The Best To-Do List Apps for 2020

How to Choose the Right To-Do List App

Why Use a To-Do List App and Not Pen and Paper?

There’s nothing wrong with a paper to-do list,
but going digital has many benefits. Paper is fine if you enjoy writing
by hand, crossing off tasks in ink or pencil, and drawing arrows all over the
place when deadlines and priorities change. A to-do list app lets you do all
that much more efficiently, dragging and dropping tasks to reorder them,
changing a priority or due date with one click, attaching a note to a task with
additional thoughts. In many ways, a good to-do app is the ultimate productivity app.

As many to-do list apps as there are, few
stand out as being much better than others. For example, there are dozens of
apps that are excellent for Android, but they do you no good when you’re working
away on a laptop and need to jot down a task without losing your place.
For this list, we looked for apps that you can access on both desktop and
mobile devices. We also looked at how these apps help you organize and stay on
top of your tasks. We consider collaboration tools, such as those that enable you to share a
to-do list with other people, a bonus, but not a requirement. We also looked for apps
that fit different user profiles, such as people who follow the Getting Things
Done (GTD) method of organization (OmniFocus 3 and Toodledo are good choices),
or those who prefer writing down tasks using a stream of consciousness
(Workflowy is the app that fits the bill there).

One of the most popular to-do list apps, Wunderlist, was acquired by
Microsoft in 2015 and taken out of commission five years later. Microsoft’s
stated ambition was to build a replacement app for Wunderlist from the ground
up, cloning all its best features in the process. The new app, Microsoft To Do, frankly took too
long to come to market and arrived half baked anyway. Although the app has
slowly improved since its debut, there are plenty of alternatives to
Wunderlist, many of which let you transfer your old to-do lists from Wunderlist into the new app.

What To Look for in a To-Do App

There are a few qualities to look for in a
to-do app. The top three are:

• design
• tools for managing and organizing your tasks
• collaboration options

First, you have to like an app’s design and interface. Seriously. How are you going to get stuff done if you can’t stand
looking at your ugly app? If you enjoy looking at your list, you’re more likely to actually use it. It also helps if navigating the app feels intuitive to you. When a thought pops into your head about
something you must do, you want to be able to capture it quickly so that you
can forget about it and get back to what you were doing.

Second, every to-do list app comes with tools
and features for organizing your tasks and lists. These features need to match
up with the way you think. For example, if you are a highly visual person, you
might find that color-coding your lists or tasks that are high priority is
important. If you are a deadline-oriented person, you might want to make sure
that you can sort your tasks by due date or put them into a calendar view. If
you are a forgetful person, you might want an app that can send you a lot of
reminders on different devices.

Third, it’s always nice to have the option to
make lists collaborative. For home use, a collaborative to-do list means you
can assign chores to other people or track who has purchased items off a shared
grocery shopping list. In business settings, collaborative task-management
makes working together easier and more transparent.

The Best Free To-Do App

Several of the best to-do list apps have a robust free tier of service. Of them, our favorites are Asana and Todoist. Asana may be
too free-form for some people’s tastes. Todoist has more inherent structure.

Another very good free app is Remember the
Milk. It’s a little more old-school in some respects compared to the other apps
on this list, but it’s very capable and reliable. It’s also highly intuitive.
You can figure out all the ins and outs of this app in minutes.

Many of the other to-do apps on this list are excellent, but their free versions are quite limited compared with the power of their paid versions.

The Best To-Do App For Teams

It should come as no surprise that our top
picks for teams are also the Editors’ Choices: Todoist Premium (meaning the
paid version) and Asana.

Todoist works best among small groups
of people organizing relatively uncomplicated tasks, whereas Asana is better
for managing more in-depth teamwork, the kind of work that changes between many
hands and passes through a lot of phases before it’s complete.

To-Do Apps vs. Project Management

An ongoing challenge in the world of software
is deciding what gets classified as a project management app. We take the view
that project management apps fit a
traditional mold of being apps that a group of people uses to manage a project.
A project is a series of tasks that has a start date, end date, and
deliverable. Building a house is a project. Sending a rocketship to the moon is
a project. Answering support emails, however, is a series of ongoing tasks and
not a project.

Some work-related tasks do fit the
definition of a project but are so small they don’t warrant being tracked and
logged in a project management app. Work of that nature can be managed in a
collaborative to-do list app. Collaborative to-do list apps, as a category,
overlaps heavily with so-called work-management apps. Asana is an app that we
sometimes call a work-management app or even a workflow management app, but it
also classifies as a to-do app. These types of apps are ideal for managing
smaller projects or series of tasks that are ongoing work.

Let’s use the example of publishing a news
story. Multiple people work on this so-called project, such as a reporter,
fact-checker, editor, and production editor. From start to finish, the work
isn’t so cumbersome, however, as to require weekly reports or being put into a
Gantt chart to keep it on track. To publish a news story, each person involved
only needs to know the order in which the tasks should get done and when each
person finishes their tasks so that the work can move to the next person in a
timely fashion.

So we can see how a project management app and
collaborative to-do app serve the same function but at a different scale. They
both keep track of what needs to get done, when, and by whom. They help us
manage time more efficiently and regulate how many tasks are on our plate at
once. To-do apps are simpler and cheaper than project management software. For
many types of work, they’re a better fit.

Use Your To-Do List to Get
Organized

Having a great to-do list app can help you get
organized and get more done, whether you want to manage personal tasks, or
those of a family or small team.

A to-do app is only as useful as the
information you put into it, so in addition to picking the right app, you might
also want to peruse these tips for creating better to-do lists.

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About the Author

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats. She is also the creator and author of ProductivityReport.org.

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, … See Full Bio