Task and reminder apps for iPhone

How the category divides

Todoist, TickTick and Structured are on one side of the line. Each is made by a company whose product is the app, each gives you a usable free tier, and each keeps something back for the paid one. Apple Reminders, Google Tasks and Microsoft To Do are on the other. None of them has a paid tier at all — Microsoft states plainly that To Do is free with a personal Microsoft Account, and neither Apple’s nor Google’s listing carries an in-app purchase. They are not being sold to you, because they are not the product. The account is.

Inside the paid group, the three do not even agree on what a free tier is. Todoist counts containers: its free plan caps active personal projects, team projects and custom filter views, and keeps a short window of activity history, while the tasks inside those projects are not counted at all. TickTick counts almost everything — lists, tasks per list, checklist items per task, attachments per day, reminders per task, the people you can share a list with, habits and countdowns each carry a published number. Structured counts nothing. Its free tier holds the timeline itself, with tasks, subtasks, notes, notifications, widgets and sync, and draws the line by capability instead: importing a calendar, importing Apple Reminders, repeating a task and its AI planning all sit on the paid side. Three companies, three incompatible theories of what you get for nothing.

That decides who hits a wall and when. Someone who opens a new list or project for every piece of work meets Todoist’s and TickTick’s ceilings early, because both count containers first. Someone who keeps a handful of long-running lists may never reach Todoist’s project cap but will still find TickTick counting the tasks inside each list. Someone using Structured will not hit a number at all; they will simply find one day that the next thing they want to do is a paid feature.

One pattern runs through all three of the paid apps and deserves stating on its own, because the category name conceals it. Reminding you is what these apps are for, and each of the three charges for part of it. Todoist’s free plan includes automatic reminders only, for tasks that already carry a date and a time; custom, time-based, location-based and recurring reminders belong to its paid plans. TickTick allows a small number of reminders per task free and more on Premium, which is a ceiling rather than a gate. Structured puts custom notifications and recurring tasks behind Pro. The free three gate none of it, because they have no paid tier to gate it behind. If reminders are the whole reason you want the app, that is the strongest argument the free side has, and it is easy to miss while comparing feature lists.

The free group’s cost is an account, and the three accounts are not equivalent. Apple Reminders wants an Apple Account — Apple’s iCloud guide states you must be signed in to the same one on each device for it to sync — though it will also hold Exchange and Yahoo accounts alongside iCloud. Google Tasks wants a Google Account, and is better understood as a companion to Gmail and Calendar than as a standalone app; Google’s own material describes it in the side panel of Gmail, Calendar, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides. Microsoft To Do wants a Microsoft account, and is the only app in this group that publishes a list of the accounts it will not serve: on-premises Exchange Server accounts, governmental accounts other than Government Community Cloud Moderate, Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, and the T-Mobile and 21Vianet-operated variants. For anyone whose account is on that list, a free app is unavailable at any price, which is a stranger sentence than it ought to be.

The account also fixes where the list exists. Apple Reminders’ listing covers iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple Vision, and Apple’s iCloud guide separately describes it on Mac and at iCloud.com. Google Tasks’ listing covers iPhone and iPad only, and its reach is through Google’s own surfaces rather than Apple’s. Microsoft To Do stores tasks on Exchange Online and syncs them to Outlook Tasks, which is exactly where you would want them if your mail already lives there and nowhere useful if it does not. A free app follows the account it belongs to, and stops where that account stops.

One last thing the paid three share, which has nothing to do with the apps and everything to do with finding out about them: none publishes its figures at the first address you would try. Todoist’s pricing page renders its prices in JavaScript and returns nothing when read as text, so its limits come from its plans, pricing and billing FAQ. TickTick’s ticktick.com/pricing returns a 404, and the prices live on its upgrade page. Structured’s figures come from its help centre. All three publish fully and in detail; none does it where the page name implies. Where app developers actually publish their prices covers how common that pattern turns out to be.

Which comparison to read

The two largest apps in the paid group are set against each other in Todoist vs. TickTick, which is where the counting difference above is worked through row by row — what each free tier allows, what the paid plans cost, and how differently the two developers arrive at a limit. Read it if you have decided you want a full task manager and the open question is which free tier will hold you longer. The answer turns on how finely you divide your work rather than on which app is better built.

Microsoft To Do vs. Structured puts one app from each side of the division directly against the other, which makes it the pairing that tests the whole idea of this page. To Do never asks for money and asks instead that your account be of a supported type; Structured asks nothing about your account and charges for part of the app. Read it if you have not decided whether to pay for a planner at all, because it is the clearest statement on this site of what each kind of cost actually feels like.

Apple Reminders vs. Google Tasks sets the two defaults against each other, where neither charges anything and the entire question is which ecosystem you already live inside. It is also the page that shows what the free side gives up: both are thinner than anything in the paid group, and the ceiling you meet is a feature ceiling rather than a billing one. Read it if the honest answer is that you were never going to spend money on this.

Two further pages take a single app each, which is the better starting point once you have chosen one and want to know exactly where its free plan stops. What Todoist costs sets out the three plans, what each one caps, and the reminder boundary described above. What TickTick costs goes through everything TickTick counts on its free plan, and the one figure on which the developer’s own two sources disagree.

What we couldn’t verify

These questions are left open by the sources behind the pages above. They are carried here unresolved rather than guessed at.

• What Structured Pro costs on the App Store. Its listing shows two different figures for Structured Pro (Monthly) and two more for Structured Pro (Yearly), while Structured’s help centre names one of each. Nothing published explains the extra figures
• Which devices Apple Reminders actually covers. Its App Store listing and Apple’s own iCloud guide name different sets, and neither Apple page reconciles them
• How many attachments a day TickTick Premium allows. Its upgrade page and its App Store description give different figures, and nothing TickTick publishes settles which is current
• Whether TickTick sells a monthly plan at all. Its upgrade page names an annual price only, and its App Store listing names no figure
• What Todoist’s own pricing page states, since that page renders its prices in JavaScript and returned no figures when read as text
• What Todoist’s Business plan includes beyond the limits its FAQ enumerates
• Whether Microsoft To Do can be opened and used at all without signing in. Microsoft documents which accounts are supported but does not address the no-account case
• Whether any To Do feature is reserved for paid Microsoft 365 subscribers, which no published Microsoft page addresses in those terms
• Whether Structured requires an account for its Structured Cloud sync, and where that synced data is held
• Whether Apple Reminders can be used with no account at all, keeping lists only on the device
• Whether Google sets any ceiling on lists or tasks per person. The only limits page Google publishes covers API queries rather than a person’s own list

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