Todoist vs Linear

Todoist has been around forever, so it's stable and does exactly what you expect a to-do list to do which is why it's our top pick.

When we tested it, the most noticeable thing was how quick it was to get things from brain to app. You type something like "submit report Friday at 5pm," hit enter, and move on. No friction, no overthinking, which is honestly what most people need. Or even better, their Ramble feature allows you to just list off everything on your mind and it uses AI to intelligently separately them into different tasks. I have Todoist on my phone and can't help but use Ramble when my brain is overloaded.

It's best for individuals managing their personal life who want a bit more structure than Apple Notes or pen and paper. Just about anyone could download Todoist and get the hang of it within 5 minutes, even your mom or grandma! But with that said, once you start expecting more, like planning your day visually or managing collaborative projects, you start to feel its limits pretty quick.

• Easy to learn
• Reliable and stable
• Lots of integrations
• Strong organization with projects, labels, and priorities
• Extremely fast task capture with natural language input via Ramble

• Basic. If you want something more proactive and handles off, it may feel too simple
• Time blocking and calendar features feel secondary

You can set due dates, reminders, and recurring tasks easily, which makes it great for routines. I’ve used it for things like weekly check-ins or simple habits, and it’s dependable.

A big part of staying organized is having a structure that doesn't overwhelm you. Being able to organize tasks into projects, add labels, set priorities, and switch between list, board, or calendar views (on paid plans) is simple enough to keep you on track without adding to your cognitive load.

Time blocking is a feature many people who are looking for a task manager love to see, and over the years, Todoist has received some pushback from its customers to build a calendar view that allows for task time blocking.

Right now, you're only able to carve out time/tasks with time blocking through the paid plans, but even if you do that, the feature is still subpar. So if you want to enjoy increased productivity, we'd recommend looking elsewhere, and we'd point you toward newer daily planner apps that do task management and time management really well.

Honestly, I love this feature. You can add tasks quickly by just speaking out things like "buy Oatly, honey, do laundry, call mom, get dress for June wedding". It separates out each task for you.

This feature helps me most before bed when my brain is still overloaded. I turn on ramble and brain dump, and then it creates tasks for me. This is the only thing that makes my brain relax (I also do this in ChatGPT at times when I'm more so circling thoughts rather than tasks).

• Beginner: Free. Best for individuals looking to manage and organize their personal lives.
• Pro: $7 monthly ($60 yearly). Best for project-oriented individuals trying to find their work-life balance within task management.
• Business: $10 monthly ($96 yearly). Best for small teams who need a dedicated workspace to assign projects and unify team billing.

Linear is in an interesting category. It's in one way a product tool (e.g. focusing on bugs, feature requests, and sprints/cycles), and another part project management (for managing the tasks around the cycles).

The thing is, Linear is very much built for your engineering and product team to tie in all of this information together. You'd be hard-pressed to use Linear as a replacement for the company's general project management tool.

If you're heavily a product-focused company, and most of your employees are engineers and product people though, you can probably get away with just using Linear as your team's project manager.

• Our engineers adopted it with zero training, zero hand-holding, and loved it from day one
• Engineers can work straight from the terminal without ever opening the app
• Integrates with GitHub, Slack, Claude, Cursor, Codex
• Built for engineering teams with cycle planning
• Useful project progress views

• Not built for non-technical teams, marketing and ops will feel boxed in
• Standalone AI features are fine, nothing mind-blowing
• Not the tool you'd roll out company-wide

You can track bugs, features, fixes, and internal tasks, but the important part is that it doesn't feel like a giant admin exercise for our team. Linear doesn't make engineers feel like they are updating a dashboard just so someone else can make a prettier status report. Instead, it gives them a clean list of what needs to be done next, which sounds boring until you've used tools that make that weirdly difficult.
Bob, our Head Engineer, said, "Right now, I have a list of all the tasks that I need to do, and it's nice and simple. That's what I like about it." Which pretty much sums up the whole argument for why to use Linear. Managers still get visibility, but the engineer doesn't have to lose their day to the tool.

It's easy to keep our team focused on top priorities with Linear. The main reason we implemented it was because it became clear our engineers were getting swallowed by Slack messages and Vercel comments, and there was no prioritization. Once we implemented Linear, we were able to ship much more cohesively. In other words, we started all rowing in the same direction.

Linear is set up for how engineers work. For example, cycles are a core part of the product (you don't get that in any of the other project management tools on this list).

You also get decent project views that tell you how close you are to completing a project. It was humbling seeing our website launch sitting at 75% complete when I was convinced we were further along. But it gave me a reality check, and the ability to go through each ticket to determine what was actually required pre-launch to move things along more quickly.

This is the part that makes the biggest difference for our team. Linear connects into the tools engineers already use (GitHub, Slack, Claude, Cursor, Codex, and terminal-based workflows).

Our head engineer's favorite thing about Linear was that he could stay in his terminal and never have to jump back into the app to stay on top of things.

He asks it what changed since he last checked, which tickets were urgent, or even what someone on the team seems worried about (appreciate you Bob!).

The Slack integration is awesome too. A bug gets mentioned in a channel, someone pastes in a screenshot, and you just @Linear to ask it to create an issue.

• Free: Best for individual developers or small teams who want a clean task list without needing advanced workflows.
• Basic: $12/user per month ($120/yr). Best for small engineering teams that want fast, streamlined task and cycle management.
• Business: $18/user per month ($192/yr). Best for growing teams that need more integrations, visibility, and control across multiple projects. This is where most scaling startups will land.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing. Best for larger organizations that need advanced security, permissions, and deeper customization across engineering teams.