We’ve all had those days, weeks, or maybe even months when we can’t seem to get a handle on our daily tasks. Meetings pop up at the last minute that we forgot about. You’re constantly trying to finish tasks at the last minute because they fell through the cracks. Over time, this cycle can really add unnecessary stress to your day, deplete your energy, and reduce productivity.
Thankfully, there are a few simple apps that can really help you get a handle on your day-to-day tasks to help boost productivity and reduce any unwanted stress from missed appointments or deadlines. Two of the most popular apps for tracking daily tasks are Todoist and Microsoft To Do. Despite the similar names, there are some key differences between these apps and how they go about simplifying your daily scheduling.
To help you decide which one is right for you, we’ll go over each app in detail and point out its strengths and weaknesses.
What is Todoist?
Todist is a personal planner and scheduler that helps you set goals, track tasks, and set reminders to avoid missing critical deadlines or appointments. You can think of Todists and a personal project manager. It shares many of the same basic features as popular project management platforms like Monday or Click Up but without the added features needed to manage large teams or complex projects spanning multiple departments.
Instead, Todists is for your personal use and keeping yourself on track as you tackle tasks and work towards goals. However, you can still collaborate with others if needed using Todoist and your fellow team members can comment on your tasks if you share projects with them. You may already use a fully-featured project management tool for this type of personal task management. But Todoist offers many benefits by streamlining the process to make adding tasks and other events much easier and faster.
Todist is available as an app for Android and iOS. It also works on desktops and has several syncing options with popular services like Outlook or Google Calendar.
Features
Todoist has some great core features for managing your tasks, but there are also some that extend it beyond just a scheduler and planner. Below are some standout features you’ll find in Todoist.
Templates
If you’re coming from a project management background, you may already be using templates. Templates help you jump-start your task lists and sub-tasks to help avoid getting bogged down when all you want to do is streamline your schedule.
Todist has over 60 templates for common business situations that can apply to many different industries. For example, some templates included with Todist include:
- Design Sprint
- Bug Tracking
- Content Pipeline Creation
- Book Writing
- Event Planning
- Design Requests
- Marketing Campaign Tracker
- …and more
Each template has useful task sections for pre-planning, execution, and even post-completion review. You can edit any template to make it your own and they make a great starting point when you aren’t sure how to start creating a roadmap for your latest initiative.
Kanban View
Todist borrows another popular feature from larger project management platforms and allows for the easy creation and viewing of Kanban boards within your projects or tasks. For those who are more visual, this is a welcome addition and can be easier to manage at a glance than traditional nested tasks and sub-tasks in a folder-type view. What’s nice about Todoist is that it gives you the option for either type of view, either a task list with nested subtasks or a Kanban view. You can toggle between the two as needed with a keyboard shortcut or a simple menu on the app.
If you currently use Kanban board views and are comfortable with them, this is likely a standout feature to consider since Microsoft To Do currently doesn’t offer this option. However, there are workarounds to create kanban boards in other Microsoft products and share them with To Do. But this is cumbersome and more of a hack than a direct integration.
Integrations
A task manager isn’t much help if you have to waste time manually moving information back and forth between apps. Todist helps you avoid this with over 80 built-in integrations with the most popular business productivity apps and services. In this regard, Todiost is more flexible than Microsoft which most focuses on its own productivity products, although it does support many outside integrations.
Overall, if integrations are important to you, this is an area to compare these two apps as Todoist will likely have the flexibility to share data the way you want to.
Reporting & Tracking
Todist includes a unique way to track your overall productivity as well as a few gamification systems to help make the process more fun and engaging. Your overall productivity trends can be seen as an overview score for the day, week, or month. You can view how well you kept up with tasks, which is great for fine-tuning your workload and bandwidth to avoid burnout or falling behind in the future. There are also internal “points” for completing tasks and goals. These are internal and not applicable to anything, but they are a fun way to keep score in a way that’s not intimidating or too serious.
It’s all totally optional and some users may not care for this feature, but it’s a nice inclusion and a way to engage users with their own productivity trends and make adjustments as necessary.
Collaboration
Despite being geared for personal use, Todoist allows for collaboration and sharing of any project and the tasks within it. Other users whom you’ve shared projects with can comment on them or even complete them if you assign the task to someone else. This feature starts to blur the line between a to-do app and a project manager, but it doesn’t get in the way if you don’t need it. It’s also nice knowing it’s there so you can quickly add team members if a project suddenly pops up and you need a little help.
Todoist’s collaboration features are more integrated than Microsoft To Do, but Microsoft does have collaboration features but they require other Microsoft apps to get the most out of them.
AI Assistant
AI is becoming a buzzword for virtually all business tools, but in the case of Todoist, it’s implemented well and does provide a useful benefit. You can use the AI assistant for task creation, writing descriptions, and even summarizing text.
Microsoft To Do does have an AI task completion feature, but it’s more of a predictive text tool that looks at your past history and helps suggest tasks. In its current iteration, the To Do AI version is not quite as useful as Todoist.
Pricing
Todoist is priced affordably and there is also a free plan to test out some of the core features before committing.
Beginner Plan: $0/month/user
- 5 personal projects
- Smart quick add
- Flexible list & board layouts
- 3 filter views
- 1-week activity history
- Integrate email, calendar, and more
Pro Plan: $4/month/user
- 300 personal projects
- Calendar layout
- Task reminders & duration
- 150 filter views
- Unlimited activity history
- AI Assistant
Business Plan: $6/month/user
- Pro for all team members
- A shared team workspace
- Up to 500 team projects
- Calendar layout for team projects
- 1000 team members & guests
- 1000 project folders
- Team roles & permissions
What is Microsoft To Do?
Microsoft To Do is a personal task manager and project management assistant designed to be used alone or within the broader Microsoft ecosystem. It shares many basic features with Todoist in that you can quickly create tasks and sub-tasks and organize them however you prefer. You can also easily set reminders for each task and customize how those reminders are delivered.
Microsoft To Do is more of a simplified and streamlined app than Todoist and that’s really one of the key differences between comparing the two.
Where Todoist strays into project management territory with Kanban views and collaboration, To Do stays true to its roots and keeps things very simple and streamlined. There’s no fluff with To Do and depending on your preference, that can be a positive or a negative.
Another key offering from To Do is how it works with countless other Microsoft products. To Do is really designed for those already in the Microsoft ecosystem and simply want a fast way to manage their day-to-day tasks.
Microsoft To Do offers slightly better individual task customization. For example, sub-tasks have all the attributes of full tasks. To Do specializes in task lists and nested task lists, so if that’s your style, you’ll feel right at home with To Do.
The interface of To Do is minimalist, but in a good way. There is virtually no learning curve and you can quickly start creating tasks and setting up reminders with very little effort. There’s also an intuitive star-based priority system so you can set different priorities right from your task list.
Features
Microsoft To Do focuses more on being streamlined for ultra-efficiency. But the core features are strong and quick to learn. Below we’ll go over which features help Microsoft To Do stand out and can help you organize your tasks.
Integration With Other Microsoft Products
This is To Do’s strongest feature and if you’re already using apps like Outlook or Teams, you’ll have no problem at all setting up To Do to work with your other apps. For example, you can immediately create tasks in To Do from an email received in Outlook.
This is also one of the reasons that To Do is more minimalist. More advanced features can be found in other Microsoft products that work seamlessly with To Do.
Reminders
To Do allows you to customize your reminders depending on your preferred method of notification as well as the time in advance to send the reminder. Reminders are straightforward to set up and you can also customize them easily through the settings menu which is available straight from your task list screen.
Overall, the reminders in To Do are very capable and they are also available for free. In Todoist, advanced reminder settings are only available in the paid plans.
Task List Customization
To Do is really a task list app and it shines if you prefer that style of working with projects and goals. Tasks can be shown in daily, weekly, or monthly views and you can quickly toggle between each one.
The overall design is minimalist and there’s not much color or graphical customization allowed. Although, you can highly customize each task and sub-task with its own comments, attachments, and other attributes.
Your default view is divided into the following separate task lists:
- My Day: Everything you have scheduled that day.
- Important: These are items you’ve manually starred as important.
- Planned: Everything with a due date or reminder set.
- Assigned To Me: Tasks assigned to you by others.
- Flagged Email: Messages you’ve flagged in Outlook to turn into tasks within To Do.
Share Projects & Tasks
To Do doesn’t have collaborative tools quite as strong as Todoist, but being free it’s much easier to bring in new team members or others to share projects.
However, if you and your team members are on a Microsoft 365 plan, then the sharing becomes much more robust and you can take advantage of the overall Microsoft integrations that work seamlessly with To Do. But even without a paid Microsoft 365 plan, you can share any task or project with other users who have a free To Do account and collaborate, comment, and perform other basic functions.
Pricing
One of the best things about Microsoft To Do is that it’s totally free. It’s available for Android and iOS as well as desktop via a browser. There are no limitations on features when using To Do for free.
Todoist vs Microsoft To Do: Comparison
Both of these apps are very capable of handling your day-to-day task management needs. The differences really come down to the slight feature additions and the more advanced tools that are available in Todoist.
Todoist is better if you want different views and to be able to customize your views. For example, toggling between Kanban views and your task lists.
Microsoft To Do simply doesn’t offer this much flexibility for those who prefer Kanban workflows. However, To Do’s task views are still solid and allow you to customize sub-tasks more than Todoist. So it’s a tradeoff you’ll need to consider based on personal preference.
With integrations, Todoist is the more flexible app. You aren’t locked into the Microsoft ecosystem. To Do does work with other apps and even devices such as the Apple Watch. So there is some flexibility with To Do, but it is clearly designed to work in concert with the Microsoft 365 apps. If you need deep integration with a host of outside apps, you will likely find Todoist is the better option. Sharing and collaboration are also an area where these apps diverge. Todoist has native sharing and collaboration tools. To Do does offer sharing, but many collaboration options are limited to using other Microsoft products. If you and your team are using Microsoft 365, then this won’t be an issue. If you’re not using 365 and want stronger collaboration features, Todoist is the better option.
Finally, there’s the price. You can’t beat free and To Do comes totally free with no limitations, which makes it easy to overlook a few of the features that may be missing. Todoist is relatively inexpensive for a single user, but it is still something to consider depending on your team size.
Todoist Vs Microsoft To Do: Wrap up
Overall, these two apps work extremely well if you want to relieve the stress and anxiety of a full workload. Both allow you to quickly create tasks and prioritize them as needed along with setting up custom reminders to stay on schedule.
Since To Do is free, we recommend trying it first to determine if the features fulfill your needs. Once you’re comfortable with To Do, you can move on to a trial of Todoist to see if the added features are worth the extra cost.
Either of these two apps can make your day-to-day work much easier, it really just comes down to a few features between the two and which one clicks with your preferred workflow.
