The to-do list app comparison: six real options

Published October 1, 2026 by Drifta

Drifta is an iPhone task app for ADHD that gives every task its own time window.

A to-do list app's real differences show up in how it handles reminders, more than in how many colors its icons come in. Some apps fire one alert and stop. Some repeat until you respond. Some give a task only a due date; a few separate a start time from a deadline. This comparison lines up six real options on exactly those differences, plus price and platform, so you can pick based on the mechanism that matches your actual problem.

What actually differs between to-do list apps?

Every app here lets you type a task and check it off; that part is table stakes. What varies is three things: how the app reminds you (once, repeatedly, or only within a window you set), what it costs over a year, and which devices it runs on. A natural-language quick-add tool and a per-task time window solve different problems, so "which app is best" is really a question about which of those three variables matters most to you.

Six to-do list apps compared

Todoist's Pro plan runs $5 a month billed annually, or $60 a year, rising to $7 a month if you pay monthly instead, according to Todoist's pricing page. TickTick's Premium plan lists at $49.99 a year, or $3.99 a month if paid monthly, according to TickTick's pricing page. Things 3 is the outlier: a single $9.99 purchase on iPhone, which also covers Apple Watch, with no subscription and no recurring charge after that, according to its App Store listing.

A worked first-year cost, paid tier, on iPhone

Comparing sticker prices hides how the subscriptions compound. Here is what a full first year actually costs if you go with each app's paid tier, assuming you pick the cheaper of the monthly or annual option where one exists.

The gap between Todoist paid annually and paid monthly alone is $24 a year, more than half of what Drifta Pro costs outright. If you know you will want the paid tier of any subscription app, paying annually instead of monthly is close to free money back.

Where the ADHD-specific gap shows up

An estimated 15.5 million U.S. adults, about 6% of the adult population or one in sixteen people, had a current ADHD diagnosis in 2023, according to the CDC. None of the six apps above were built exclusively around that number, but the reminder mechanism each one chose still matters more for that group than for a general user. A single scheduled alert, the model Apple Reminders and Google Tasks both use, is easy to miss entirely if a Focus mode is active, since Reminders is silenced by a Focus unless the app is explicitly allowed through it or the alert is marked Time Sensitive, according to Apple's support documentation. TickTick's repeating Constant Reminder is built to survive exactly that kind of missed first alert. Drifta's time window approach aims at a different part of the same problem: instead of a task competing for attention on every day leading up to its deadline, it stays out of view until its earliest start time, so the daily list only ever shows what can actually be worked on right now.

How to pick between them

Start from the one thing that actually breaks in your current system, the way choosing a task app for ADHD frames it as eight specific questions rather than a single best answer. If free and already installed matters most, Apple Reminders or Google Tasks cost nothing to try. If a one-time purchase beats a subscription on principle, Things 3 is the only app here that never charges again after $9.99. If typing a task in plain English and having it schedule itself matters, Todoist's Quick Add is built for that. If a single missed alert is the actual failure mode, TickTick's repeating reminder addresses it directly. If the problem is tasks competing for attention before they can actually be started, a time window, which is what Drifta is built around, removes that competition instead of managing it.

Before you switch anything

A new app rarely fixes a habit problem; it just gives the same habit a new interface for a few weeks. How to make a to-do list you'll actually use covers the habits that make any of these six apps work, independent of which one you choose. And if your actual blocker is reading and reacting to the list twenty times a day instead of once, cutting decisions out of your task list is a smaller, cheaper fix to try before paying for any of the plans above.

This article shares practical organizing ideas. It is not medical advice. For diagnosis or treatment questions, talk with a qualified clinician.