Notom vs Todoist
Todoist is the best dedicated to-do list in the world. It also has no idea why you added the task. Notom keeps the note and the to-do together so the why never gets lost.
In Todoist, you add "send Anna the Q4 deck by Friday" and it lands on your list. Two weeks later you find that task, half-completed, and have absolutely no memory of why you said you'd do it. Which Anna? Which deck? What was she actually expecting?
In Notom, the action you'd manually have typed into Todoist was generated from a note. The conversation, the meeting recap, the email summary that produced the commitment. The original context is one click away from the action. Two weeks later the why is still there, because Notom captured it.
Todoist assumes you've already done the hard part. Turned the messy reality into a tidy task with a project, a label, a date, a priority. Adding a task is fast if you know what the task is. The decomposition is on you.
Notom inverts that: you write the messy sentence, the way you'd jot it down for yourself, "caught up with Anna at coffee. She's sending the Q4 deck before Friday, then we both need to read it before the board meeting on the 18th, plus book the venue for the offsite, end of the month", and the actions fall out automatically. Three actions, three resolved due dates, one source note linking them together.
Todoist's Projects, Sections, Sub-projects, Sub-tasks, Labels and Filters are powerful, and they reward people who'll spend an afternoon designing the right hierarchy. They also become an under-maintained mess once life gets busy. Half the tasks live in Inbox forever because deciding which project they belong to is its own little tax.
Notom has no project hierarchy. The Actions tab has six views. Overdue, Today, Week, Open, All, Completed, and groups your open actions by when they're actually due. There's nothing to design, nothing to misplace, no Inbox-zero ritual.
Todoist's home screen is your entire today list. You see twenty things, and your nervous system does the thing where you scroll up and down without picking any of them.
Notom has a dedicated One view. Just the most-imminent open action, big, with a Done button and a link to the rest. The friction to act on the next thing is one tap. The list is still there if you want it; the One view is for when you want to stop reviewing and start doing.
| Notom | Todoist | |
|---|---|---|
| Notes as source-of-truth | Yes. Every action linked back | No. Comments only |
| To-dos from prose | Pulled out automatically | You type each one |
| Natural-language dates | "by Monday", "eod" | Yes, also strong |
| Projects / labels / filters | None. Six time-based views | Deep |
| Sub-tasks | No | Yes, multi-level |
| Focus view | One. Single next thing | Today list |
| Karma / gamification | None | Yes |
| Shared lists / team | On the roadmap | First-class |
Reactions
“Todoist was where I added tasks and forgot why. Notom keeps the original conversation attached. Game over for the dedicated to-do app, for me anyway.”
“Less satisfying than Todoist's check-off animation. More useful in every other way.”
FAQ
You probably wouldn't, if Todoist is working for you. Notom solves a different problem: it captures the messy original sentence, then surfaces the to-do from inside it. Todoist asks you to already have decomposed the sentence into a tidy task before you arrive.
Yes, and many people will. Capture in Notom, extract the actions, then port the ones with hard external deadlines to Todoist if that's where your shared family / team list lives. The two are complementary: Notom is your personal memory, Todoist is the to-do interchange format.
No projects, no sub-tasks, no labels in the Todoist sense. Notom has six filtered views (Overdue, Today, Week, Open, All, Completed) and groups your actions automatically by when they're due. The structure shows up after you capture; you don't build it first.
Notom doesn't gamify your to-dos. Karma points, streaks and productivity scores work for some people; for others they create an anxious relationship with their own commitments. Notom shows you what's due, what's overdue, and what's done. That's the whole reporting layer.
No. AI inference runs only when you save a note, only against our AI provider. Your notes are not sold, mined, or used to train models. Each AI-extracted action stays linked to the note it came from so you can always see why it appeared.
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