How We Evaluated Family Task Apps (And Why We Landed on Todoist Pro)

After yet another evening of “I thought you were picking up the prescription” and “Wait, that permission slip was due today?”, I decided to get systematic about how our family tracks tasks. Over five years of daily use with Todoist—and testing various alternatives before that—here’s what I learned about finding a task system that actually works for families.

The Problem We Were Trying to Solve

For years, our family’s approach to staying organized was a patchwork of Apple shared calendars and Dropbox folders. Events went on the calendar. Documents went in shared folders. But tasks—the “remember to call the dentist” and “pick up birthday party supplies” items—lived in our heads or on scattered sticky notes.

The result was predictable: things slipped through the cracks constantly. Not because we weren’t trying, but because we had no single system for capturing and tracking what needed to get done. Apple Calendar is great for when things happen, but it’s not designed for tracking what needs to happen (especially recurring tasks with no specific time).

My Evaluation Framework

When I started looking for a family task app, I focused on four criteria:

1. Low friction capture If adding a task takes more than 10 seconds, it won’t happen during the chaos of family life. The system needed quick capture on any device.

2. Shared visibility Both parents need to see what’s on the list. No more “I didn’t know you needed me to do that” conversations.

3. Reminders that work Tasks without due dates or reminders are tasks that get forgotten. We needed a system that would nudge us at the right time.

4. Room to grow A simple grocery list app wasn’t going to cut it. We needed something that could expand to handle home maintenance, school activities, finances, and more—without becoming overwhelming.

What We Tried Before Todoist

Apple Shared Calendars We already lived in the Apple ecosystem, so shared calendars were our first attempt at family coordination. They work well for appointments and events, but calendar entries are the wrong tool for tasks. You end up creating fake “events” for things like “Call insurance company”—and if you don’t do it that day, you have to manually move the event. There’s no concept of recurring tasks, priority, or project organization.

Dropbox Shared Folders We also tried keeping shared documents—packing lists, home maintenance checklists, school info—in Dropbox. This works for reference materials, but there’s no way to assign tasks, set reminders, or track what’s been completed. We’d open a checklist, check things off mentally, and then forget where we left off.

Apple Reminders The obvious Apple ecosystem choice. It’s free, it syncs across devices, and it has shared lists. For simple grocery lists, it works fine. But Apple Reminders becomes less effective when you need more than a handful of lists. There’s no project hierarchy, limited filter options, and the reminder system is more basic than dedicated task apps. We outgrew it within a few weeks.

Why Todoist Won

After trying various approaches over several months, I landed on Todoist for a few specific reasons:

Natural language input I can type “Call dentist tomorrow at 2pm” and Todoist parses it correctly. This sounds small, but it dramatically reduces the friction of capturing tasks. During a busy morning, the difference between “type a sentence” and “tap through five fields” determines whether the task gets captured at all.

Actual project structure Todoist lets you organize tasks into projects with sub-projects. This means I can have a “Home” project with sub-projects for different rooms or systems, a “Kids” project with sub-projects for each child’s school and activities, and so on. Apple Reminders has flat lists. Notion has infinite flexibility (which became its own problem). Todoist hits the sweet spot.

It just works Looking back over years of daily use, Todoist has earned my trust. The sync is reliable. The apps are fast. Tasks I add on my phone appear instantly everywhere else. This sounds basic, but reliability matters when you’re building a family system that everyone depends on.

Karma system kept me engaged This is minor, but Todoist’s karma points and streaks gave me just enough gamification to build the habit. Years later, I’m at Grand Master level—a few thousand points from Enlightened. The system stuck.

How Todoist Fits Our Life Organization

Todoist isn’t our only organizational tool—it’s one part of a broader system.

I organize my life into seven distinct areas (what I call the 7 Fs Framework: Family, Finance, Fitness, Flourish, Forte, Freedom, and Function). Each of these areas becomes a top-level project in Todoist. This means tasks naturally group by life domain rather than arbitrary categories like “Work” and “Personal.”

Why this matters for families:

• Tasks for each life area stay together (all FAMILY tasks in one place)
• Weekly reviews can check the health of each area
• Cross-area connections become visible (a task that affects both FINANCE and FAMILY)
• The framework is consistent across tools—Todoist for tasks, Obsidian for knowledge, calendar for time

The 7 Fs is the mental model; Todoist is just one tool that implements it. For the complete framework behind how we organize life areas, see The 7 Fs Life Organization Framework.

The Honest Limitations

I want to be upfront: Todoist isn’t perfect for everyone.

No native habit tracking If you want to track habits (exercise streaks, water intake, etc.), Todoist can fake it with recurring tasks, but apps like TickTick have this built in. We use a separate system for habits.

Single assignee per task You can only assign a task to one person. For true shared responsibility (“either of us should grab milk”), you need workarounds like labels or just communication.

The price keeps climbing This is my main complaint. Todoist Pro recently increased to $5/month (or $48/year if you pay annually). Over five years, that adds up. For a family already juggling subscriptions, another recurring cost is a real consideration. I’ll address whether it’s worth it in the cost section below.

The Free Tier Reality Check

You might be wondering: can you just use the free version?

You can, but you’ll hit walls quickly:

5 project limit The free tier limits you to 5 active projects. A realistic family setup needs more: Groceries, Home Maintenance, one project per kid, Finances, Health, maybe Meal Planning. You’ll run out fast.

No reminders This is the most significant limitation. Free Todoist has no automatic reminders. You have to remember to check the app—which reduces much of the value of a task management system. For families, where tasks need to surface at the right moment, this limitation makes free Todoist quite limited for our needs.

No calendar layout Free users can’t see their tasks in a calendar view, which makes planning a family week much harder.

The Cost-Benefit Decision

At $5/month, Todoist Pro costs roughly 17 cents per day.

Here’s how I think about it: How much is one forgotten task worth? A missed permission slip. A lapsed car registration. A prescription that ran out. One of those mistakes easily costs more than a year of Todoist.

More importantly: How much is mental load worth? Before Todoist, I carried a constant low-grade anxiety about what I might be forgetting. Now, if it’s not in Todoist, I don’t worry about it. That peace of mind is worth far more than $5/month.

That said, I understand subscription fatigue is real. If you’re already paying for streaming services, cloud storage, and other apps, another $5/month feels like death by a thousand cuts. You’ll have to decide if the value justifies it for your family.

For us, it has—and continues to.

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Coming up in Part 2: I’ll share what I learned testing Todoist Pro’s features with my family—including which features we use daily, which ones we ignore, and whether the Pro upgrade is actually worth it.

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Have you tried Todoist for your family? I’d love to hear what’s working (or not working) for you.