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Notion and Todoist are two of the most popular organization and task management apps for individuals and team members. They are also excellent choices for personal use. However useful, they present significant differences in how they manage tasks, organize to-do lists, and store data. In this article, we’ll compare Notion vs. Todoist so you can identify which is better for your particular needs, taking into consideration features, user experience, customization capabilities, and pricing.
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Notion vs. Todoist at a glance
| Feature | Notion | Todoist |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of use | Powerful but can be complex | Simple, intuitive |
| Learning curve | Steeper, more features to master | Shallower, easier to get started |
| Task management | Flexible, supports various workflows | Streamlined, focused on task completion |
| Organization & structure | Databases, pages, nested hierarchies | Projects, labels, filters |
| Customization | Extremely high, adaptable | Moderate, focused on task organization |
| Templates | Extensive library, diverse categories | Task-oriented, workflow templates |
| Collaboration | Real-time editing, shared workspaces | Task assignment, comments, project sharing |
| AI | Notion AI: content creation, summaries | AI Assistant: task suggestions |
| Search & filtering | Powerful filters, database queries | Advanced filters, AI-powered filters |
| Mobile apps | Available, full-featured | Available, streamlined for tasks |
| Offline access | Limited (in development) | Available |
| Integrations | Wide range, expanding | Growing, focused on productivity tools |
| Platforms | Web, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android | Web, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, Apple Watch, Wear OS |
| Pricing & plans | Free | Paid starts at $12/month | Free | Paid starts at $5/month |
Why choose Notion?
- Superior note-taking functionality
- Highly customizable features
- Multiple data views, including lists, tables, calendars, and Kanban views.
- Comprehensive toolkit
- Huge variety of templates
- Powerful AI features
- It works and syncs on all platforms
- Generous free version
Why choose Todoist?
- Optimal focus on task tracking
- Natural language feature for better management
- Clean and simple user-friendly interface
- Low learning curve
- Easy collaboration
- Lots of integrations
- Low cost
What is Notion?
Notion is an all-in-one workspace that blends note-taking, project management, and database capabilities into a single, highly customizable platform.
Launched in 2016, Notion empowers individuals and teams to organize their work, ideas, and information in a way that suits their unique needs.
From simple to-do lists and meeting notes to complex project roadmaps and wikis, Notion’s flexible building blocks allow users to create bespoke systems for virtually any task.
Its strength lies in its adaptability, allowing users to tailor their workspace with various views, templates, and integrations.
While its extensive feature set can present a learning curve, the payoff is a powerful tool capable of streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity.
What is Todoist?
Todoist is a focused and intuitive task management app designed to help individuals and teams stay organized and productive.
Its clean interface and user-friendly design make it easy to capture tasks quickly, set deadlines, and track progress.
Todoist simplifies task management, offering features like recurring tasks, natural language input, priority levels, and collaborative project sharing.
While it may not offer the same level of customization as some other platforms like Notion, its simplicity and reliability make it an excellent choice for those seeking a straightforward and efficient way to manage their to-dos.
Ease of use
Notion, while incredibly powerful and flexible, presents a steeper learning curve than Todoist.
Its interface, packed with features and customization options, can feel overwhelming at first glance. With a clean design, easy-to-set-up pages, and the option to embed other websites and applications, it’s a boon for note-taking and organizing information.
Navigating through its various menus, understanding its database functionalities, and mastering its building blocks require time and patience.
Once you grasp the fundamentals, Notion becomes a playground for productivity, allowing you to tailor your workspace to your exact needs.
Todoist, in contrast, embraces simplicity.
Its clean and uncluttered interface is a breath of fresh air for those seeking a straightforward task management solution. Adding tasks, setting due dates, and organizing projects feel intuitive and natural, requiring minimal effort to get started.
While Todoist may not offer the same depth of customization as Notion, its ease of use is a significant advantage for those who prioritize efficiency and quick task management.
Tasks and subtasks
Both platforms allow you to create tasks and break them down into smaller subtasks, providing a clear hierarchy for managing complex projects.
However, Notion’s flexibility shines through in its ability to customize task properties, add rich text formatting, and embed various content types within tasks.
Also, dependencies allow you to establish relationships between tasks, indicating which tasks rely on the completion of others.
👉 Learn more: How to Create Sub-tasks in Notion (3 Easy Steps)
Todoist, while supporting subtasks, maintains a more streamlined approach, focusing on clarity and conciseness.
Adding subtasks in Todoist is straightforward. When viewing a task, you can simply add a new task within it. This automatically creates a subtask relationship.
Todoist supports multiple levels of subtasks, allowing for a nested structure similar to Notion. Subtasks inherit the project and due date of their parent task by default, but these can be changed.
Recurring tasks
Both apps support recurring tasks, but their implementations differ.
Notion, while offering more flexibility in how recurring tasks are integrated into your workflows, requires a slightly more manual and complex setup process.
Notion doesn’t have a built-in natural language parser for recurrences. Instead, the typical approach involves creating a template for the recurring task and then automating the creation of new instances of that template using either Notion’s built-in repeat function within a database or, for more complex scenarios, relying on third-party integrations or the Notion API. This allows for more customization, although it sacrifices ease of use.
Todoist offers a more user-friendly approach, allowing you to set recurring tasks using natural language, allowing you to define recurrences using phrases like “every Monday at 8pm,” “every other Wednesday,” or “daily starting tomorrow.”
This makes setting up recurring tasks quicker and more intuitive. Todoist also offers more granular control, allowing you to specify complex recurrences, such as “every weekday except Wednesday.”
Customization
Notion’s customization options are seemingly endless.
You can personalize nearly every aspect of your workspace, from the color scheme and fonts to the structure and functionality of your pages and databases.
This granular control allows you to create a system that perfectly aligns with your workflow and preferences. Beyond templates, Notion offers extensive customization through several aspects:
- Custom properties: Define properties of various types (text, number, select, date, formula, relation, etc.) for detailed information capture.
- Multiple views: Create different views (table, board, list, calendar, gallery) of the same database with custom filtering, sorting, and grouping.
- Formulas: Use formulas to automate calculations and create dynamic content based on other properties.
- Linked databases: Connect databases to create relationships between different sets of information.
- Integrations: Connect to third-party apps to extend functionality and automate workflows.
- Page design: Rich text formatting, embedded content, and free-form layout for visual customization.
Todoist, while offering some customization options, focuses on providing a clean and consistent user experience.
You can choose from a selection of themes and color palettes, but the overall structure and functionality remain relatively standardized. You can customize:
- Themes and colors: Choose from pre-designed themes and color palettes.
- Custom labels: Create labels to categorize and filter tasks.
- Filters: Create custom filters to view specific task sets.
- Project organization: Organize tasks into projects and sub-projects.
- Priorities: Set task priorities.
- Notifications: Customize notification settings.
Templates
Notion provides an extensive template gallery with thousands of options categorized by use case, including work, school, personal, projects, wikis, and docs.
These templates range from simple meeting agendas and to-do lists to complex project management systems and content calendars.
Notion also allows you to create custom templates, giving you complete control over your workspace organization. Its flexibility extends to its views: you can choose from tables, calendars, lists, Kanban boards, timelines, and galleries to visualize your information in various ways.
Todoist’s templates are more focused on guiding users through specific tasks or workflows.
They cover areas like yearly goals, marketing and sales, creativity, personal productivity, support, design, product management, development, education, and general work.
While not as extensive as Notion’s template library, Todoist’s templates provide a helpful starting point for common tasks and projects.
Collaboration
Notion provides a comprehensive suite of collaboration tools, making it ideal for teams working on complex projects. Its features include:
- Shared workspaces: Create dedicated workspaces for your team with granular permission controls.
- Real-time collaboration: Edit pages and databases simultaneously with your team members, seeing changes instantly.
- Unlimited file uploads: Store and share any type of file within your workspace.
- Rich text editing: Collaborate on documents with advanced formatting options and embedded content.
- Block-building system: Work together to build pages with diverse content blocks, fostering creativity and flexibility.
- Comments and mentions: Communicate within pages and tasks using comments and @mentions to notify specific team members.
- Reminders and notifications: Keep everyone on track with reminders and notifications for tasks and deadlines.
Todoist, while supporting collaboration, offers a more streamlined approach centered around task management. Its collaboration features include:
- Task assignment: Assign tasks to specific team members within shared projects.
- Comments: Discuss tasks and provide feedback using comments.
- Project sharing: Share projects with collaborators and control their access levels.
- Real-time updates: See updates to tasks and projects as they happen.
AI
Both Notion and Todoist have integrated AI features to enhance productivity and streamline workflows.
Notion AI acts as a versatile writing assistant within your workspace. It can generate various content types, including:
- Notes and summaries: Quickly summarize meeting notes, articles, or lengthy documents.
- To-do lists: Generate to-do lists based on your notes or project descriptions.
- Blog posts and articles: Create outlines, generate drafts, and refine your writing.
- Creative content: Explore ideas, write poems, or generate different creative text formats.
- Code: Generate code in various programming languages.
- Translations: Translate text between multiple languages.
Notion AI can also help you refine your existing content by improving writing quality, changing the tone, and summarizing key takeaways.
👉 Learn more: Notion AI vs. ChatGPT: Which AI Tool Is the Best for You?
On the other hand, Todoist’s AI Assistant focuses primarily on task management. It can:
- Suggest tasks: Analyze your projects and suggest tasks that might be missing.
- Break down tasks: Divide larger tasks into smaller, more manageable subtasks.
- Prioritize tasks: Help you prioritize tasks based on deadlines and importance.
- Set due dates: Suggest appropriate due dates for your tasks.
- Provide task ideas: Offer inspiration and ideas for tasks related to your projects.
Search and filtering
Notion provides robust search functionality that allows you to search across your entire workspace, including pages, databases, and even the text within images.
You can use keywords, filters, and operators to refine your search and quickly locate specific information.
Notion’s database views also offer powerful filtering options, allowing you to create custom views based on various criteria, such as due dates, tags, or assigned team members.
Todoist also offers advanced search and filtering capabilities.
Its search function allows you to search across all your projects and tasks, using keywords, labels, and filters to narrow down your results.
Todoist also provides a feature called “Quick Find” that lets you instantly search for tasks, projects, labels, or filters by typing a few keystrokes.
In addition, Todoist’s filter system allows you to create complex queries using various criteria, including due dates, priority levels, and assigned collaborators. You can save these filters for quick access, making it easy to find the tasks that require your attention.
Mobile apps
Notion’s mobile app provides a full-featured experience, mirroring most of the functionality available on the desktop version.
You can create and edit pages, access databases, manage tasks, and collaborate with your team, all from your mobile device.
The app’s interface is well-designed, adapting the workspace to the smaller screen while maintaining Notion’s core functionalities.
However, some users may find the app slightly less intuitive than the desktop version due to the complexity of Notion’s features.
In contrast, Todoist’s mobile app is specifically designed for managing tasks on the go.
It offers a streamlined and intuitive interface, making it easy to add tasks, set reminders, and track your progress.
The app’s focus on simplicity and efficiency makes it ideal for quickly capturing tasks and staying organized while away from your computer.
Offline access
Regarding offline mode, Todoist currently has a clear advantage.
Its mobile and desktop apps offer robust offline functionality, allowing you to access and manage your tasks even without an internet connection.
Any changes you make offline will automatically sync with your account once you’re back online.
Notion, unfortunately, has limited offline access.
While you can still view some previously accessed pages and content in offline mode, you cannot create new pages, edit existing content, or access databases without an internet connection.
However, it’s worth noting that Notion developers are actively working on improving offline functionality at the time of writing this article. So, Notion’s offline capabilities may be enhanced in the near future.
Pricing and plans
Notion and Todoist offer generous free plans, but you can expand their features by subscribing to a paid plan.
| Plan | Notion | Todoist |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 |
| Plus/Pro | $12 per user/month | $5 per user/month |
| Business | $18 per user/month | $8 per user/month |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | N/A |
⚠️ Note: Notion offers an optional AI add-on at $10 per user/month.
Conclusion
Notion and Todoist are both powerful productivity tools with distinct strengths and weaknesses.
👉 Choose Notion if you need a highly adaptable and customizable workspace to manage various content types, collaborate on complex projects, and leverage powerful databases and AI features.
👉 Choose Todoist if you prioritize simplicity, efficiency, and a laser focus on task management. Its intuitive interface, seamless collaboration features, and robust offline access.
One might think that choosing between the two is challenging. However, the beauty lies in the fact that these tools, while distinct, can be integrated and automated to work together.
Our service at 2sync offers the unique advantage of merging different tools with Notion, like Google Calendar, Todoist, and many upcoming automations. With our expertise, you can benefit from the robustness of Notion and the simplicity of Todoist, all within a streamlined environment.
