Todoist vs Trello (2026): Free Plans, Recurring Tasks & Team Costs

Quick Verdict: Choose the Workflow, Not the Old Stereotype

Choose Todoist first when the difficult question is 'What should I do next across all my responsibilities?' Its task-first approach, natural-language dates, priorities and filters suit personal routines and straightforward shared work. Choose Trello first when the difficult question is 'Where does this deliverable sit in our workflow?' Boards, cards and stage-based coordination suit content pipelines, client approvals and work that benefits from a shared visual overview. These are starting recommendations, not measured speed or productivity rankings.

The distinction is no longer lists versus boards, or personal versus professional. Todoist has board layouts and team workspaces. Trello has a personal Inbox, Planner and native recurring due dates. Buying from an older comparison can therefore send you toward an upgrade or integration you do not need. A freelancer with four clients may prefer either: the deciding issue is whether the main record should be an individual action, a reusable routine or a deliverable moving through several stages.

Research method: official pricing, support documentation and billing rules checked October 18, 2026. No paid account, timed usability test, live automation or migration was run. USD calculations exclude tax, third-party subscriptions and implementation time; annual equivalents are not monthly-payment quotes. Our Todoist review and Trello review provide background, while this guide's dated sources support its current claims. For broader requirements, start with the project-management category.

Free Plans: Five Personal Projects Is Not a Five-Person Team

Todoist Beginner includes five active personal projects, three filter views, list and board layouts, recurring dates and automatic task reminders. Its usage guide separately limits personal projects to five people and projects to 300 active tasks, including subtasks and recurring tasks. Five personal projects does not mean five tasks, and five people per personal project is not a universal five-person limit on every type of Todoist collaboration.

A free Todoist team is available alongside personal projects, with up to five active team projects and five guests under the current limits. Buying personal Pro does not upgrade that team to Business. Free team participants invited as team members are admins; the differentiated member role requires Business. That matters if you want a coordinator to manage access without giving every colleague the same team-level control. Decide which kind of project and role you need before comparing only the free headline.

Trello Free permits ten open boards and ten collaborators per Workspace, plus unlimited cards. The collaborator-limit guide counts Workspace members, board guests and pending invitations across the Workspace—not ten people separately on each board. Exactly ten prevents adding a new collaborator; more than ten makes boards view-only and stops their automations. Eight members, including the owner, and two additional guests therefore fill the allowance. Compare those independent board and people limits with the free project-management guide, not an old unlimited-members claim.

Paid Plans: Monthly Prices and Annual Commitments

The current Todoist billing FAQ prices Pro at $7 on monthly payment or $60 per year, equivalent to $5 monthly. Business is $10 per member monthly or $96 per member yearly, equivalent to $8. Pro adds capacity and planning features such as 300 personal projects, calendar layout, task duration, custom reminders, deadlines and full reporting history. Business members also receive personal Pro features; do not add a second Pro subscription to every Business seat in the comparison.

Trello Standard is $6 per billable user monthly or $60 yearly; Premium is $12.50 monthly or $120 yearly. Standard includes unlimited boards, Custom Fields, advanced checklists, full Planner access and card mirroring. Premium adds native Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard and Map views, Workspace views, observers and broader export/admin features. A paid Trello subscription upgrades a Workspace, not every Workspace that a person's account happens to use.

For a solo buyer, Todoist Pro and one Trello Standard seat both have a $60 annual list price; on monthly payment they are $7 and $6 respectively. Neither price proves equivalent functionality. A team requiring Trello's native Calendar view must compare Premium, not quietly retain the Standard price. Todoist's pricing page and billing FAQ disagree on Pro's generic upload size, so confirm that limit if large files are decisive. The SaaS spending guide provides a useful framework for comparing the actual tier, add-ons and continuing administration.

Five Staff and Two Clients: The Guest-Billing Difference

Assume five internal members, including the owner, and two external clients. Everyone needs access to the same agreed work, all quantities remain unchanged for a full billing period, and clients are genuinely guests rather than Workspace/team members. Todoist's role documentation makes guests non-billable. Five Business members therefore cost $50 on monthly payment or $480 yearly, whether those guests join one or two invited projects. Guests do not inherit Business's paid features, including deadlines, so that budget is not seven full-featured Business users.

Trello's billing guide bills Workspace members and guests on two or more boards within that paid Workspace. If each client is on only one board and neither is a Workspace member, five Standard seats total $30 monthly or $300 yearly; Premium totals $62.50 or $600. Add both clients to a second board in the same Workspace and seven seats become billable: Standard is $42 monthly or $420 yearly; Premium is $87.50 or $840.

The extra cost is triggered by membership, not by sending more comments. An observer is not automatically a free user either: an observer who is a Workspace member or multi-board guest remains billable. Removing someone frees a seat for reuse for the remainder of the period; unused seats drop from the count at renewal rather than producing an assumed instant cash refund. Teams handling several clients should use the agency software guide to compare those access boundaries before treating guests as a universal discount.

Recurring Tasks: Three Behaviors That Look Similar

First decide whether you want one ongoing routine, a task scheduled relative to its last completion, or a separate deliverable for every period. A monthly 'review subscriptions' reminder can reuse one item. A client report for October and another for November may need separate comments, files and approval records. A recurring-date badge does not establish that the application preserves each period as an independent task with its own state.

Todoist recurring dates support scheduled intervals and completion-based intervals. The documented example 'every 3 months' anchored on January 10 keeps April 10 as its next scheduled date; 'every! 3 months' completed January 20 moves to April 20. If several occurrences are overdue, Todoist advances to a future occurrence rather than filling your list with every missed period. Important exceptions prevent a simplistic punctuation rule: daily recurrences follow completion, and the guide describes 'every week' as dynamic. For a fixed weekday, use an explicit expression such as 'every Monday'.

Trello now has native recurring due dates. Marking the card done updates its due date according to the configured cadence and returns that same card to not-done status. You do not always need an automation or Power-Up. The documentation does not establish a universal completion-relative interval equivalent to Todoist's 'every!' or explicitly list recurrence's plan entitlement, so verify those requirements on your account. New recurrence settings must be configured on the web; mobile users can interact with existing recurring cards.

The Card Repeater Power-Up does a different job: it creates scheduled copies. The copied due date does not automatically move forward, and archiving the original does not stop its repetitions. A separate automation can update copied dates, with its own usage allowance. Choose this separate-record model deliberately and review which comments or descriptions it repeats. For personal routines versus client deliverables, the freelancer workflow guide helps define what should remain one task and what deserves a new record.

Calendars and Deadlines: A Date Is Not a Time Block

Todoist's calendar integration is available on all plans. Connecting a calendar and seeing external events is different from the paid visual calendar layout and time-blocking controls. You can connect one Google or Outlook account at a time; external events are read-only inside Todoist. Avoid upgrading solely because a comparison says every calendar capability requires Pro, but also do not assume a free calendar connection includes the paid planning interface.

A Todoist task date can represent when you intend to work; a paid deadline is a separate fixed cutoff. A recurring task may have a deadline, but that deadline does not itself stop the recurrence. Use the recurrence's ending rule or complete it forever when appropriate. Neither scheduling a ninety-minute duration nor placing work on a calendar measures actual time spent; use the time-tracking guide if billing or estimates require a timer.

Trello distinguishes Free's view-only Planner, Standard's full Planner and Premium's native Calendar and Workspace Calendar views. There is also a Calendar Power-Up for board cards with due dates; it is not the same feature as Premium's native view. Trello reminders require selecting a reminder time, and archived cards do not send due-date notifications. Before choosing, try the actual sequence you need: capture a task, plan a work session, move it once and receive the intended reminder.

Collaboration: Share the Project, Not Just the Assigned Task

Todoist's sharing guide distinguishes personal-project collaborators, team members and guests. Someone invited to a personal project can view and edit its contents; their feature entitlement follows their own plan, not the inviter's subscription. Business members get personal Pro, but guests do not. Personal work is not automatically a team project. Review the team project's access setting and guest invitations rather than assuming the words personal, team or shared describe the same audience.

A Trello guest is a board member who is not a Workspace member. Guests are normal editing board members by default and can see every card on their invited board. There is no per-card hiding rule that makes an assigned client see only their own cards. A filtered view, colored label or separate list is not confidentiality. Keep unrelated clients in appropriately restricted boards, and check paid-Workspace administrator access when setting board visibility.

Task ownership is another separate decision. Todoist assigns one person to a task; divide work into separately owned subtasks when responsibility changes. In either tool, define who accepts a handoff and what done means. For a content pipeline, 'ready for client' should not mean 'published'; for a personal list, assigning an action to yourself should not expose a private note to a project group. The small-team project-management guide is useful when these coordination needs extend beyond choosing a visual style.

Automation and AI: Check the Meter Behind the Feature

Trello's automation limits distinguish a run from its operations. Free includes 250 monthly runs and 2,500 operations; Standard includes 1,000 and 20,000. Those allowances are pooled across the Workspace's boards. One trigger consumes one run, while each action consumes at least one operation. Premium advertises unlimited runs but retains a separate operations ceiling and per-run limits. Unlimited runs therefore cannot be read as unrestricted processing.

For a planning example, sixty card-triggered workflows per working day across twenty days require 1,200 runs. If each workflow performs three single-operation actions, it needs 3,600 operations. That exceeds Standard's run allowance despite fitting its operations allowance. It is arithmetic, not a measured workflow trace: some actions consume more than one operation. Do not apply that automation calculation to Trello's native recurring-date control without evidence that it uses the same meter. Third-party connectors introduce separate subscriptions and processing rules, as the Zapier vs Make comparison explains.

Both products now advertise AI assistance. Todoist's current plan FAQ lists limited free capture sessions and paid Assist capabilities; Trello's current price matrix lists AI capture and organization features on Standard and above. Older blanket claims that Todoist has no native assistance or Trello has no Inbox are not a reliable purchasing basis. No AI accuracy or time-saving benchmark was performed here. Keep confidential client data within approved processing rules and check generated dates, assignments and descriptions before accepting them into real work.

Exports and Backups: An Active Task List Is Not All Your History

Todoist's native project CSV supports task structure, descriptions, dates and other attributes, including comments and attachment references. It excludes completed tasks and loses the starting date of a recurring expression. The separate Google Sheets export route can include completed tasks but omits labels, deadlines, comments, attachments and reminders. These are two different routes: do not incorrectly attach the Sheets omission list to every Todoist CSV.

Paid Todoist backups retain up to twenty-one snapshots of active projects, made on days with activity and changes. They include up to 500 comments per task and links to attachments, but exclude completed tasks and archived projects. Twenty-one backups is not necessarily twenty-one consecutive calendar days, and a file link is not an independent copy of the file. Keep completion reports and required files separately if your retention needs go beyond active work.

Trello's export guide allows board JSON exports on Free, while board CSV and Workspace exports require Premium. A board JSON contains the latest 1,000 actions, including comments; CSV omits comments and its normal menu route excludes archived cards. For all comments, the guide points to Workspace export. Workspace admins can select Include raw attachments to obtain files in a ZIP. Inbox cards must first be moved to a board. Trello does not provide a native JSON/CSV re-import that simply reconstructs the exported board, so neither route alone proves complete recovery. The cloud-storage guide helps separate a downloaded archive from continuing access to someone else's links.

Moving from Trello to Todoist: Keep the Source Until the Sample Works

Todoist's Trello Power-Up documentation explicitly says there is no official Trello-to-Todoist import tool. Its Add to Todoist button creates an Inbox task with the card's name and a link back. Due dates, labels and other card details are not carried over. That can be useful for turning a board item into a personal next action, but it is not a bulk migration or a documented two-way status sync.

For an actual move, inventory cards, lists, checklists, assignees, comments, files, Custom Fields and recurring rules before selecting a third-party importer or CSV transformation. Todoist requires its own CSV schema and supports up to 300 active tasks per project; a Trello export is not automatically in that format. Review a completed card, an archived card, a recurring item and an attachment as well as an ordinary open task. Re-create destination permissions before exposing imported client records.

If both tools remain in use, choose one authority for completion status and link back to it. Two independent copies can disagree about due dates or whether a client approved the work. A connector's advertised integration count says nothing about deletion behavior, failed updates or copied permissions. Keep the source accessible until the sample reconciles and the team knows where to update work. If you actually need deeper project structure rather than a lighter daily list, the Trello alternatives guide and ClickUp vs Notion comparison address that different decision.

A Seven-Day Evaluation for Solo Work or a Small Team

Start with a permission-safe sample rather than copying an entire client workspace into both products. On day one, create ten representative tasks: a quick personal reminder, a fixed deadline, a completion-relative routine, a shared deliverable, a checklist and a file-bearing task. Record which features require a paid trial. An attractive trial screen is not evidence the same workflow remains available after the account returns to Free.

Over the next few days, capture work from a phone, find the next action, complete a recurring item late and hand a deliverable to another person. Check the next occurrence rather than only the green completion indicator. Invite a synthetic client to the intended scope and inspect exactly what they can see. A solo operator should evaluate maintenance effort across all responsibilities; a team should also evaluate ownership and whether a colleague can locate the latest status without asking in chat.

At the end of the week, review billable members and guests, automation counters, missing reminders and a sample export. Remove test invitations and integrations that are no longer needed. Record unresolved plan entitlements rather than interpreting a missing control as a universal product limitation. The software evaluation checklist can hold these results. This is a proposed evaluation, not a claim that Softora performed it or that either product will save a fixed number of hours.

Final Choice: One Reliable Place for the Next Action

Pick Todoist when task capture, cross-project prioritization and clearly specified recurring routines are the central job, and its personal/team model fits the people involved. Start with Beginner if the limits suffice; use Pro for the paid planning features or Business for the required team controls. Pick Trello when a shared card moving through stages is the clearest representation of work, and price the actual Workspace, views and guest pattern. Its Inbox, Planner and native recurrence mean it should not be dismissed as a board with no personal-planning tools.

For five staff and two clients, the worked annual budgets range from $300 for Trello Standard with single-board guests to $840 for Premium with multi-board guests, with Todoist Business at $480 for five members plus guests. Those are different feature packages, not a universal cheapest winner. Choose the system that preserves your intended ownership, recurrence, privacy and exit path. A second application is justified only when the distinct workflow is worth maintaining—not because two incomplete copies of the same task look more organized.