Todoist

What is Todoist?

Todoist is a task management application built by Doist — a fully remote, bootstrapped company that has been making the same focused bet since 2007: that most people don’t need a project management platform, they need a fast, reliable, beautiful place to capture and manage tasks. The result is a cross-platform to-do app available on every major operating system including Linux, with natural language task input that turns “client invoice every 1st of the month at 9am” into a recurring reminder before you finish typing the sentence.

In 2026, it supports over 40 million users across individual, team, and business tiers, and recently updated its pricing in December 2025 — the first price change since 2022 — adding AI-assisted features and voice-based task capture through a feature called Ramble.

At Smart Remote Gigs, we test tools like Todoist because task management is one of those categories where paying for the wrong thing — either an app that’s too simple to keep up with real client workloads, or a full project management suite that takes longer to maintain than the work itself — costs freelancers more in wasted time than any subscription fee. Todoist sits at a specific and well-defined point in that spectrum: it’s the best pure task manager available, it has a legitimately low price ceiling, and it will frustrate you in specific, predictable ways if you need it to do anything beyond managing tasks. Knowing exactly where those edges are is the whole point of this review.

🚀 Key Features for Freelancers

⚖️ Pros & Cons

✅ The Good:

• Cleanest, most intuitive task manager interface available — zero learning curve, functional within minutes of signing up
• Natural language input is genuinely best-in-class — faster and more accurate than any competing tool in this category
• Pro at $60/year ($5/month annual) is one of the most affordable paid productivity upgrades in the entire software market
• Available on literally every platform — iOS, Android, Web, Mac, Windows, Linux, and browser extensions
• Recurring tasks are free — no paywall on a feature that should be standard across all task managers
• Doist is a fully independent, bootstrapped company — no VC pressure to bloat the product or pivot the pricing model
• 90+ integrations available on all plans including free — Google Calendar sync doesn’t require a paid upgrade

❌ The Bad (The Catch):

• Free plan’s 5-project cap is punishing for freelancers — most multi-client operators hit it in the first week
• No reminders on the free plan — this is the kind of omission that feels deliberately designed to push upgrades
• No time blocking or calendar scheduling — Todoist shows you what to do, not when to do it; you need a separate tool for that
• No Gantt charts, task dependencies, or resource views — it’s a task manager, not a project management tool, and that distinction matters
• No built-in notes — attach a file or link, but there’s no rich text notepad attached to tasks; you’ll need Notion or Obsidian alongside it
• Business plan had a price increase in December 2025 — small in absolute terms but Teams users on legacy pricing felt the hit
• Calendar view is basic compared to dedicated scheduling tools — don’t expect time-blocking or meeting integration

💰 Pricing Breakdown

Todoist runs three tiers with pricing that was updated in December 2025. Beginner (Free) gives you 5 projects, 5 collaborators per project, recurring tasks, basic filters, and cross-platform sync — genuinely useful for personal organization, genuinely restrictive for anyone managing more than a handful of client workstreams. Pro at $5/month (annual, $60/year) or $7/month (monthly) is where freelancers need to live: 300 projects, reminders, file attachments, advanced filters, unlimited activity history, board and calendar views, and the Ramble voice input and AI Task Assist features.

That $60/year is difficult to argue against — it’s the price of a single dinner out for a task manager you’ll use every working day of the year. Business at $8/user/month (annual) or $10/user/month (monthly) adds shared team workspaces, up to 500 team projects, admin controls, granular activity logs, shared templates, and roles and permissions — appropriate for small agencies and collaborative freelance teams where shared task visibility matters.

The hidden cost that catches freelancers: there is no flat-rate Business plan. Every seat is billed individually with no ceiling, so a 10-person agency on Business pays $960/year minimum — at that scale, ClickUp’s Business plan at $12/user/month starts to win on value simply because it does more. Todoist Business makes financial sense for teams of 2–5 who want coordination without ClickUp’s complexity overhead.

Beyond that, the per-seat math starts competing against full-featured project management platforms that offer significantly more for a comparable total. For solo freelancers, the decision is simple: start free, hit 5 projects faster than expected, and upgrade to Pro at $60/year without looking back.

⚠️ Free plan has no reminders — a significant omission for deadline-driven freelancers. Business plan pricing updated December 2025; no flat-rate option means costs scale linearly with headcount.