Todoist is built for straightforward personal task management, letting you create, prioritize, and organize tasks in a list, kanban board, or (if you pay) a basic calendar view. It nails the basics for solo users, but doesn't do much else. If you want to get into time blocking, Todoist's calendar view is there, but it's minimal and really just tacked on. For anything beyond simple task lists, you'll need to integrate with another daily planner to fill in the gaps.

Trello, on the other hand, is all about kanban boards. If you love dragging cards around and want a clean board view, Trello still does that well. It also has a solid mobile app and deep integrations with Atlassian tools like Jira and Confluence. But outside of those integrations and the board view, Trello hasn't kept up with newer project managers. Its feature set feels stuck in the past, and it's not built for deep personal productivity or more advanced planning.

If your main concern is classic task management for your personal life, Todoist is the better pick. It's focused, reliable, and does what you expect without extra clutter. Trello is only worth considering if you specifically want a kanban board above all else or need those Atlassian integrations. Otherwise, Todoist is the clear choice for simple, effective personal task tracking.

Todoist Editor's Verdict

What is Todoist?

Todoist is one of the longest-standing task management apps (founded in 2007!). You get exactly what you'd expect from Todoist — the ability to create tasks, prioritize them, and organize them with labels. You can view your tasks in a list, kanban view, or calendar view (paid tier).

With the rising popularity of time blocking, Todoist has received immense pressure from it's customers to build a calendar view and allow for task time blocking. That said, time blocking is a secondary feature to Todoist and is quite barebones compared to other daily planners. Many folks integrate Todoist with Sunsama or Akiflow for the full daily planning experience.

If considering Todoist for business, whether you're an individual or a team, there are better task management apps available that will give you more productivity power (e.g. other tools that will allow you to schedule meetings, time block tasks, manage projects, see your workload, and collaborate with team members), so as a heads up, make sure to consider those before diving head first into Todoist for business.

Trello Editor's Verdict

What is Trello?

Trello is probably a project management tool that most people have heard of. It was one of the first project managers to hit mainstream popularity because it was the first project manager to allow for kanban board view from a web app, bringing with it a super user friendly interface.

This was an incredible feat back in 2011 and what resulted in its rise to popularity, especially in the B2C space (general consumers, not majorly breaking into the B2B space). For example, you'd use Trello to manage your personal tasks, maybe more as a prosumer, and less as a business owner.

We used Trello here at Efficient App for years, before ultimately switching to Asana, when they too added kanban functionality, as we felt that Trello sort of got a bit stuck, while their competitors were evolving and working to further innovate in the project management space.

Key Features

The main differentiation that Trello had was kanban board functionality, and that's about where it started and ends. Thing is, kanban view is now a staple of any modern project manager on the market in this day and age.

Feature set wise, since Atlassian now owns Trello, they've prioritized integrations within the Atlassian suite.

User Experience

Trello does board view well, but that's about the bulk of it. As they haven't really seemed to update Trello much in the past 6+ years, the bulk of the credit that we can give Trello comes from it having incredibly deep integration with the Atlassian suite of tools (e.g. Jira,Confluence, and Bitbucket).

With Atlassian's acquisition of Trello, came with it more of an integration with Atlassian's tooling.

Mobile App

Trello actually has a pretty solid mobile app on both iOS and Android. This is in part to how much time they've had to perfect it. Early on, being more in the B2C space, and coming out more when the iPhone was gaining major traction, a solid mobile app is something that the general consumer wanted. So this is something they've spent a lot of time perfecting.

API & Integration

We also have to give Trello credit in this area. They have a super robust API and powerful Zapier connector. If their Zapier connector doesn't have quite what you're looking for, you should be able to do chat you'd like to do using their developer API.

If your team is heavily relying on the Atlassian software stack, then Trello is likely to bring with it some native integrations to help your team out as well.