lanework/research/04-todo-adjacent.md

# Personal Todo / Task-Management Apps

This document covers the personal todo/task-management market adjacent to kanban: Todoist, Things 3, TickTick, OmniFocus, Microsoft To Do, Apple Reminders, Any.do, Structured, Sunsama, Akiflow, Motion, Amie, Superlist, Twos, Godspeed, and Lunatask, plus cross-cutting patterns on subscription fatigue, the Apple Reminders squeeze, and todo/kanban convergence.

Researched: 2026-08-01

## Todoist

Positioning: the default, cross-platform "does everything reasonably well" task manager for individuals and small teams; broadest platform reach in the category.

Pricing: freemium subscription (Beginner free tier; Pro $5/mo annual or $7/mo monthly; Business $8/user/mo annual or $10/mo monthly). Prices rose in December 2025 (Pro $4→$5, Business $6→$8 annual), and regional pricing was pulled for many international users, effectively doubling their cost overnight — a real source of anger in reviews.

Standout features / direction: added a native kanban view ("Todoist Boards") alongside lists; has layered in AI features; remains the most feature-complete free-to-paid ladder in the category.

Traction: bootstrapped (Doist Inc.), no outside investment, ~$11.2M revenue in 2025 on a claimed 30–50M user base (figures vary by source, 300K paying customers cited in 2024); ~93–102 employees. This is a durable, profitable indie-scale business, not a rocket-growth one.

Common complaints: pricing creep and the regional-pricing removal; cost scales steeply for teams; some users feel plan limits (free tier) are too tight to be useful.

## Things 3 (Cultured Code)

Positioning: the design-forward, Apple-only GTD app for people who want a beautiful, opinionated, single-owner tool and are willing to pay once instead of forever.

Pricing: one-time purchase per platform — $49.99 Mac, $19.99 iPad, $9.99 iPhone/Watch (~$80 for the full set); Things Cloud sync included free, no subscription anywhere. This model is a genuine differentiator and a point of loyalty in an increasingly subscription-saturated category.

Standout features / direction: in 2025 Cultured Code rewrote the Things Cloud backend in Swift (showcased by Apple at WWDC 2025 State of the Union); shipped OS 26 support (Liquid Glass redesign, Control Center integration, Spotlight quick-add on Mac, visionOS support). Development is steady but slow and incremental — no calendar view, no time blocking, no AI.

Traction / sentiment: reviews remain very favorable; the brand halo (Apple's own praise) is strong. The flip side is a recurring complaint that development pace is glacial next to subscription competitors with continuous funding — "beautifully designed but frozen in scope."

Common complaints: no AI (smart scheduling, task extraction, pattern analysis) at all in 2026, which is now a competitive gap as "every productivity app has AI assistants"; no kanban/board view natively (a third-party app, KanbanView, fills the gap); Apple-only, no Android/Windows.

Kanban: no native board view; one-dimensional lists only.

## TickTick

Positioning: the value-for-money all-rounder — Todoist-equivalent feature set (calendar sync, habit tracking, Pomodoro, kanban) at a fraction of the price, cross-platform including Android/Windows where Things and OmniFocus aren't.

Pricing: single Premium tier at $35.99/year (~$3/mo) or $3.99/mo — dramatically cheaper than most of this list; free tier is capped (9 lists, 99 tasks/list) but usable.

Standout features / direction: native kanban board view (rare in this list — only Todoist and TickTick have it natively); habit tracking, Pomodoro timer, 2-way calendar sync, custom filters all gated to Premium. No team/family plan — deliberately personal-only.

Traction: unfunded/bootstrapped (Santa Clara, founded 2010 by Zhimin Chen); estimated ~$5M company revenue, Android Play Store revenue estimated ~$1.8M/year; ranks in the 70s-100s on US App Store free/productivity charts — solidly mid-tier, durable, not viral.

Common complaints: fewer surfaced in research than for pricier competitors, consistent with its low price largely defusing the value objection; free tier is capped enough to push conversions.

Kanban: yes, native board view.

## OmniFocus (The Omni Group)

Positioning: the power-user GTD engine for people who want deep customization (perspectives, AppleScript, complex repeat/defer logic) and don't mind a learning curve; Apple-only.

Pricing: fragmented and expensive — Mac Standard $49.99 / Pro $99.99 one-time, iOS subscription $9.99/mo or $99.99/yr, web $4.99/mo. Effectively the most expensive app in this list to own across platforms.

Standout features: custom perspectives, AppleScript/Shortcuts automation, tagging and deep filtering — the most powerful rules engine in the category.

Common complaints: price is called "high" or "prohibitive" repeatedly, especially for solo/small users; steep learning curve; occasional sync issues; no collaboration features; Apple-only lock-in is explicitly cited as disqualifying for mixed-platform households ("expensive, complex, and Apple-locked — if that doesn't fit your life, you'll hate it").

Kanban: no native board view found.

## Microsoft To Do

Positioning: the free, bundled-with-Microsoft-365 option for people already living in Outlook/Teams; the spiritual (if diminished) successor to Wunderlist.

Pricing: free.

Direction / status: update cadence is uneven across platforms (Windows/iOS updated as recently as March 2026, Android's last update was over 11 months stale at time of research), consistent with a broader pattern of Microsoft consumer apps drifting toward "neglected relic" status as the company's real investment goes into Copilot/AI/enterprise/cloud. No sign of active feature investment or a stated roadmap; reads as maintenance-mode, not a growth product.

Historical note: it is literally the app Microsoft built to replace and then sunset Wunderlist (2015 acquisition → 2020 shutdown), a cautionary tale for what happens when a beloved indie todo app is absorbed and slow-walked to death (see Patterns below).

## Apple Reminders

Positioning: the free, built-in default that keeps getting better and is the single biggest headwind every paid competitor on this list has to answer.

Pricing: free, bundled with every Apple device.

Recent direction: iOS 26 shipped a real redesign (Liquid Glass), faster task entry, time-zone support (Calendar-style, useful for travelers), and — critically — Apple Intelligence features: automatic categorization of lists into grouped sections, and AI-suggested to-dos pulled from emails/notes. iOS 26.2 (Dec 2025) added alarm-style urgent reminders with snooze/slide-to-stop. This is a steady multi-year climb from "barely a checklist app" to "credible everyday task manager with light AI."

Assessment: for single-ecosystem Apple households, Reminders now covers the majority of what casual users need — Siri capture, native sync, decent organization — at zero cost. It remains meaningfully behind on cross-platform support (no real Android/Windows story), advanced recurrence, and power features, which is exactly the seam third-party apps still live in.

## Any.do

Positioning: sits between a lightweight personal task manager and a broader family/small-team planning platform — tasks, reminders, calendar, shared spaces, and (per its own 2026 marketing) workflow/kanban boards in one app.

Pricing: freemium; free tier plus Premium and Teams paid tiers (exact current price not confirmed in research, but occasional promo-driven annual discounting is called out).

Traction: ~25M+ users claimed; funding is old and modest ($9M total, last round 2016 seed) — this is not a growth-funded story, more a long-tail bootstrapped-since-funding operator. Revenue figures found in research were inconsistent/unreliable (one stale data point of ~$40K ARR looks wrong for a 25M-user app and should not be trusted).

Common complaints: Premium is seen by some as not worth it since competitors give the same features free; calendar view gets crowded/hard to read with many same-day tasks; feature overload for people who want something simple; not team-oriented enough for larger groups despite the "Teams" positioning.

Kanban: markets "workflow boards" / kanban-style views as of 2026, alongside its own blog content pitching kanban as a category it competes in.

## Structured

Positioning: visual, timeline-based daily planner — less "task database," more "see your whole day as blocks." iPhone/iPad-first (also Mac, Android, Watch).

Pricing: subscription, roughly $19.99–27.99/year (sources vary) or a lifetime option around $64.99; free tier lets you try the timeline UI.

Standout feature: the visual timeline itself is the product — the differentiator is the daily-planning UX, not task-database depth.

Traction / complaints: limited hard data found; positioned and reviewed as a well-liked, focused single-purpose planner rather than a broad task-management system.

## Sunsama

Positioning: premium daily-planning ritual tool for professionals who believe the *act* of intentional planning has value — pulls tasks in from other tools (Slack, email, Trello, Todoist, etc.) rather than replacing them, then has you build a realistic daily plan.

Pricing: raised prices in 2026 for the first time in five years — Pro now $20/mo annual or $25/mo monthly (up from $16/$20). Wirecutter named it "best scheduling app" in 2025.

Standout features: time tracking, focus mode, deep integrations for pulling tasks from other systems into one daily view; explicitly not an automatic scheduler — the user does the planning work each day.

Common complaints: mobile apps are widely called "read-only" or "companion apps" — real planning only happens on desktop; smart/automation features are thin relative to price; because it requires daily active planning, a lapsed user gets zero value while still paying — a structural churn risk called out directly by reviewers.

Kanban: not native; it's a daily-planning layer on top of other tools' task lists, not a board.

## Akiflow

Positioning: time-blocking command-center that aggregates tasks/calendars from many sources into one keyboard-driven, drag-to-schedule interface.

Pricing: no free plan, trial only — $34/mo monthly, $17/mo billed yearly, or a "Believer 730" plan at $14.90/mo billed every two years. Among the more aggressively tiered/expensive apps in this list.

Sentiment: mixed-to-concerning. Praise for consolidating everything into one view and a clean UX; but a "growing number of users" reporting billing problems, buggy mobile apps, and integrations that don't work as advertised. No evidence found of a shutdown or acquisition — it's still shipping updates as of April 2026 — but the billing/reliability complaints are a decline signal worth tracking.

Kanban: not found as a native feature; it's calendar/time-block-centric, not board-centric.

## Motion

Positioning: started as an AI auto-scheduler for individuals, has since pivoted hard toward B2B — marketing itself in 2025–2026 as an "agentic work suite" / "AI Employees" platform for small businesses rather than a personal todo app. Worth noting this pivot explicitly: it is drifting out of the personal-task category into agentic-workflow/AI-labor territory.

Pricing: complex and has gotten less transparent — AI Workplace plan from $29/user/mo annual; separate "AI Employees" tiers from $49 (Starter) up to $599 (Plus) for multi-seat bundles.

Traction: well-funded and growing fast — $75M total raised, $550M valuation (2025), revenue estimates range from $10M to $50M ARR depending on source, 10,000+ paying customers, 3x YoY growth in the AI-Employees line. This is the one app in the list with real venture-scale momentum.

Common complaints: difficult onboarding, cluttered UI, weak/frustrating mobile app (G2 desktop 4.5/5 vs mobile 2.7/5), pricing that has risen more than once, and reports of trial-to-annual billing surprises and refund friction.

Read for Lanework: Motion is instructive as a "where the AI-scheduling money is going" signal — it's leaving pure personal-task-management for agentic B2B, which somewhat validates that solo/individual task apps are not where the biggest funding rounds chase growth right now.

## Amie

Positioning: was an "opinionated," design-forward calendar + todo app; as of July 2024 it announced a pivot away from calendar/todo toward being an AI meeting notetaker, with a full UI rebuild completed by February 2025. Calendar/todo functionality still exists but is explicitly no longer the priority.

Pricing: moved from free to a subscription-only model (~€6/year cited by early users) with no free plan and no monthly option, which upset its early adopter base.

Funding: raised ~$7–8M (Spark Capital-led seed, 2022), small team (~14 people); no evidence of a shutdown, but the pivot away from its original todo/calendar identity is itself a decline signal for anyone evaluating it as a task-management tool specifically.

Read for Lanework: a cautionary example of a well-funded, well-designed calendar/todo app that couldn't find a sustainable business in the category itself and pivoted to a different product entirely (AI notetaking) rather than iterate task management further.

## Superlist

Positioning: the spiritual successor to Wunderlist, built by several of the original Wunderlist co-founders (led by Christian Reber) after Microsoft's shutdown of that app — explicit "we're rebuilding what you loved" positioning.

Pricing: reworked pricing with a genuinely free-forever Basic tier (unlimited private/shared lists, sublists, integrations) and Pro at $8/user/mo annual — deliberately undercutting Notion Team ($16) and beating Todoist Business on value.

Standout features / direction: added AI Meeting Notes in May 2025 (records Zoom/Meet/Teams/Slack calls, auto-generates actionable tasks) — the clearest "AI eating adjacent categories" move among the pure-personal-todo apps.

Traction: privately funded, Berlin-based; no acquisition found in research despite searching specifically. Marketed heavily to former-Wunderlist-diaspora as "the best Wunderlist alternative in 2026."

Kanban: a kanban view is a requested/roadmap feature per its own public feedback board (Frill), not confirmed shipped — i.e., users are actively asking for it, which is itself a signal of demand.

## Twos

Positioning: fast, flexible, gamified note-plus-task capture app aimed at brain-dump/quick-capture use cases — popular specifically among ADHD and bullet-journal-style users.

Pricing: notably not a recurring subscription — free tier is fully-featured with no data/note/task caps, and paid unlocks are one-time $2 purchases (plus an in-app currency/coin system for earning free unlocks). This is a real outlier pricing model in a subscription-saturated category.

Standout features: fast cross-device sync, tagging, rollover of undone items, light gamification, sharing.

Common complaints: modest learning curve up front; requests for better UI polish, widgets, shortcuts, habit tracking, and attachments.

Kanban: not found as a feature; it's a linear/list capture tool, not board-based.

## Godspeed

Positioning: a keyboard-first, "fastest to-do app" for power users who prefer typing to clicking — every interaction targets sub-50ms response, includes a "Hardcore Mode" that disables the mouse entirely. Mac + iOS.

Pricing: $6/mo — called out explicitly as "at the top of the task manager market" and a real barrier next to free alternatives (Todoist free tier, Microsoft To Do).

Reception: generally positive (8.0/10-class scores), praised for labels/attachments/notes/snoozing; some instability reported on iOS.

Kanban: not found as a feature; single-list, speed-first tool.

## Lunatask

Positioning: privacy-first, end-to-end-encrypted "better to-do list" that bundles notes, journaling, habit/mood tracking, and a relationship manager — pitched heavily at ADHD users and people who distrust cloud task apps with their data.

Pricing: $6/mo (annual) or $8/mo (monthly) for Premium; a lifetime license is available direct from the website for $220. Free tier exists, no credit card required to start.

Standout features: end-to-end encryption, no in-app analytics/tracking, no data sale — a genuine privacy differentiator most competitors don't offer. Lets users switch freely between multiple workflow paradigms on the same task list: list, kanban board (vertically-stacked sections rather than horizontal columns, but conceptually the same), and Eisenhower Matrix — without losing data switching between them.

Kanban: yes, native, and notably flexible (switch between kanban/matrix/list without restructuring data) — one of the few apps in this list that treats board view as a first-class, freely-interchangeable perspective rather than a bolted-on extra.

## Kanban-view summary

Native kanban/board view confirmed: Todoist (Boards), TickTick, Any.do (workflow boards), Lunatask (kanban workflow, vertical-stack style).
Requested but not confirmed shipped: Superlist (on public roadmap/feedback board).
No native board view: Things 3 (third-party workaround exists — KanbanView), OmniFocus, Sunsama, Akiflow, Godspeed, Twos, Structured, Microsoft To Do, Apple Reminders.
Motion and Amie are calendar/AI-scheduling-centric and don't fit the board paradigm at all.

## Patterns

**Subscription fatigue is real and rising, and this category is not exempt.** Active cancellation rates among US consumers jumped from 31% (2024) to 47% (2026); the fastest-growing fatigue category in 2026 is AI-feature subscriptions specifically, with the average person paying for four AI tools at ~$66/month and 53% saying they now treat subscriptions as churn-and-restart rather than long-term commitments. Weekly-subscription revenue share nearly doubled in two years (43%→56%), meaning even paid apps are being pressured toward more escapable, lower-commitment pricing. Every subscription todo app in this list (Todoist, TickTick, Sunsama, Akiflow, Motion, Godspeed, Lunatask) is competing against this headwind; the two structural outliers — Things 3 (one-time purchase) and Twos ($2 one-time unlocks) — are explicitly positioned against subscription fatigue and get credit for it in reviews. A one-time-purchase or low-commitment model reads as a genuine trust signal right now, not just a pricing choice.

**Apple Reminders is the market's quiet ceiling, not just a "free alternative."** It went from a bare checklist app to a genuinely competent task manager with Apple Intelligence categorization, AI-suggested to-dos pulled from mail/notes, and a real design pass (Liquid Glass) — all free, all pre-installed, all deeply Siri-integrated. For any single-ecosystem Apple household with light-to-moderate task needs, Reminders now covers "enough." The seam every paid competitor lives in is: cross-platform households (no real Android/Windows story for Reminders), power features (recurrence, filtering, automation), and specialized workflows (GTD rigor, time-blocking, kanban). This means positioning against Reminders on "basic todo list" grounds is now close to a losing argument — differentiation has to be structural, not featural.

**Todo and kanban are converging, but slowly and mostly at the UI-view layer, not the data-model layer.** Todoist and TickTick both ship kanban as an alternate view over the same flat task list; Any.do markets "workflow boards"; Lunatask goes furthest by making board/list/matrix freely interchangeable views over one underlying task set; Superlist's own users are asking for it on the public roadmap. What's notably absent across all of them: none treat the board as the *native* data model the way a dedicated kanban tool would — it's always "todo app that also has a board view," never "board app that also has a todo view." That's the open lane. Nobody in the personal-task category has built kanban-as-first-class-primitive with file-backed, git-friendly, agent-legible data — which is closer to Lanework's own territory (see doc 03) than to this list.

**Subscription vs. one-time is a real fork in user trust, and price alone doesn't explain reactions — the *removal of value* does.** Todoist's backlash wasn't really about the absolute price increase, it was regional pricing being pulled and effectively doubling cost overnight for non-US users; Sunsama's backlash risk isn't the $20–25/mo, it's that a lapsed week of not planning means paying for nothing; Akiflow's complaints cluster on billing surprises, not the sticker price. Users tolerate high prices for tools they actively use every day (Motion at $29+/user/mo has a fanbase); they revolt when the pricing model itself feels like it's taking something away or when it charges for idle non-use.

**Apple-only, cross-platform, and "no platform at all" (encrypted/local) are three distinct trust postures competing for the same user.** Things 3 and OmniFocus bet on deep Apple integration and accept the ceiling that puts on their addressable market; Todoist/TickTick/Any.do bet on maximum reach; Lunatask bets on privacy/encryption as the differentiator entirely separate from platform. None of the three postures is "winning" outright — they're serving genuinely different anxieties (design/quality vs. reach vs. data trust).

**AI is now table stakes for the subscription tier of this category, but its absence is not fatal if the rest of the product is trusted.** Every subscription-model competitor (Todoist, TickTick's roadmap direction, Any.do, Sunsama's integrations, Akiflow, Motion, Amie, Superlist's meeting notes) is adding AI — categorization, suggested tasks, auto-scheduling, meeting-to-task extraction. Things 3 is the explicit counterexample: reviewers call out "no AI" as a real gap in 2026, yet the app remains well-reviewed and trusted because the core promise (fast, reliable, beautifully simple, no subscription) hasn't been diluted chasing feature parity. The lesson for a well-differentiated tool: AI absence is a tolerated trade-off, not an automatic disqualifier, as long as the core value prop stays sharp.

**Funding flows toward agentic/B2B, not toward better personal todo lists.** Motion is the one app here with real venture money ($75M raised, $550M valuation) and it's spending that trajectory pivoting toward "AI Employees" for small businesses, not toward a better personal task manager. Amie, also venture-funded, pivoted away from calendar/todo into AI meeting notes. The two most durable pure personal-task apps in this list (Todoist, TickTick) are both bootstrapped, profitable, unfunded-by-choice-or-necessity businesses. This suggests venture capital doesn't see standalone personal task management as a category with room for outsized returns anymore — it sees the money in agentic B2B or adjacent categories (meeting notes, scheduling-as-a-service) that can upsell into task management rather than starting there.

**The historical cautionary tale every player in this space knows: Wunderlist.** Peaked at ~13M users and ~1B to-dos/day, was acquired by Microsoft in 2015, then was starved of updates and finally shut down in 2020 in favor of Microsoft To Do — described by users at the time as "migration hell that destroyed the fan-base." Superlist exists specifically to re-capture that diaspora, and Microsoft To Do itself now shows the same early-stage neglect signals (stale platform updates, no clear roadmap, strategic focus elsewhere) that preceded Wunderlist's decline. The pattern — beloved indie tool acquired by a platform giant, then slow-walked to death or absorbed into a bigger, blander umbrella product — is the standing risk case for any small todo app that considers an acquisition exit, and a reason users are wary of trusting their task data to venture-funded upstarts long-term.

**What personal-task users say they want heading into 2026, synthesized across reviews:** speed of capture above almost everything else (Twos, Godspeed, and Apple's own "faster add" work in Reminders all compete on this axis specifically); trustworthy AI that discloses what model powers it and lets them opt out of training use, not just AI-for-AI's-sake; genuine offline-first reliability after several cloud-only years burned people in low-connectivity moments; and — per multiple 2026 app reviews — a swing back toward "focused tools that do fewer things exceptionally well" after a decade of feature-bloat, which favors sharply-scoped products (Things 3, Twos, Godspeed) over kitchen-sink ones, even as those kitchen-sink apps (Any.do, TickTick, Superlist) keep adding surface area to compete on breadth.