Microsoft To Do vs Todoist in 2026: which should you use?

Todoist is the better task manager. Microsoft To Do is the better free one. Both statements are true at once, which is what makes this comparison harder than it looks.

The split runs along the paid line. Everything To Do does costs nothing, timed reminders and shared lists included. Todoist gives you the structure To Do has never had (projects, sections, labels, filters, board layouts), but its free Beginner plan holds you to five projects and keeps deadlines, the calendar layout, and the more flexible reminder types behind Pro, so picking Todoist usually means paying for Todoist.

Below, the two apps go head to head on price, capture, organization, collaboration, and Microsoft 365 fit. Two later sections answer the questions people actually arrive with: what each app gives you if you never spend anything, and which one can push your tasks into the workspace where you plan the rest of your work.

Microsoft To Do vs Todoist at a glance

The scorecard below rates each app on the jobs people actually use a task manager for. Detailed breakdowns follow in the sections beneath it.

What is Microsoft To Do?

Microsoft To Do is a free task app built on the bones of Wunderlist, the beloved list app Microsoft acquired in 2015 and retired in 2020. It is designed to be simple: a clean place to keep daily lists, tied tightly into the Microsoft 365 world.

Its signature feature is My Day, a fresh list you rebuild each morning. To Do suggests items from your overdue and upcoming tasks, and you pick the handful worth doing today. Around that sit ordinary lists, steps (subtasks), due dates, reminders, recurring tasks, file attachments, and shared lists for a partner or small team.

The real draw is the Microsoft integration. Flagged emails in Outlook turn into To Do tasks automatically, your tasks surface in the Teams Tasks app alongside Planner, and everything syncs across Windows, web, iOS, Android, and Mac. What To Do leaves out is structure: there are no tags, no custom filters, no board view, and no way to group tasks by anything other than the list they sit in.

What is Todoist?

Todoist is a cross-platform task manager that has spent years building one of the most refined to-do experiences available. Where To Do is a daily list, Todoist is a system: somewhere you can run your whole life and work without it falling apart at scale.

The feature people fall for first is natural-language input. Type "Write agenda for Monday's meeting every week #Work +Paul" and Todoist parses the due date, the recurrence, the project, and the assignee as you type. From there you get projects and sub-projects, sections, labels, filters, four priority levels, and three ways to look at the same tasks: list, board, and calendar (the calendar layout is a Pro feature). It also handles recurring tasks, reminders, comments, templates, and a light gamification layer called Karma.

Todoist runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and the web, with browser extensions and add-ins for Gmail, Outlook, and Slack. Its free tier is called Beginner, and it is thinner than the marketing suggests: 5 active personal projects, 3 filter views, 7 days of activity history, and 5 MB file uploads, with no calendar layout and no deadlines. Pro raises the ceilings to 300 projects and 150 filter views with full history, and adds the scheduling extras (deadlines, the calendar layout, multiple custom reminders per task, and location reminders).

For a closer look at how it stacks up against other tools, see Todoist vs. Google Tasks and TickTick vs. Todoist.

Key differences

Both apps are fast, sync everywhere, and handle a basic checklist well. The differences show up the moment your needs grow past "remember to buy milk."

Price: free vs. freemium

Microsoft To Do is completely free with no paid tier. Everything it does, you get at no cost with a personal Microsoft account or a Microsoft 365 subscription.

Todoist uses a freemium model, and the three tiers separate cleanly:

• Beginner (free): fine for one person with a few projects, but the ceilings arrive fast: 5 active personal projects, 3 filter views, 7 days of activity history, and 5 MB file uploads.
• Pro: $5 per user per month billed yearly ($60 a year), or $7 billed monthly.
• Business: $8 per user per month billed yearly ($96 per user a year), or $10 billed monthly.

Both paid rates took effect on 10 Dec 2025. If price is the only thing that matters, To Do wins outright.

Task capture and natural language

Todoist still captures faster, but the gap has narrowed. Microsoft To Do reads dates, times, and repeat patterns straight out of the task title as you type: "submit invoice friday 5pm" arrives with a due date and a reminder already attached. That recognition runs on the Windows app from version 2.66 onward and on iOS, in English only on Windows, and it stops working once you are editing an existing task in the details view.

What To Do cannot read is structure. Todoist's parser takes the project, the label, the priority, and the assignee from the same line, so a task lands where it belongs instead of waiting to be sorted. Todoist has also pushed capture past typing: Ramble turns spoken thoughts into structured tasks in more than 40 languages, with 10 sessions a month on the free plan and unlimited sessions on Pro and Business. The Todoist Assist tools that build filters from plain language and turn forwarded emails into tasks are Pro and Business only.

Organization: projects, labels, and views

To Do organizes work into lists, which you can collect into groups, plus steps inside each task. That is the whole hierarchy. There are no tags, no filters, and one way to view a list.

Todoist gives you projects, sections, labels, and filters, so the same task can belong to a project and carry tags like @home or @deep-work that you filter across every project at once. You also get three views of any project, including a Kanban-style board for moving work through stages. The list and board layouts are free; the calendar layout comes with Pro.

Reminders and recurring tasks

Repeating tasks are close to a draw. To Do repeats daily, on weekdays, weekly, monthly, yearly, or on a custom pattern. Todoist takes the same instructions as text ("every 2nd Tuesday", "every weekday at 9am"), which our guide to Todoist recurring tasks walks through in detail.

Reminders are closer than the plan pages suggest, and the difference is about flexibility rather than access. Both free plans will buzz you. To Do's Remind me control costs nothing and takes any time you name: later today, tomorrow, next week, or a specific date and time, whether or not the task has a due date.

Free Todoist reminds you too, but it hangs the reminder off the task itself. Give a task a date and a time and Todoist adds an automatic reminder, 30 minutes before by default and adjustable in your settings. What Pro adds is the ability to stack several custom reminders on one task, type them inline with the ! shortcut, and trigger a reminder by location instead of time. So the free gap is not "no reminders", it is "one reminder, tied to when the task is due".

Collaboration and sharing

To Do lets you share a list with other people, which is enough for a shared grocery list or a couple's errands. Todoist goes further: you share whole projects, assign tasks to specific people, add comments, and attach files, which makes it workable for small teams, not just households.

Platforms and the Microsoft ecosystem

If your day runs through Microsoft 365, To Do has a real edge. Flagged Outlook emails become tasks, your items appear in the Teams Tasks experience next to Microsoft Planner, and the whole thing is free with your existing subscription.

One caveat on the flagged email trick, since it is the feature people pick To Do for: the Flagged email list only works with mailboxes Microsoft hosts (Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, Live.com, or a custom domain hosted by Microsoft), and you have to switch the list on before anything appears in it.

Todoist matches the broad platform coverage (and adds Linux, which To Do skips) and offers Outlook and Gmail add-ins, but it sits beside the Microsoft stack rather than inside it.

Getting your tasks where you plan

This dimension often decides the question for people who plan their work somewhere other than a task app. Microsoft To Do has no official Notion connection; you are limited to third-party automation, and most of those run one direction only. Todoist has an official Notion embed and a healthy set of sync tools, including true two-way options. If your tasks need to show up in Notion alongside your notes, projects, and docs, Todoist is the far easier app to wire in, which is what the next section is about.

If you are only ever going to use the free version

Most people comparing these two apps intend to spend nothing, and that changes the answer.

Free Microsoft To Do is the entire product:

• Lists, steps, due dates, and file attachments
• Reminders at a time you pick, and repeating tasks from daily through custom patterns
• Shared lists, My Day, and the Outlook and Teams connections

Free Todoist is a sample of the product:

• 5 active personal projects and 3 filter views
• 7 days of activity history and 5 MB file uploads
• List and board layouts, but no calendar layout and no deadlines
• One automatic reminder per task, tied to its due time; multiple custom and location reminders need Pro
• Ramble voice capture capped at 10 sessions a month, and no Todoist Assist

On a strict free-versus-free comparison, Microsoft To Do gives you more. Todoist earns its place once you need labels and filters spanning projects, or a task app that connects to the rest of your stack. At that point the fair comparison is To Do against Todoist Pro at $5 per user per month billed yearly, not against the free Beginner plan. If you would rather survey the wider field first, our roundups of the best to-do list apps and the best planner apps cover the alternatives.

Which should you choose?

The right answer depends on how complex your work is and which ecosystem you already work in.

Connecting your tasks to your workspace

A task app is only half a system. If you plan projects, keep meeting notes, and track everything else in Notion, a separate checklist on the side means you are constantly switching windows and copying items by hand. The fix is to keep your tasks where you do them and have them appear, automatically, in a Notion database next to the rest of your work.

This is where Todoist pulls ahead in a way that matters. To keep the two in step without retyping anything, 2sync connects Todoist and Notion with true two-way sync: add or complete a task in Todoist and it updates in Notion, edit it in Notion and the change flows back to Todoist. It maps Todoist fields to Notion properties, including due dates, priorities, labels, sections, and subtasks, and you can filter so only certain projects or labels sync.

Todoist tasks landing in a Notion database after a two-way sync, ready for board, table, or calendar views.

If you want a head start, our free Todoist Notion template gives you a database that is already structured to mirror your Todoist tasks, so you can connect it and go. Other layouts are worth a look too: our pick of the best Notion to-do list templates covers boards, weekly planners, and GTD setups you can point a sync at.

Setting it up takes a few minutes: walk through how to sync Notion with Todoist for the step-by-step, or see the Todoist Notion integration page for exactly what each field maps to. If you are still weighing Todoist against Notion's own task features, Notion vs. Todoist covers that decision in depth. Pleexy is the other tool people reach for to bridge Todoist and Notion; 2sync vs Pleexy compares the two on two-way sync and field mapping.

What if you lean toward Microsoft To Do? Notion gets stronger when it is wired to the Microsoft apps you already run your day in: 2sync syncs Outlook Calendar, Outlook Mail, and Outlook Contacts into Notion, so your meetings, important emails, and contacts land in the same workspace as your notes. See how to sync Notion with Outlook Calendar if that is the part of your day you most want in Notion.

Conclusion

Microsoft To Do and Todoist are built for different people. Microsoft To Do is the better choice if you want a free, focused daily planner and your work already runs through Outlook and Teams, and it is the better choice if your budget for task software is zero, since nothing in it is reserved for a paid tier. Todoist is the better choice for almost everyone willing to pay: it captures tasks faster, organizes them with projects, labels, and filters, shows them in list, board, or calendar view, and scales from a personal list to small-team work without breaking.

The deciding factor for a lot of people is what happens outside the task app. If you plan your life in Notion, Todoist is the one that connects cleanly, and a two-way sync turns your task list into part of the same workspace you already use for everything else. For a wider look at the field, compare the best to-do list apps or read Google Keep vs. Google Tasks if you are leaning toward Google's tools instead.

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