Todoist Review 2026: Free vs Pro, Business & Limits

Beginner is the ongoing free plan. The usage-limits guide allows five active personal projects, three filters, and one week of activity history. Pro permits 300 active personal projects, 150 filters, and full activity history. The one-week Free history limit is not evidence that all completed tasks are deleted after seven days. Buyers comparing a board-oriented approach in Trello should first decide how many distinct active projects their own work needs, rather than treating every saved task as another project.

Every plan permits 300 active tasks per project, including subtasks and recurring tasks, with 20 sections per project. Paying does not remove that ceiling. An individual account can participate in 500 active projects across personal and team work combined; Business does not grant an additive 300 personal plus 500 team projects to each person. Our Trello alternatives guide can help frame a different structure if one enormous backlog is essential. Splitting work into useful projects may fit Todoist, but splitting solely to conceal an unsuitable capacity requirement creates administrative work.

A scheduled date says when you intend to work; a deadline is a paid feature representing a fixed completion cutoff. Keeping those concepts separate can make a task actionable before its final due date. Repetition uses recurring dates, not recurring deadlines. A buyer should therefore model both a recurring administrative task and a one-off deliverable rather than assuming the same field handles every scheduling rule. The distinction matters more than simply checking whether a product has a calendar.

Task duration is another paid capability. It requires a date and time, supports a maximum of 24 hours, and describes planned time rather than recorded work. A two-hour block is not evidence that two billable hours were performed. When comparing ClickUp for broader project requirements, distinguish scheduling, estimates, actual time records, and reporting as separate needs. Todoist can be a candidate for intentional daily planning without this review claiming that its duration field supplies a timesheet, payroll record, or verified productivity measurement.

The Ramble guide gives Beginner ten monthly sessions shared with Task Capture Assist across devices. The allowance resets on the first day of the month UTC, and a capture that produces no task does not count. Pro and Business provide unlimited sessions subject to fair-use and rate limits. Older descriptions that Free has no AI are therefore misleading, but unlimited paid sessions should not be rewritten as an unconditional absence of operational limits or a guarantee of continuous availability.

Ramble is experimental, internet-dependent voice-to-task capture, not a general conversational assistant. It presents a task preview for confirmation. Dictating a deadline or duration does not grant Free users the corresponding paid functionality. Before relying on it, review a representative phrase for task wording, dates, and intended structure using our SaaS evaluation framework. No speech accuracy, language coverage, or time-saving outcome was measured here. Treat the confirmation step as part of the workflow, and use ordinary task entry whenever voice capture is inappropriate for the environment or information involved.

A free team allows five active team projects, but the more consequential boundary can be authority. The roles and access guide says invited internal users are admins on free teams; the restricted Member role requires Business. A free team workspace is therefore not automatically the right place for a business that needs ordinary colleagues without administrative control. Before inviting the whole organization, identify who should administer the workspace and which projects each contractor or guest should be able to see.

Guests are free and project-scoped, but they do not inherit Business's paid features. Personal projects also remain separate from team-owned work. Business supports up to 500 active team projects, 250 people per project, and 1,000 people including guests, subject to the individual account's combined project ceiling. A team also evaluating Linear should compare ownership and access using actual roles, not assume all collaborators are equivalent seats. A useful evaluation includes an administrator, an ordinary member, and a guest with a deliberately limited project scope.

The pricing page and billing FAQ list Pro at $7 monthly or $60 annually, a $5 monthly equivalent. Business costs $10 per member monthly or $96 per member annually, equivalent to $8 per month. Beginner remains a separate ongoing free option. The FAQ lists seven days for the Pro trial and 14 for Business. These prices should not be replaced by older $4 and $6 annual-equivalent figures found in historical comparisons.

For a hypothetical team with ten paid Business members and two free guests, the software charge is $960 annually or $100 each month on monthly billing, before tax. Do not add ten separate Pro subscriptions: paid members receive personal Pro features through Business. However, different paid teams have separate subscriptions, so overlapping membership can multiply charges. The inventory approach in our SaaS spending guide should count actual team memberships, not just unique employees. Confirm that guests can perform their required work without assuming they inherit the paid member's capabilities.

The backup documentation describes up to 21 snapshots, created on active days when account changes occur. That is not a promise of 21 consecutive calendar days of backups. Included data covers active projects and tasks, dates, durations, deadlines, up to 500 comments per task, and attachment links. Completed tasks and archived projects are excluded. Someone buying full activity history must not assume that the backup consequently contains every finished task or an independent copy of every file.

Those exclusions are especially important when completion records are evidence rather than disposable checklist items. A team considering Jira for a more formal work-tracking process should identify its retention and reconstruction needs before selecting either product. Do not infer deletion from an export omission: a completed task can be absent from a backup without that statement describing its availability inside the service. Conversely, an accessible attachment link is not proof that the file remains accessible after its source is removed. Archive important documents independently under appropriate access controls.

The project export guide explains that CSV exports also omit completed tasks and lose recurring-date start dates. The Google Sheets alternative can include completed tasks, but omits labels, deadlines, comments, attachments, and reminders. Neither route establishes a complete, lossless archive. Compare an exported representative project against the information the destination needs. Our Linear versus Jira comparison similarly treats migration as a question about specific fields, relationships, and files rather than a generic export checkbox.

There is also an unresolved official upload discrepancy: pricing lists Pro at 100MB, while the billing FAQ says 25MB. The usage guide separately gives 25MB for email attachments, which is not necessarily the same upload pathway. Confirm the actual workflow instead of declaring one universal attachment cap. Buyers exploring ClickUp alternatives should carry that requirement into each evaluation. Reconstructing one project with recurring dates, comments, finished tasks, and linked files is a more informative acceptance check than merely confirming that a ZIP or spreadsheet downloads successfully.

Todoist deserves consideration when the central job is keeping next actions organized and making daily work explicit. Beginner can remain the sensible choice if five personal projects, three filters, and its history window are sufficient. Pro has a clear rationale when more projects, full activity history, deadlines, or durations are required. Business addresses team ownership, member roles, and larger shared-project capacity. That is a needs-based progression, not an assertion that everyone becomes more productive by paying or enabling voice capture.

The strongest reasons to pause are equally specific: a single project needing more than 300 active tasks, a free team that cannot tolerate broad administrator access, or an exit requirement that demands complete completed-task and file archives. Guest expectations also need clarification because free guests do not inherit Business features. Evaluate one representative, authorized project before an annual commitment, and keep the upload conflict on the acceptance checklist. If those boundaries fit, Todoist is a credible task-management candidate; if they do not, another project system is the more appropriate purchase.