I’ve been using Todoist for a solid year across all of my devices: Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and Windows. This was after using OmniFocus exclusively since the fall of 2016 (and for many years before that–I even beta tested the first version, excluding forays into both Asana and Things). Last night, while setting up a new machine, I decided to reinstall OmniFocus 4, with the possibility of switching back (I think I am). So this is a good time to consider the differences between them, and ultimately what makes me choose OmniFocus.
| Feature | OmniFocus | Todoist |
|---|---|---|
| Natural Language Input | No | Yes |
| Cross-Platform | Web | Yes |
| Hookmark | Yes | Web only |
| Defer | Yes | No |
| Weekly Review | Yes | No |
| Project Sections | No | Yes |
| Shortcut Support | Yes | iOS only |
Natural Language Input
The one great strength of Todoist–and the feature I miss the most when I don’t use it–is its natural language input. For example, I wanted to be reminded at 4 pm today to text my son to turn on the sous vide machine. I opened Todoist and created a new task like this:
text Aaron today at 4 pm @phone #Home
One line, with autocomplete in the app. It’s fast and great.
Consider the same operation in OmniFocus:
You can type in the meat of the task, but getting those other parameters requires mousing, tabbing, or tapping around in a number of fields. It’s not as fast as Todoist and far more fiddly, especially on iOS.
Defer Dates
The most frequently requested Todoist features on the Todoist Subreddit are defer or start dates. These requests must come from people with demanding jobs, because a good task management app for busy people ideally includes the ability to capture action items that you will need to deal with in the future. That could be in a week, a month, or a year. Defer dates, in OmniFocus, allow you to push off a task or project to a future date, but more importantly, to obscure it from your OmniFocus window until you need to see it.
There are some tricks you can use to achieve a workable version of this on Todoist. Different people have come up with clever workarounds to this missing feature, using tags (“labels” in Todoist), or in my case, moving lists into a folder and using filters to overlook them when I don’t want to see them. It’s fiddly (and fun) to build these workarounds in Todoist, but you never get over the nagging sense that this app/service wouldn’t be elevated by the addition of defer dates.
Cross Platform
Another benefit of Todoist is it’s available on just about every platform: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, web. OmniFocus is a first-class citizen in the Apple ecosystem, but is only otherwise available on the web. The features are identical on Mac and Windows, but the app really shines on iOS.
But really, Todoist is an example of how cross-platform isn’t necessarily better. Sure, it’s great to have the app running on any OS you want to use. But you’re really just using a web wrapper on Mac or Windows; the experience is identical whether you’re using the Electron version or loading a page in Safari. And on the Mac, Todoist just doesn’t look right.
OmniGroup, the makers of OmniFocus, have been developing for the Mac since the NeXTSTEP days, before that OS became Mac OS. It is, in the truest sense, a Mac-Assed Mac App. OmniFocus feels tightly integrated into the system on macOS, iPadOS, and iOS. It is an example of the benefits of full commitment, of narrowing your options, for the good.
Hookmark
Take Hookmark as an argument for eschewing cross-platform solutions in favor of a tightly integrated app. Hookmark is only available on the Mac, and allows you to link all kinds of data. Integrating Hookmark into your OmniFocus workflow allows you to link emails, documents, and other files to projects or single tasks. Called “Ubiquitous Linking,” it’s best described in its manifesto:
We also recognize that humans work best in psychological flow. Switching contexts, even to search for information, interferes with flow while consuming precious mental capacity, brain energy and time. Activating an aptly-placed link to information is easier and faster than searching for the information — and more protective of flow.
We affirm that the ability to copy a link to a resource is as important for cognitive productivity as the ability to copy other types of information. This applies to all persistent digital information.
Hookmark does work in Todoist… but only in the web interface. And there are some linking affordances available in Windows, but not to the extent that Hookmark enables. It might be the utility I miss the most when using Windows. I don’t want to overstate Hookmark’s utility, as it’s a unique app with a similarly unique feature set, but if you spend some time getting to understand how it works, you will likely find it indispensable.\1\
Weekly Review
GTD is, on the surface, about collecting to do items, organizing them by project and context, and working from your lists. An essential feature of implementing the method, though, is regularly reviewing your tasks and projects. You can’t effectively do this using only your todo list app, but it’s a central part of the process. Without a proper review, a good app can only help you so much.
There’s nothing about Todoist that prevents you from reviewing, in the GTD sense of the word, your open loops and obligations. It is, however, a manual affair, and you have to sit down and comb through your projects. It is easy, in this instance, to dig into something and tick some action items off your list, but then forget where you left off in Todoist.
This is not the case with OmniFocus, which is the only todo manager I’ve ever used that bakes the weekly review into the app itself. Each week, OmniFocus collects all of your projects–overdue, current, and future–and presents them to you in a pane for you to review. You mark off your progress per project, and there’s no question about where you left off if you get distracted or attend to something else emergent. The review is one of the features I miss most when I’m not using OmniFocus.
Project Sections
Todoist lacks some of OmniFocus’s organizational elan. Most notably, Todoist was designed initially to support one canonical list of projects. You can create one sub level of projects, which is helpful in the way that folders are in organizing projects in OmniFocus, but for anyone who at least splits their projects into “Work” and “Home” categories, you know that you will chafe at Todoist’s limitations here.
A big however, though, are sections in projects in Todoist. You can create phases or stages within a project, and in addition to making these sections meaningful dividers between project subsections, they clean up your projects considerably. Additionally, you can use natural language to assign tasks to sections of projects, and search on sections. OmniFocus has no such affordance, leaving you only the option to create tasks with subtasks to subdivide your projects. Sections are a more attractive and sophisticated feature.
Another neat trick that Todoist offers is to present your sections within a project as a Kanban board. I have tried Trello and never found that particular mode of organizing and viewing my tasks to my taste, but I did enjoy using the feature in Todoist to separate projects into things I can do now (or should do sooner) from things I can wait on. Similarly, it’s a great way to divide up my Car Maintenance project, where each section (or board) corresponds to one of the family vehicles. In this case, I find it helpful to focus on one vehicle at a time. Very flexible, very cool. OmniFocus is stuck in outliner mode at all times.
Shortcut Support
Both Todoist and OmniFocus offer support for Apple’s Shortcuts app/utility, but Todoist shortcuts are not available on the Mac. OmniFocus has a nice collection of shortcuts in the app, and in addition there are hooks in the app that allow you to make some useful shortcuts of your own. This highlights again how Todoist is well integrated on mobile, but a second-class citizen on the Mac.
Speaking of, a cool workflow around OmniFocus and its shortcuts support, in addition to LaunchBar, is using the latter to browse and execute the former. Once you’ve collected some shortcuts, you can browse them using LaunchBar, and fire the shortcut you want.
I was using OmniFocus not so long ago that I could have dug into the Shortcuts support. I’m having a blast with this now, though.
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\1\ I readily agree that Hookmark support is super-niche, and likely not a consideration for a lot of people comparing the features of these two apps.