ForumsQuestionsDISCUSS ALTERNATIVES TO TOODLEDO
DISCUSS ALTERNATIVES TO TOODLEDO
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bandit |
As much as we don’t want to lose Toodledo, many of us are seeing its inevitable demise and starting to look for alternatives that meet our individual needs, so there are many posts in several forum discussions from users who have researched alternatives and have offered some very helpful information (e.g. the post titled Toodledo still alive?).
I thought it might be useful to have a discussion on just the topic of alternatives and features people like or don’t like as compared to Toodledo. Alternatives that have been mentioned are (in no particular order): Task Angel, TickTick, Google Tasks, ToDoist, Remember the Milk, Any.do, Microsoft To Do, 2Do, Good Task, Notion, ClickUp, Nirvana, and just use of Excel (or other spreadsheet) program. Personally, I have yet to find a replacement that has all of my favorite Toodledo features and functionality, so I’m continuing my research and will most likely have to choose which features to give up. Because of this, right now I am not yet ready to provide any opinions, but am appreciative to hear the findings and thoughts of others. (It would be great if someone would buy Toodledo and save it!) This message was edited Feb 08, 2021. |
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claudio.cerutti |
I moved from Toodledo to ClickUp.
In ClickUp you've tons of feature, but if you use "TableView" is like Toodledo (with more customizabile fields) The only cons is that you've to practice a little bit. |
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SquidgyFishy |
I'm with you in wishing someone would save toodles, it has been my system for many years.
Below is my shortlist together with my views on each one, in case this is helpful to anyone. I moved to using a spreadsheet after testing through my shortlist, and it works really well for me. I have hundreds of next actions and I can filter them depending on location, time, tool and anything else I want to. I have hundreds of projects as well and excel makes reviewing projects (for me) a dream. For project notes longer than a few sentences I store those in OneNote. I used to do this with toodles anyway because the notes in toodles were a bit naff. I love excel, I love playing with spreadsheets and I love adding conditional formatting and creating pivot tables to give me feedback on how much I’m completing in a week. To tell the truth I feel more confident in the spreadsheet than I used to with toodles. I’ve dropped the spreadsheet onto my onedrive so I can see it on my tablet and mobile. I don’t use my todo list heavily on mobile, so it is sufficient for me. It works very well on tablet. I acknowledge my system may not suit everyone. I thought that I would miss not importing my emails into my system, but actually it’s been fine. When I’m moving really fast I just BCC myself so I remember to add it (which isn’t that far from what I used to do, BCC’ing toodles). When im not moving superfast I’ll just switch to excel and drop some kind of reminder in my inbox to process later. I get about 150 average actionable emails a day, so I'm not a mega heavy email user, but i get enough. Common to all the below is that they seemed to work well in the first trial with under 100 tasks, but as soon as I imported my full list, it became much more difficult, whereas toodles (and excel) handle them easily. They also tried to make me think the way they wanted to, whereas toodledo felt like it was asking how it could change according to what I wanted. The one exception was Amazing Marvin, but that had slow down when I imported my full list of tasks. 1) Paper (such as bullet journal or custom system) – tried it and decided against it, I’m too messy and I move too fast 2) RememberTheMilk – liked it. Felt a bit like toodles, but ultimately had less features. You needed a tag for everything rather than folders, contexts, locations and then tags. I also didn’t like how it does things by start date, I commit to achieving things in a week but I can never commit to it on a day as my days change to quickly (I have to schedule time in my calendar for focus time) 3) Todoist – I liked the resources that were behind it. But I couldn’t get on with the projects list. It’s like it was designed for someone with only 10 ongoing projects. Who has that? So I would end up having to change the “projects” list to be my different lists… Ugh. Bring back toodledo! Also only had tags, which i struggled with. 4) Nozbe - £90 per year, and didn’t feel much more featured than MS Todo was. Also really didn’t like the “add new item” being in the bottom right hand corner 5) Amazing Marvin – really loved this, so customisable and flexible. But would need time investment to get it perfect. Main reason for discounting was it was slowing down after I’d imported all my tasks (I have several thousand) 6) Nirvana – I liked this, but it was a bit simple 7) Facile Things – It seemed overly complicated to be able to add a project 8) MS Todo – I wanted to like this, but it was too simple fo me. Liked that you could connect it to Outlook, but I try and spend as little time in Outlook as possible. 9) Trello – I wanted to like this, loved the graphical interface, but I just couldn’t see myself importing thousands of tasks and reviewing lists easily like I can with toodles 10) TickTick – I had written this off a few years ago when Jake sold Toodles (I wasn’t sure what the future for toodles was then) and hadn’t tried this again since then, but it looks like it may have improved since when I trialed it 11) Clickup – I just couldn’t get over the way they use the inbox, trying to make it some kind of focus box. No, an inbox is where things come IN. Not where you work! Hope it helps someone! |
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bandit |
Posted by SquidgyFishy:
Below is my shortlist together with my views on each one, in case this is helpful to anyone. Hi SquidgyFishy. Thank you so much for the comprehensive list and all of your thoughts on the alternative solutions you have researched. You’ve done a lot of work that I think will be helpful to others - I know it’s helpful to me, and I am very appreciative of this! I think I’m like you in that I need to thoroughly research and compare everything before making any final decisions. I’m also an Excel junkie and tend to put as many things as I can into spreadsheets. A while back I had thought that exporting everything from Toodledo into a .csv file was an excellent starting point for building a spreadsheet that would suit my needs. My biggest “problem” with this is that I use Toodledo almost exclusively on my iPhone (and access it many, many times throughout each day) and, while I can access Excel on my iPhone, in my opinion this is just not optimal for such heavy use. However, perhaps this is because I just need to get used to it. That being said, I’m going to take the time to build a spreadsheet and will use that in parallel with Toodledo. I’m also going to go through your comprehensive list and see if there’s anything there that may suit my needs. If I have any feedback or additional information to add, I’ll do so. Thank you again! |
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Gnopps |
Thanks @SquidgyFishy for your list, I agree with your sentiment.
Two more alternatives I'd propose: GTDNext: Very nifty but limited functionality Skedpal: Great software but expensive MyLifeOrganized: No web version and complicated pricing I myself have switched to RTM with Skedpal as a close second. |
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claudio.cerutti |
Posted by SquidgyFishy:
11) Clickup – I just couldn’t get over the way they use the inbox, trying to make it some kind of focus box. No, an inbox is where things come IN. Not where you work! Yes, I don't use inbox in ClickUp because it doesn't make sense for me. But if you use the table view, ClickUp is the same of Toodledo, with more and more feature. The matter is that ClickUp is very customizable, and so you have to spend a little time to configure it. But after that, it works very well. This message was edited Feb 11, 2021. |
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TimberXX |
I was terrified leaving toodle, now about 6 weeks after the transition, I am much better.
I have a separate thread on tick tick, i think its on page 2 now. My biggest concern was going from toodledo's contexts, tags, location, to just tags. But after living with it for 6 weeks, I am ok with just tags. Now I use a prefix for Locations with an @ sign, and I use several symbols as a prefix for different context types, people, companies, etc. So I feel just as organized. |
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mlb32704 |
I've actually posted on this topic several times, but a few of these I had not heard of, so I gave them a try.
Based upon my own personal observations, trials, and analyses, there really isn't a solid alternative to Toodledo. I wish that Pink Java Media LLC who acquired Toodledo would put some time effort and money into it, but evidently that isn't going to happen. I can manage with all of the outstanding issues and zero support, so long as they keep the lights on, I'm good for now. These forums help. As for the alternatives listed in this post, here are my high level takes on each of them. Please keep in mind that I am a basic user, but I do use the triple criteria sorting feature of Toodledo as well as advanced repeating tasks, tags, etc. so, not too basic :) - - Task Angel - by FAR the best alternative out there, it is the closest thing to Toodledo, very simple yet robust, has everything that I need. The challenge is that Task Angel right now is fully dependent upon Toodledo servers and data. Per multiple conversations with their management, they will supposedly have an application across all platforms ready to go, if and when Toodledo pulls the plug. - Tick Tick - a close second, but they don't offer sorting on multiple criteria, that was a showstopper for me. - Google Tasks - I wanted this one to work based on everything else that I use from Google, but it is way too underpowered for even a basic to do list. - ToDoist - nice look and feel, great until you start kicking the tires and want to add labels, reminders, etc. which requires a Pro account ($). And I could not figure out how to do recurring tasks although it says that you can. I like my to do lists robust AND free :) - Remember the Milk - this was my frontrunner for a while, I spent a lot of time playing with it and trying to make it look and act like Toodledo. It's decent but the look and feel is off and it's actually a little complicated for a basic app. I know that there was something else about it that I didn't like, either RTM or TickTick added an extra line for every extra data point that you included with a task (i.e a note). A complete waste of space that crowded up the screen and required more scrolling through tasks than necessary. Can't remember which one, sorry. - Any.do - crazy layout, way too complicated and seems to be missing a lot of what Toodledo does right now. - 2Do - one of the few iOS apps with a corresponding Watch app, I had some fun with this one for a while but they have no Web solution. - Microsoft ToDo - see Google Tasks :) Same thing, would LOVE to use this if it were more robust, but it's not. - Amazing Marvin - just gave it a shot, good luck with that :) Looks like a very nice app with tons of functionality but could it be any more complicated? I'm sure that if I play around with it for a year or two I might get it close to Toodledo, no thanks. - GoodTask, Notion and Nirvana - downloaded each of them, signed up, played around for a few minutes, deleted them all. - ClickUp - now this one piqued my interest. Definitely has the functionality, but tasks and notes are overshadowed and misplaced in what is essentially a full blown project management app. I don't need to assign owners, check dashboards, setup spaces and whiteboards to flesh out new ideas...I just need to pick up some milk every other Tuesday and I want to use a tag to move it up to the top of the list. That's it. So this one might be worth checking out for power users, not for me. - Excel - I wish that I was better at it, because I know that I could jury rig a spreadsheet to do some or all of what I do in Toodledo. And I back up to CSV every week, so the data is ready to roll. Eventually I might play around more with this. If anyone has any insights or examples that they can share or tips for setting up and maintaining, I'm all ears. - Paper - lol, yeah good luck with that. Laugh if you will but I do miss Palm and the Palm Desktop from time to time, simple to do list, calendar and contacts. When I was shopping for my first iPhone, and Palm was on the way out the door, I did a quick search for the best possible match in terms of a to do list with notes functionality that would look and feel like Palm on an iPhone. That was Toodledo, and 10 years plus later, I'm still here and I still love it. Damn shame what's happened, really is, such a great app across the board and a loyal base of users, I wish that Pink Java Media would wake up and do something. My bottom line - I'm holding out hope for ToodleDo, and/or hoping that TaskAngel is busy getting ready to go at it alone should ToodleDo pull the plug. This message was edited Feb 11, 2021. |
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Ummagumma |
I ended up using the combination of MS Outlook / Onenote on the laptop for work tasks, and iOS Reminders with a GoodTask app on my iOS devices for personal tasks (and access to work tasks on the mobile).
I use Onenote 2016 to plan my projects & maintain action lists, and export individual tasks to Outlook with a single click (there's a decent amount of integration between two programs). While Outlook's interface is pretty dated, its Task module is still extremely powerful if you know how to set up custom filtered views and conditional formatting. I could use it with MS Todo on mobile - they run on the same database - but I far prefer GoodTask for iOS, as it adds a lot of great functionality that really speeds up working with tasks, and also has a very good Apple Watch app. I am syncing Exchange to my iOS devices via Reminders. GoodTask is using Reminders database. For personal tasks, I use GoodTask with an iOS Reminders account rather than an Outlook account. Just because it works smoother and I very rarely need to use personal tasks from my laptop - my phone is always with me. I could (and did) just as well use Outlook.com tasks. I stopped using Start Dates a while ago, but if I wanted to, GoodTask has that feature & will sync Start Dates with Microsoft. I use Tags when it makes sense. GoodTask uses plaintext tags added to either subject line or notes (e.g. #FollowUp). These tags work seamlessly when synced to Outlook or MS Todo. I never used contexts. As far as other services or apps - here's my personal take, which is very much driven by how I used Toodledo: * TickTick - I don't trust China based software with business info. * Todoist - has an excellent natural language input functionality, and overall is a well polished service. No start dates but I haven't been using them for a while anyway. This is going to be my first contender if for whatever reason I am unhappy with the current setup. * RTM - probably the closest to Toodledo from what I recall, and would be my #2 things to consider, alongside Todoist. * Click Up - has a lot of promise, but ... clunky. They at least fixed the terrible mobile interface they used to have (tiny gray fonts on gray background) that was giving me headache. Still, a very complicated interface, lack of consistency between mobile and desktop or web clients, some must have functionality is missing from mobile client (can't set recurrence, no Siri integration). A lot of people also complain of slowdowns and crashes, but I haven't used it enough to run into these. Will keep an eye on this service, but for now unlikely to use it. * ToDo - it's actually not bad, and I've used it for a while. My biggest issues with it are (1) no way to sort search or tag filter results by due date (2) subtasks (steps) don't sync to anything other than ToDo (3) My Day feature could be great but you can only set up tasks for it on that day (4) no custom views, although it has a few predefined ones that are useful (5) the interface works slower than GoodTask - especially if need to re-schedule a task for another day. It's not that the app is slow, it's that it takes more steps to reschedule a task. (6) You can't combine tasks from two accounts on iOS - to see tasks from one account you have to log out of another. (5) and (6) are primary reasons why I am no longer using it - I can get far better functionality with GoodTask. That said, I disagree that ToDo is as barebones as Google Tasks. It has many features that GT doesn't - file attachments, tags, priorities, master task view, My Day, etc. |
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mlb32704 |
Posted by Ummagumma
I disagree that ToDo is as barebones as Google Tasks. It has many features that GT doesn't - file attachments, tags, priorities, master task view, My Day, etc. At first I thought that you were talking about 2Do. I guess that I need to take another look at Microsoft ToDo, I shouldn’t have generalized that it was as basic as Google Tasks, my bad. If I recall, my issues had more to do with sorting, tagging, customizing views, etc. versus lag times or merging of data across accounts. But I will check it out again, thanks. |
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Ummagumma |
Posted by mlb32704:
Posted by Ummagumma I disagree that ToDo is as barebones as Google Tasks. It has many features that GT doesn't - file attachments, tags, priorities, master task view, My Day, etc. At first I thought that you were talking about 2Do. I guess that I need to take another look at Microsoft ToDo, I shouldn’t have generalized that it was as basic as Google Tasks, my bad. If I recall, my issues had more to do with sorting, tagging, customizing views, etc. versus lag times or merging of data across accounts. But I will check it out again, thanks. I didn't experience much lagging, it was more the number of taps required to re-schedule tasks. I use Due date as my start date, and add actual Due date to the subject, so I re-schedule tasks all the time. When it comes to sorting and custom views - this is indeed where ToDo comes short, but way ahead of Google Tasks that have no such functionality whatsoever. There's quite a few sorting criteria for tasks in lists, or All tasks view. The biggest problem I have with it is that if I filter by any tag, or run a search, the resulting list isn't arranged in any meaningful way, and can't be re-sorted. This drastically cuts on the usability of tags - if I have a couple dozen tasks using the same tag, and they are not arranged by due date, it's a lot of guessing. As far as 2Do, it's an excellent standalone app, but unless you only use Apple devices and have no need for web access, it's somewhat limited. |
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mlb32704 |
Seems like everyone from the basic to the power users has their favorite alternative at this point. Mine is Task Angel, but again, the future of that app is highly dependent upon whatever ongoing and future development they are engaged in independent of Toodledo. Beyond Task Angel, I am still undecided and have not found anything that really works for me yet.
Side note - if and when Toodledo does shut down, it would be great if we all had some sort of external forum to continue these discussions on. I for one have found them extremely helpful over the past few months. I am certain that there are many users that have no clue what's going on, and they'll be looking for answers and alternatives, again, if and when. If anyone has any suggestions on the right site or forum to do this, I would be glad to set this up and share it back here. What's the best solution - Reddit, Quora, etc.? UPDATE - I set up a discussion space on Quora, I will post the invitation links in a separate forum post but I think that they expire every 7 days, so it's going to be tough to get the word out whenever Toodledo does get shut down. This message was edited Feb 11, 2021. |
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SleepySpider_2 |
Task angel only synced about 50% of my tasks.
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Charlie5 |
So here we are again. A couple of years ago the IQTELL subs crowd sourced a list of alternatives on this spreadsheet. If you would like to add to or edit it, please request.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JCAzQ5f9ETGDhGZSUtecnq5at7AJw3BxSzP5E3h4lgo/edit#gid=0 |
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bandit |
Posted by mlb32704:
Side note - if and when Toodledo does shut down, it would be great if we all had some sort of external forum to continue these discussions on. I for one have found them extremely helpful over the past few months. I am certain that there are many users that have no clue what's going on, and they'll be looking for answers and alternatives, again, if and when. UPDATE - I set up a discussion space on Quora, I will post the invitation links in a separate forum post but I think that they expire every 7 days, so it's going to be tough to get the word out whenever Toodledo does get shut down. Thank you mlb32704 - something like this would be great! For those of us who are in this same quandary (and slight panic, for some, like me!), it’s great to be able to go to one place to share all this information and personal thoughts on the various alternatives to Toodledo. I’ve already found this one forum post to be extremely informative and helpful, and am thankful to all who have contributed such good information so far, and to others who will hopefully contribute in the future, including updates any of us might want to add as we continue our individual quests for our own “perfect” solutions. |
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creinhard |
There is an outside discussion forum, you'd need to create a Slack account to access
https://td-user-coop.slack.com/?redir=%2Fmessages It's not an overly active forum.. yet :D I'm a longtime desktop/web user of Toodledo, and over the last two years I have tested just about all the other alternatives. One day I might just move it all to Excel spreadsheet and stop being a pawn in these "here-today-gone-tomorrow" apps, In the meantime, I'm making daily Toodledo data backups, and once per week I refresh the data to Remember the milk (it's about as seamless a migration as I could hope for). Chris |
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Ummagumma |
Posted by creinhard:
There is an outside discussion forum, you'd need to create a Slack account to access https://td-user-coop.slack.com/?redir=%2Fmessages It's not an overly active forum.. yet :D I'm a longtime desktop/web user of Toodledo, and over the last two years I have tested just about all the other alternatives. One day I might just move it all to Excel spreadsheet and stop being a pawn in these "here-today-gone-tomorrow" apps, In the meantime, I'm making daily Toodledo data backups, and once per week I refresh the data to Remember the milk (it's about as seamless a migration as I could hope for). Chris Excel spreadsheet won’t give you reminders or recurrence. And it sucks on mobile. |
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frogboy |
I am using Nozbe - like it. It’s simple, cross platform. Same on every device. Evernote integration.
But expensive...... Big moan is it’s great for projects at the runway &10,000 ft level but random stuff from out yonder - which Toodledo was awesome for - is poor. ZenKit, looks promising, but takes quite a lot of time to get your head around. RTM, has great reminder features but interface can be annoying. Todoist wins if you use a lot of ifttt/zapier kind of things. Overwhelming with too many projects.... 2Do, is nearest equivalent, but not cross platform & no email in. Solution might be to split roles and use several tools..... Sadly there is no one tool to rule them..... |
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Ummagumma |
Posted by frogboy:
I am using Nozbe - like it. It’s simple, cross platform. Same on every device. Evernote integration. But expensive...... Big moan is it’s great for projects at the runway &10,000 ft level but random stuff from out yonder - which Toodledo was awesome for - is poor. ZenKit, looks promising, but takes quite a lot of time to get your head around. RTM, has great reminder features but interface can be annoying. Todoist wins if you use a lot of ifttt/zapier kind of things. Overwhelming with too many projects.... 2Do, is nearest equivalent, but not cross platform & no email in. Solution might be to split roles and use several tools..... Sadly there is no one tool to rule them..... 2Do does have an email add-on. It was just a couple bucks extra IIRC. The biggest problem I have with it is that it's so limited in what it can sync with and what data it will sync. Have you looked at Goodtask ? |
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