Todoist vs TickTick vs Things 3: Task Managers Developers Actually Stick With

I have a graveyard of task managers. Org-mode files I stopped syncing, a Notion database that turned into a swamp, three or four “this is the one” apps that lasted a sprint and then went quiet. The pattern is always the same: the app that wins isn’t the one with the most features, it’s the one I keep opening without thinking about it. So when I sat down to compare Todoist, TickTick, and Things 3, I didn’t grade them on spec sheets. I ran each as my primary system for a couple of weeks, capturing real work — code review reminders, “renew the TLS cert,” “call the bank,” the usual mix of engineering and life admin — and watched which one survived contact with a busy week.

These three keep coming up in developer circles for a reason. They’re the survivors of a decade of consolidation, they all do the boring stuff well, and they each represent a genuinely different bet about what a task manager should be. Todoist is the cross-platform workhorse with an actual API. TickTick is the maximalist that bundles half a productivity suite into one app. Things 3 is the Apple-only craftsman’s tool that you buy once and never get nagged about again. The interesting part isn’t which is “best” — it’s how cleanly they sort by who you are.

Platform support: where you can actually use it

This is the first filter, and it eliminates more people than anything else. If you don’t run all-Apple hardware, the decision narrows fast.

Todoist runs everywhere I could think to try it. macOS, Windows, Linux (there’s a real desktop app, not just a wrapper, plus the web app works fine), iOS, Android, browser extensions, a watch app. On my Linux box at work and my M2 MacBook Air at home, the same inbox showed up instantly with no fiddling. For a developer who hops between an Ubuntu workstation, a Windows gaming-slash-work machine, and a phone, this matters more than any single feature. You’re never locked out of your own system.

TickTick is nearly as broad — macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, web, and browser extensions. Its Linux story is the web app rather than a first-class native binary, which is fine for most people but worth knowing if you want a real desktop client on Linux. In practice I used the web app in a pinned tab and never felt second-class.

Things 3 is the outlier: Apple only. Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and that’s the whole list. No web app, no Android, no Windows, no Linux. The flip side is that because Cultured Code only targets Apple platforms, the apps feel native in a way the cross-platform tools can’t match — the Mac app behaves like a Mac app, the iOS app like an iOS app, with no Electron tax. If your entire computing life is inside Apple’s walls, that focus is a feature. If even one important device is outside, Things is simply off the table.

Quick capture: the feature you use 50 times a day

Capture is the make-or-break interaction. If getting a thought out of your head and into the system has any friction, you stop trusting the system, and a task manager you don’t trust is worse than a sticky note.

Todoist’s natural-language quick-add is the headline here, and it earns it. I can type Deploy staging tomorrow at 4pm #work @ops p1 and it parses the date, the project, the label, and the priority in one line without me touching a date picker. After a week the syntax is automatic. The global hotkey pops a capture box from anywhere, and the parsing is forgiving — it understands “every other Monday,” “in 3 days,” “next quarter.” For someone who thinks in text, this is the fastest capture of the three.

TickTick has very similar natural-language parsing and a quick-add of its own, and it’s genuinely good — close enough to Todoist that you won’t feel a downgrade. It also leans on smart date recognition and lets you fire off a task with a keyboard shortcut. The difference is mostly polish and habit rather than capability.

Things 3 takes a different philosophy. Its capture is built around a system-wide hotkey (“Quick Entry,” with a variant that autofills from whatever app you’re in) and a deliberately calm interface. It does parse dates, but the whole app is designed to reduce the friction of processing what you captured — its Inbox-to-Today flow is the smoothest of the three. Things is less about cramming everything into one parsed line and more about making the daily ritual of triaging tasks feel pleasant. It’s a quieter kind of fast.

Query power, labels, and filters: organizing real complexity

Once you have a few hundred tasks, retrieval matters as much as capture. This is where the developer brain wants real query power.

Todoist is the strongest here for anyone who likes building views. Labels, projects, sections, sub-tasks, and — the part power users care about — saved filters with a query syntax. You can write something like (today | overdue) & #work & !@waiting and pin it as a custom view. It’s the closest thing to a little query language among these three, and if you enjoy slicing your tasks the way you’d slice a dataset, Todoist rewards that.

TickTick gives you labels (tags), folders, lists, and smart lists with filtering, plus a few view modes including a Kanban board and a timeline. It covers the common cases well and the smart-list filtering is solid, though its filter expressiveness doesn’t reach Todoist’s boolean-query level. For most people that gap never shows up; for the type who builds elaborate filter stacks, it will.

Things 3 deliberately offers less rope, and that’s the point. It gives you Areas, Projects, headings, tags, and a clean Today/Upcoming/Anytime/Someday structure. You can filter by tag and it’s quick, but there’s no boolean query language. Things’ bet is that a well-designed fixed structure beats infinite configurability for most humans — and honestly, for a lot of weeks it was right. I spent less time arranging in Things and more time just doing. Whether that’s a feature or a limitation depends entirely on your temperament.

Calendar, automation, and the API question

Here the three apps fan out the most, and this section probably decides it for the developer audience.

Calendar. TickTick is the standout: it ships a built-in calendar view that shows your tasks alongside events, plus two-way calendar sync, a native Pomodoro timer, and habit tracking — all inside the one app. That bundling is its whole pitch, and it’s a real one; you get a chunk of what people stitch together from three separate tools. Todoist has a calendar layout and calendar integrations, and it added more calendar-forward features over the last couple of years, but the calendar isn’t the center of gravity the way it is in TickTick. Things 3 shows calendar events inline in its Today and Upcoming views (read-only, via your system calendar) so you can see your day, but it’s not trying to be a calendar app.

Automation and API. This is the clearest split. Todoist has a real, documented REST API plus a sync API, OAuth, webhooks, and a large ecosystem of integrations and community tooling. I’ve scripted Todoist before — closing tasks from CI, creating tickets from a cron job, piping items in from other systems — and it just works. For a developer, the API alone can be the deciding factor. TickTick also exposes an Open API with OAuth, though its surface is more limited than Todoist’s; you can do meaningful integration work, just expect a smaller toolkit and a quieter community. Things 3 has no public web API. It offers deep URL scheme automation and AppleScript/Shortcuts support on Apple platforms, which is genuinely powerful if you’re automating locally on a Mac — but there’s no server-side API to call from a Linux box or a CI pipeline. That’s a hard wall for backend-style automation.

Pricing: subscription versus buy-once

The business models are as different as the apps, and they shape how the apps feel over years.

Todoist has a usable free tier and a Pro subscription at roughly $4–5/month billed annually (around $50/year as of mid-2026), which unlocks reminders, more filters, more active projects, and bigger limits. It’s a subscription, so you’re renting access — fair, given the constant cross-platform sync infrastructure behind it, but it’s an ongoing line item.

TickTick follows the same model with a free tier and a Premium subscription in the same ballpark — roughly $3–4/month or around $36/year as of mid-2026. Given how much it bundles (calendar, Pomodoro, habits), a lot of people consider it the best raw value of the three because it can replace several paid apps at once.

Things 3 is the philosophical opposite: a one-time purchase, per platform. You buy the Mac app once and the iPhone/Apple Watch app once and the iPad app once (each sold separately), and then there’s nothing more to pay — no subscription, no nags, no feature gated behind a renewal. As of mid-2026 the combined cost lands somewhere in the rough vicinity of a year or two of a competitor’s subscription, after which it’s effectively free to keep using. For people who resent recurring charges, that math is deeply satisfying. The trade-off is that major version upgrades (a future Things 4) would typically be a new purchase rather than an included update.

How they stack up against the rest of the landscape

These three don’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s worth saying where they sit relative to the obvious alternatives so you don’t over-rotate on a false choice.

If you want a free, open, hackable system, the comparison shifts to things like the org-mode setups or self-hosted options (Vikunja, for instance) — more control, more maintenance, no native mobile polish. If your tasks are really project management with a team, you’re in Linear/Jira/Asana territory, and a personal task manager is the wrong tool. And if your notes and tasks are deeply intertwined, an all-in-one like Notion or Obsidian-with-plugins competes — at the cost of the focused, fast capture these three are built around. Among dedicated personal task managers, Microsoft To Do is the free cross-platform default (simpler, less powerful), and there are smaller premium players, but Todoist, TickTick, and Things remain the three most developers actually land on after the dust settles. The fact that they sort so cleanly by platform, value, and ownership model is exactly why this trio keeps showing up.

Who should pick which

After living in each, the recommendation isn’t a single winner — it’s a short decision tree.

Pick Todoist if you work across multiple operating systems, you want the strongest filter/query power, and — above all — you want a real API to wire your tasks into scripts, CI, and other systems. It’s the developer default for good reasons, and the subscription buys genuinely useful infrastructure.

Pick TickTick if you want the most for your money and you like the idea of one app that handles tasks, your calendar, focus sessions, and habits. It’s nearly as cross-platform as Todoist, the natural-language capture is excellent, and the bundling makes the subscription easy to justify. For a lot of people this is the pragmatic best buy.

Pick Things 3 if your whole world is Apple, you value how an app feels over how configurable it is, and you’d rather pay once than rent forever. It has no API and no Android, and if those matter to you the decision is already made. But if they don’t, Things is the one I found myself reaching for without effort — which is the only metric that ultimately keeps a task manager alive.

The honest meta-answer: try your top pick for two real weeks with real tasks before committing. The app that wins is the one you stop noticing.

FAQ