Looking for a TickTick alternative

Two reasons, and they pull in opposite directions.

The counting. TickTick publishes its limits, which is more than most of this category does, and they are tighter than people expect: 9 lists, 99 tasks per list, 19 checklist items per task, 2 reminders, one attachment a day, 5 habits, and 2 members on a shared list. The one that bites is the list cap — nine is not many once areas of your life get their own — and the tasks cap arrives quietly, because 99 feels infinite until a project is real. Custom filters, task duration, activity history and integrations are Premium-only on top. TaskPocket’s free plan does not count file uploads a day, but it caps them by size instead: 10 MB a file and 100 MB in total.

The breadth. The other group leaves for the opposite reason: TickTick is a calendar, a habit tracker, a Pomodoro timer and a task manager in one application. That is genuinely good value and it is why most people choose it. It is also a lot of surface to maintain, and some people discover they are tending the app rather than doing the work. This is a taste question, not a flaw.

A third reason shows up occasionally and is worth answering directly: AI. TickTick sells “AI Features” as a Premium row on its own plan comparison. If you specifically want a task manager with no model in it, see why there is no AI here.

TickTick wins most of that table, and the rows it loses are narrow: the counting, the second date field, and a one-time price. That is the whole of the case, and it is either exactly what you need or it is not enough.

The direct answer to the most common reason for looking. Tasks are unlimited on both TaskPocket plans — there is no per-list cap, no total cap, and no checklist-item cap. The free plan does cap structure at 5 projects and 2 areas, which is tighter than TickTick’s nine lists, so this is a genuine trade rather than a clean win: unlimited contents, fewer containers.

This is the real structural difference between the products. TickTick has a due date, and optionally a Duration — a start and end time that replaces it, and is Premium-only. What it does not have is a deadline distinct from the scheduling date, or anything documented that keeps a task out of sight until its day. TaskPocket splits them: the start date decides what Today shows you, the deadline is a fact about the world with its own view. See start dates and deadlines.

If the breadth is what wore you down, the honest pitch is subtraction. There is no habit tracker, no Pomodoro timer and no AI, and none of them is coming — task, area, inbox, project, someday, start date, deadline is the whole vocabulary. There is a month calendar on Premium, but it shows your tasks on days, not events or hours. Whether that reads as focus or as a missing product depends entirely on which of TickTick’s features you actually used.

TickTick is subscription-only — $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, with no lifetime option and no free trial advertised. TaskPocket’s lifetime plan is $59.99 once. Over five years that is not a close comparison, though what a subscription buys is a much larger product under active development by a real company.

Two of these matter enough that most people should stay.

Recurring tasks. TickTick has the strongest repeat engine of any product covered on this site — completion-anchored repeats as a labelled option, both end conditions, and skipping an occurrence outright. TaskPocket matches it and does not beat it. The single exception is that a repeating task there cannot carry a separate deadline, because there is no deadline field.

Reminders. Both apps have them, and TickTick’s go further: two per task on free and five on Premium, with Constant Reminder and Checklist Item Reminder sold as Premium features on top. TaskPocket gives one reminder per task, free on every plan, and has no snooze. If you lean on any of that, this decision is already made.

Breadth and platforms. Native apps on every operating system including Linux, an Apple Watch app, a public API, an MCP server, and importers from six other task managers. TaskPocket has a web app, an iPhone app, and no way in for your existing data.

One warning about anything else you read: almost every comparison article still quotes $35.99 a year and $3.99 a month. Those are out of date. The figures above are from TickTick’s own upgrade page and the App Store listing, checked on 1 September 2026 — the monthly price is genuinely hard to find, because the upgrade page sells only the annual plan, which is probably why the stale numbers persist.

Note that both products paywall the second date in some form: Duration is Premium on their side, the deadline field is Premium on ours.

Worth knowing before you commit: this only goes one way. TickTick imports from six other apps; TaskPocket imports from none. If you might come back, that asymmetry is the thing to weigh.

1. Take a backup first. Settings → Account → Backup & Import on the web version generates one, and it is not gated behind Premium.
2. Move only what is live. If you have been near the 99-task cap, a lot of what is in there is finished or dead. A migration is the cheapest time to not carry it forward.
3. Map nine lists onto five projects and two areas. This is the step that needs thought, because the shape is different: areas group projects rather than holding tasks. Most people find several lists were really one project.
4. Paste tasks in and let the parser do the dates. “Water the plants every 3 days” arrives as a repeating task with the phrase lifted out of the title, so most of the retyping is just the titles.