Organize your life and complete tasks more reliably by using the right to-do app. These are the top performers we’ve tested.
There’s nothing wrong with a paper to-do list, but going digital has its benefits. Paper is fine if you enjoy writing by hand, crossing off tasks in ink or pencil, and drawing arrows to show when priorities and deadlines change. The best to-do list apps, however, let you write, organize, and reprioritize your tasks more efficiently. They also let you attach notes, links, and files to a task, and the very best ones also let you see when someone else has completed a task. In many ways, a good to-do program is the ultimate productivity app.
To find the best to-do list apps, we look for ones that are easy to use, offered on all major platforms, and have the tools you need to work productively. After considering dozens of apps in this category, these are the best we’ve tested, followed by what to look for when choosing the right app for your needs.
How We Choose the Best To-Do List Apps
To-do list apps are a dime a dozen, and few of them stand out as being much better than others. For example, there are plenty of excellent apps for Android or iPhone, but they do you no good when you’re working on a laptop and need to jot down a thought quickly without picking up your phone and losing your place.
That’s why for this list, we only include apps that you can access on both desktop and mobile devices. After evaluating around 25 possible contenders, we tested and evaluated them and selected the highest-scoring apps to list here.
One of the major points of consideration when testing and scoring is how well these apps help you organize and stay on top of your tasks. We also consider collaboration, meaning the ability to share a to-do list with other people, though we see it as a bonus feature and not a requirement to be included.
We also looked for apps that fit different user profiles, such as people who follow the Getting Things Done (GTD) method of organization (OmniFocus 3 and Toodledo are good choices).
One of the most popular to-do list apps, Wunderlist, was acquired by Microsoft in 2015 and taken out of commission five years later. Microsoft’s stated ambition was to build a replacement app for Wunderlist from the ground up, cloning all its best features in the process. The new app, Microsoft To Do, frankly took too long to come to market and arrived half baked, which is why it isn’t included here.
