TickTick vs TaskPocket

TickTick wins most of that table, and it is not a close-run thing. It is a mature product with a calendar, habits, a Pomodoro timer, an API and apps on every platform. TaskPocket is a smaller tool that does a narrower job.

Recurrence is the feature this site writes about most, so it would be convenient to claim it here. It would also be false. TickTick’s repeat engine is the strongest of any competitor covered on this site. It has completion-anchored repeats as a labelled option — “By Completion Date”, which it defines as calculating the next date from when the previous one was finished. It has both end conditions, “Repeat Ends On” and “Repeat Ends After xx times”. And it has an explicit “Skip the recurrence”.

Those last two were, until we checked, listed on our own recurring-tasks page as things nobody else documented. They were corrected the day this page was written.

One row survives, and it is a consequence of the date model rather than the repeat engine: a repeating task cannot carry a separate deadline in TickTick, because there is no deadline field to put on it. There is also a documented limitation worth knowing if you plan ahead — “you cannot modify future recurring tasks until the current recurrence is completed.”

This is the actual difference between the products, and it is structural rather than a matter of feature count.

TickTick has a due date, and optionally a Duration — a start and end time that takes the due date’s place. That is a calendar-event shape, and it fits a product with a calendar view at its centre. What it is not is a scheduling date plus a separate cutoff: there is no deadline field distinct from the due date, and nothing documented that hides a task until its start date arrives.

TaskPocket splits them. The start date decides which day the task appears; the deadline is a fact about the world that schedules nothing and has its own view. The tax return is the worked example — start on the 12th, due on the 30th, and moving the first does not move the second. See start dates and deadlines. Note that Duration is Premium on their side and the deadline field is Premium on ours, so both products charge for the second date.

TickTick publishes its limits, which is more than most of this category does, and they are worth reading before you commit a system to it.

• TickTick free: 9 lists, 99 tasks per list, 19 checklist items per task, 2 reminders per task, 1 attachment a day, 5 habits, 5 countdowns, 2 members per shared list. Recurrence, tags, subtasks and priority are all included. Custom filters, task duration, activity history, AI features, timeline view and integrations are Premium-only.
• TaskPocket free: unlimited tasks, 5 projects, 2 areas, the whole repeat engine, checklists, search, natural-language capture, a JSON export, and the last 14 days of completed history.

The shape of the trade: TickTick gives you far more kinds of thing for free — reminders, a calendar, habits, sharing — and counts them. TaskPocket gives you fewer kinds and does not count tasks. Which is better depends entirely on whether nine lists is a ceiling you will ever touch.

The honest framing of this comparison is not feature-by-feature at all. TickTick is a calendar, a habit tracker, a Pomodoro timer and a task manager in one application, on every platform there is. TaskPocket deliberately has none of the first three and is not building them. If you want one app for everything, TickTick is a genuinely good answer and this page is not going to talk you out of it. If you have tried that and found the app became a second job to maintain, the smaller tool is the argument.

A warning about anything else you read on this: almost every comparison article online still quotes $35.99 a year and $3.99 a month. Those figures are out of date. The current ones above come from TickTick’s own upgrade page and the App Store listing, checked on 1 September 2026. The monthly price is genuinely awkward to find — the upgrade page advertises only the annual plan — which is probably why the stale numbers have survived so long.

Against that, TaskPocket is $3.99 a month, $34.99 a year, or $59.99 once. The lifetime option is the real difference in shape: TickTick is subscription-only, so the comparison over five years is not close. What the subscription buys is a much larger product that is actively developed by a real company, which is worth something a lifetime licence is not.