Todoist vs Apple Reminders: Which One Actually Gets Things Done?

I've had Todoist installed for years out of habit, and Apple Reminders sitting unopened on every device I own because it comes free with the phone. For one month I forced myself to actually use both properly, side by side, for the same real task list — work deadlines, household admin, the two-minute jobs I usually just forget. I expected the paid app to win easily. It didn't, not entirely, and the reason surprised me.

This isn't a spec-sheet comparison. Both apps do the obvious things — add a task, set a due date, get a notification. The question that actually matters is which one you keep opening after the novelty wears off, and that only shows up once you've lived in both for a while.

What each one actually is

Apple Reminders is the app most iPhone owners already have and never think about — free, built into every Apple device, and quietly capable of more than its plain look suggests: due dates, locations, flags, subtasks, and smart lists that group things automatically by date or flag. Todoist is a dedicated third-party task manager, free at a basic tier and roughly £4 a month for Pro, built around projects, labels, priority levels and a filter system that lets you query your own task list almost like a spreadsheet. One is a utility that came with the phone. The other is software you deliberately chose and pay for. That difference in intent shows up everywhere once you start using them properly.

Where Todoist actually wins

The single feature that earned Todoist its keep this month was natural-language quick add. Typing "renew car insurance next Friday 9am #Household p1" creates a fully-formed task — due date, project and priority all parsed correctly — without touching a single menu. Apple Reminders can parse a date from typed text too, but it stops there; there's no equivalent for project or priority in one line, so those still need a manual tap each.

Filters were the other genuine win. Todoist lets you save a view like "everything due today across every project, sorted by priority," and it sits there permanently as a tab you can check in three seconds. Reminders' smart lists do something similar for dates, but there's no way to combine a date range with a specific project or priority level in one saved view — you're choosing one axis at a time. For a task list with more than about fifteen live items across a few areas of life, that filtering gap is where Reminders started to feel genuinely thin.

Where Apple Reminders actually wins

What surprised me was how little I missed Todoist for anything location-based. Reminders' "remind me when I arrive" or "when I leave" triggers, tied to your phone's GPS, caught things Todoist simply can't do at all — a reminder to grab the parcel from the hallway that only fires when I actually walk in the front door, not at a guessed time. That single feature quietly solved more real forgetting than any due date ever has.

The other place Reminders pulled ahead was speed of capture. Siri, a widget, or a Watch complication all add a task in under two seconds with zero app-switching, and on a Mac the menu-bar quick-entry shortcut is just as fast. Todoist's own widgets and Siri Shortcut work, but they're a layer you have to set up deliberately; Reminders' equivalents are already sitting there, switched on, the day you get the phone. For anything I need to capture in the two seconds before I forget it entirely, that built-in speed won every time, plain app or not.

What I actually settled on

By week three the split had settled itself without me planning it: anything with more than one moving part — a project with a deadline, work that needs a priority level, anything I'll want to filter later — goes in Todoist. Anything that's a single, standalone thing I need to not forget, especially if it's tied to a place, goes straight into Reminders via Siri while I'm still holding the thing that reminded me. It's less elegant than picking one app and committing, and it's exactly what I built my actual Todoist task system around once I stopped pretending one app had to do everything.

It's the same conclusion I kept landing on comparing Notion against a plain spreadsheet a while back: the fancier tool usually wins on structure and loses on friction, and the plain one usually wins on speed and loses on structure. The trick isn't finding the app that wins both — it's being honest about which one you're solving for on a given task, and not forcing everything through the same door. It's also the reason only three of the fifteen productivity apps I tried this year survived past the first month: the ones that stuck all did one job well rather than trying to be the single app that ran my whole life.

If neither app's structure appeals and you'd rather the whole system lived outside your phone entirely, the same "three priorities, dump every stray thought in one place" instinct behind Todoist's daily view is exactly what's behind the ADHD Daily Planner in the shop — a pen-and-spreadsheet version of the same idea, for days you'd rather not open an app to manage your day at all.

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Questions people actually ask

Is Todoist worth paying for over Apple Reminders?

Only if you actually need what the paid tier unlocks: labels, filters, and more than five active projects. If your task list is a handful of personal to-dos and reminders tied to a time or place, Apple Reminders does that free and does it well. Todoist's Pro tier earns its price the moment you're juggling overlapping projects or recurring work across a team.

Can Apple Reminders do recurring tasks like Todoist?

Yes, and it has for years — daily, weekly, monthly, custom intervals, all built in. What it can't do is Todoist's more flexible recurring language, things like "every 3rd Friday" or a task that reschedules itself relative to when you actually completed it rather than a fixed date. For simple repeats, Reminders is genuinely equal to Todoist.

Does Todoist sync with Apple Reminders?

Not natively, and there's no official two-way sync between them. Third-party automation tools can move tasks one way between the two, but in a month of testing I never found a bridge reliable enough to trust with anything I couldn't afford to lose track of, so I'd treat them as separate systems rather than one synced list.

Is Apple Reminders good enough for GTD?

For a light version of Getting Things Done, yes — lists as contexts, flags for priority, and smart lists that filter by date work well enough. Where it runs out of road is weekly review: Reminders has no saved filters or productivity view to surface everything overdue or unscheduled at once, which is the step GTD leans on most and where Todoist's filter language does the job properly.