Project and task management decision
Todoist
A competent developer can reproduce a useful single‑team Todoist subset (tasks, projects, recurrence, sync) in ~30 hours and run it cheaply; however, Todoist’s scale, platform polish, and SOC2-level enterprise guarantees are durable advantages that a lone developer cannot match, so keeping paid Todoist makes sense for teams that need those assurances.
Visit website↗$7/mo
$84/yr
Not verified against a pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$30/mo8 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 5 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Todoist alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Create, organize, schedule, and complete tasks (projects, labels/filters, recurring due dates), plus sync and optional team sharing.
What it still won’t have
- Mobile-first polished native apps and multi-platform client optimizations
- Large-scale sync reliability and latency engineering for millions of users
- Enterprise SOC2 compliance and related security controls
- Deep integrations and the breadth of third-party integrations
- Advanced AI Assist features and product polish from a decade+ of iteration
What remains hard
- Infrastructure at scale
Join 50+ million professionals who simplify work and life with the world’s #1 to-do list app.
- Compliance and regulation
Enterprise-grade security with SOC2 Type II certification.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 5 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal Todoist-style task manager using React for the frontend, Node.js + Express for the API, Postgres for storage, Redis for job/lock coordination, and Docker for deployment. In scope: user signup/login, task CRUD (title, notes, due date/time, recurrence rules), projects and labels, list and board UI, a REST sync endpoint, background worker for reminders and recurrence expansion, basic sharing of a project with another user, unit and integration tests, and error handling and input validation. Out of scope: native mobile apps, enterprise SOC2 audits, full 3rd-party integrations, and large-scale multi-region sync optimizations. Deliver Docker Compose and a short README with deploy steps and environment variables.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-6
- Evidence score58
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productTodoist product page
- official pricingTodoist pricing
- official productFeature requests template
- open sourceAppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy
- open sourcemakeplane/plane
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
