Todoist vs TaskPocket

Todoist wins most of those rows outright and ties much of the rest. That is the honest shape of this comparison: it is a fifteen-year-old product from a company of around ninety people, and TaskPocket is one developer choosing a smaller scope.

Recurrence. Both do after-completion repeats. The difference is how. Todoist expresses it as punctuation inside a typed string — every! 3 months counts from completion, every 3 months from the original date. It works, and it is powerful once learned, but it is a parsed string rather than a structured rule: what you get is not always what you meant, and editing it later means editing the string. TaskPocket makes it a labelled option and shows the rule back as a sentence before saving. See recurrence anchor.

The start date. Todoist says outright that it does not support start dates that defer a task, and its help centre lists six workarounds instead — a separate “start” task, a recurring date, a deadline, a filter, a calendar sync, a reminder. TaskPocket has the field. This matters less than it used to, because Todoist has Deadlines, so it is a difference in which of the two dates you get rather than in how many. See start dates and deadlines.

AI. Todoist ships four AI features and one of them, Ramble, is on the free tier. TaskPocket has none, and the natural-language date parser is a deterministic grammar rather than a model — no round-trip, no quota, no guessing. This is a positioning choice for a segment, not a claim that AI is useless.

Scope. Todoist has sharing, assigning, comments, an established API and hundreds of integrations built on it. TaskPocket has a REST API and an MCP server of its own, and none of the rest: no sharing, no comments, no integration catalogue, and it is not building them. Whether that reads as restraint or as a missing product is genuinely a matter of what you need.

This is the clearest difference and the one worth being concrete about.

• Todoist Beginner: 5 personal projects, Smart Quick Add, task reminders, list and board layouts, 3 filter views, one week of activity history, integrations, Ramble with limited sessions, and files up to 5 MB on a task's comments.
• TaskPocket Free: unlimited tasks, 5 projects, 2 areas, the full repeat engine, reminders, checklists, tags, search, natural-language capture, sync across every device, a one-click JSON export, the last 14 days of completed history, and up to 20 files on each task, 10 MB each and 100 MB in total.

The trade is legible: Todoist's free tier gives you integrations and several reminders per task, neither of which TaskPocket has at any price, plus three saved filter views, where TaskPocket keeps its saved filters for Premium. TaskPocket's gives you the whole repeat engine and unlimited tasks. Neither app deletes anything when you downgrade.

The comparison people usually want: the second date field costs money in both products. Todoist gates Deadlines behind Pro; TaskPocket gates the deadline field and the Deadlines view behind Premium. Neither gives it away, and any article claiming Todoist does is out of date.

Where they diverge is the shape of the payment. Todoist is a subscription only. TaskPocket's lifetime option is a single payment rather than a recurring one, which is worth more to some people than the monthly difference and nothing at all to others. It is not a claim to breadth: Todoist has native apps everywhere and TaskPocket has a web app and an iPhone app.