makes the system trustworthy.
• Use priorities sparingly. If everything is p1, nothing is. Keep p1 for the few tasks that must happen today.
• Separate dates from deadlines. Set the date you plan to work on something and the deadline it is actually due, so overdue warnings mean something.
• Make three good filters. Even on the free plan, filters such as “Today and overdue in Work” or “Waiting on others” do more than extra projects.
• Write tasks as actions. “Email Sarah the budget draft” is easier to start than “Budget”.
• Review weekly. Look through Upcoming and each project once a week, reschedule or delete stale tasks, and clear the Inbox.
• Use Ramble for brain-dumps. Speaking a messy list and letting Todoist structure it is faster than typing after a long meeting. Our guide on how to write better prompts applies here too: clear, specific input gets cleaner tasks.

Limitations and common problems

• Free plan limits. Five projects and three filters are tight for work. Use labels and sections to stretch them, or upgrade to Pro.
• No calendar layout on the free plan. Custom reminders and task duration also require Pro.
• No automatic scheduling. Todoist records when you plan to do tasks but does not fit them around your meetings. Pair it with an AI calendar if you want that.
• AI capture is rationed on the free plan. Ten sessions a month cover Ramble and Task Capture Assist together. “Unlimited” on paid plans has a fair-use cap that Todoist does not publish.
• Personal-project sharing is capped at 5 people, even on Business. Larger groups should use team projects.
• Label syntax is changing. The @ symbol for labels is planned to be retired by the end of 2026; switch to % now.
• AI and privacy. Todoist says Assist runs on its own infrastructure using LLMs from providers that have committed not to train on the data processed, and its privacy policy says it does not use your data to train generalised AI models. It does not name the providers in the pages we checked. The older Task Assist browser extension is a separate case with its own terms, so read them before installing it.

Alternatives

• TickTick - a similar personal task manager with a built-in calendar and habit tracker.
• Microsoft To Do - a free, simpler list app that suits people already in Microsoft 365.
• monday.com and other work-management platforms - better for teams that need dashboards and complex workflows.
• Reclaim - not a replacement but a partner: it turns Todoist tasks into time on your calendar.
• Vea - an all-in-one system for service businesses that combines customers, tasks, tickets and accounting.

Compare more options in our productivity tools directory, see our SaneBox guide if email is where most of your tasks start, and our WebCatalog guide if your work is spread across many web apps and accounts.

Verdict

Sign up for Todoist if you want a fast, dependable place to put everything you need to do, and you like typing tasks the way you would say them. The free plan is enough to test the habit; Pro at $5 a month billed yearly is worth it once you need more than five projects, a calendar view or the AI capture features. Teams that need shared projects without heavy project-management overhead should try Business. Skip it if you need Gantt charts and resource planning, or if you want tasks scheduled onto your calendar automatically without adding a tool such as Reclaim.