Microsoft To Do vs Todoist: An Honest 2026 Comparison
These two get compared constantly and the comparison usually goes wrong, because people evaluate features instead of fit. Both are good. They’re good at different things, and the deciding factor is almost never a feature list.
The short version: To Do wins if your work arrives as email, Todoist wins if your work needs structure.
Capture
Todoist parses natural language as you type. “Call Ana every second Tuesday at 3pm #work p1” produces a recurring task, on the right project, at the right priority, in one line. This is the feature people miss most when they leave, because it makes capture nearly frictionless.
To Do takes plain text and expects you to set the fields afterward in the detail pane. Slower per task. Where it wins is a case Todoist can’t match natively: flag an email in Outlook and it becomes a task, with the flag clearing in Outlook when you complete it in To Do. That’s the same data, not a sync.
If most of your commitments arrive by email, that single link outweighs the typing speed.
Organization
Todoist has projects, sections within projects, labels, priorities, and a filter query language. You can build saved views such as “everything labelled @waiting that’s overdue across all projects.” For people who think in systems, this is the reason to choose it.
To Do has lists, optionally grouped, plus steps inside a task, and a small set of automatic smart lists: My Day, Important, Planned, Assigned to me, Flagged email. There is no query language and no cross-list filtering beyond those views.
That constraint isn’t purely a loss. To Do is harder to over-engineer, and the number of abandoned task systems that died of elaborate structure is not small. But if you have genuinely hit the ceiling, you’ll hit it in To Do and you won’t in Todoist.
Daily planning
To Do has My Day, which clears every night and offers suggestions drawn from what’s due or overdue. The nightly reset is the whole design: it forces a fresh decision each morning rather than letting today’s plan silently become another backlog.
Todoist has Today and Upcoming views computed from due dates. Cleaner if you drive everything by date, and less useful if you want a deliberate daily selection separate from deadlines. Todoist also has karma and streaks, which some people find motivating and others find noise.
Integrations and ecosystem
Todoist has the larger third-party ecosystem and a straightforward developer API, so it shows up as a first-class connector in most automation tools.
To Do goes through Microsoft Graph rather than a standalone API, which is fine for developers but means fewer prebuilt connectors in third-party tools. What it gets instead is depth inside Microsoft 365: Outlook tasks, flagged email, the My Day panel beside your mail, and Planner tasks assigned to you landing in your personal list.
Neither has a native Carly connector today. Both are reachable with your own credentials on the integrations page, and Composio is a third route.
Platforms and cost
Both cover Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and web.
To Do is free with any Microsoft account, and the features described here are in that free tier.
Todoist has a free tier plus paid plans, and the free tier carries limits on things like project count and reminders that have changed over time. Check the current limits against how you’d actually use it rather than trusting an old comparison, including this one.
Cost is rarely the deciding factor, but it’s worth being clear that To Do’s capability is not gated behind a subscription in the way Todoist’s is.
Pick this way
Choose To Do if you’re in Outlook all day, if your tasks mostly start as emails, if you want a daily plan that resets, or if you don’t want another subscription.
Choose Todoist if you want fast natural language capture, if you need labels and filters, if you organize by project rather than by list, or if you rely on third-party integrations.
Running both is a mistake most people make once. Two task lists means neither is trusted, and the failure is silent, because the task you forget is in the app you didn’t open.
What neither of them does
Both are stores. They hold tasks and wait.
The failure mode is not the app, it’s the tasks that never make it in: the commitment buried in the third paragraph of an email, the thing agreed on a call, the follow-up that should exist because a meeting just ended. Outlook’s flag handles the narrow case where the whole email is the task, and nothing handles the rest.
Carly sits on that layer instead of competing with either app. Its event-triggered workflows fire on real events, and an AI agent can read the content and decide what the task is rather than matching a keyword. Workflow steps are free, and AI agents start at $35/month.
FAQ
Is Microsoft To Do free?
Yes, with any Microsoft account, personal or work, and no Microsoft 365 subscription required for the core features.
Does Todoist integrate with Outlook?
There is an Outlook add-in, but it isn’t the same as To Do’s relationship with Outlook. To Do and Outlook tasks share a store, so flagged emails and tasks are the same items rather than copies passed between two systems.
Which has better recurring tasks?
Todoist, mostly because of how you enter them. Typing “every second Tuesday” creates the pattern inline, while To Do requires opening the task and configuring recurrence in the detail pane. Both handle the patterns themselves correctly.
Can I migrate from Todoist to Microsoft To Do?
There’s no official direct importer. Todoist can export project data, and To Do historically offered a Wunderlist importer rather than a general one, so most migrations end up going through a third-party tool or a script against Microsoft Graph.
Does Microsoft To Do have labels or filters?
No. It has lists, optional groups, and a fixed set of smart lists. If you rely on labels and saved filter queries, that’s the clearest argument for Todoist.
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