Best Things 3 Alternatives in 2026 (Free and Paid)

What is the quick answer?

best Things 3 alternatives is a key topic in modern project management and teamwork. If you love Things 3’s speed but need to share work, Todoist is the most natural switch. If you want the most features per dollar, TickTick wins. If you need a team workspace rather than a shared list, none of the personal task managers will do and you should look at a project management tool. The honest answer depends on whether your problem is *features* or *other people*.

Why do people leave Things 3?

Four reasons come up repeatedly, and only one is about capability.

Apple exclusivity. Things 3 runs on Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch and Vision Pro. There is no web app and no Android or Windows client. In a team where one person uses a Windows laptop, the plan fragments immediately.

No collaboration. There are no shared projects, no assignment, no comments and no guest access. You can share a task by pasting text into a message, which is not a workflow. A 2026 team of six people sharing a plan will rebuild that plan in a spreadsheet within a month.

Per-platform purchase. Things is sold separately for Mac, iPad and iPhone. That is fair pricing for a one-time app, and it also means every new team member, every replacement laptop and every device upgrade is a fresh purchase decision.

The ceiling. Things 3 has no dependencies, no workload view, no time tracking and no reporting. For a solo operator that is discipline. For a five-person studio billing client hours, it is a gap that another tool has to fill.

What does Things 3 actually cost in 2026?

Things 3 is a one-time purchase per platform: the iPhone and Watch app is $9.99, the Mac app is a separate purchase in the region of $50, and the iPad app around $20. A single person covering Mac, iPad and iPhone pays roughly $80 once, with no renewal.

Worked example, six-person studio: 6 × $80 = $480 one-time. Spread over three years that is $160 a year, or about $2.22 per person per month — cheaper than every subscription in this article. If the studio never needs to share a list, that is the correct answer and this article is unnecessary.

Now the honest counter-calculation. The same studio needs one shared project board, and Things cannot provide it. Someone maintains a parallel spreadsheet and asks for updates in a weekly message. At two hours a week of coordination across the team and a $50 loaded rate, that workaround costs $5,200 a year. The subscription you were avoiding is $300 to $600. The real cost of Things 3 here is not the licence; it is the manual coordination it forces.

Which alternatives are worth switching to?

The table compares list prices checked against vendor pages in November 2026, annual billing, USD, excluding tax.

Two patterns matter. First, the personal task managers cluster between $50 and $100 per person per year, which is cheap enough that the decision should be made on workflow rather than price. Second, only Todoist Business, Any.do Teams and dedicated project tools actually solve collaboration; the rest solve features.

Is Todoist the closest replacement?

Yes, for feel. Todoist’s quick-add parses “pay invoice tomorrow 4pm #finance p1” into a dated, labelled, prioritised task faster than any competitor, and the keyboard workflow will feel familiar to a Things user within an hour. It also runs everywhere, which is the point.

Pricing: the free plan covers 5 personal projects, 3 filter views and one week of activity history. Pro is $5 per month billed yearly ($60 a year) with 300 projects, calendar and table layouts, durations and full history. Business is $8 per user per month ($96 a year) and adds a shared team workspace with up to 500 team projects, roles and centralised billing.

Worked example: a six-person team on Todoist Business pays 6 × $96 = $576 a year, or $0.96 per person per week. If that team completes 12,000 tasks a year, the cost is about 4.8 cents per task. That is the right way to frame a subscription this small: not “can we afford it” but “does it remove one coordination hour a month”, which at a $50 rate is $600 a year.

The trade-off: Todoist is a task manager with light team features, not a project management system. There are no dependencies, no Gantt view and no workload planning. Teams that need those will hit the ceiling within two quarters.

Is TickTick the best value option?

TickTick packs more into $49.99 a year than anything else in this list: lists and Kanban views, calendar and timeline views, pomodoro timer, habits, Eisenhower matrix, notes, durations, reminders and statistics, across every major platform. The free tier is usable, with 9 lists, 99 tasks per list and 25 reminders — enough to test the workflow for a month.

Worked example: six people on Premium cost 6 × $49.99 = $299.94 a year, roughly half the Todoist Business bill and $260 less than Any.do Teams. Per feature, nothing here is close.

The trade-offs are structural rather than cosmetic. Team collaboration is thin: shared lists and assigned tasks exist, but there is no real workspace, no roles model and no admin console worth the name. The interface also carries more surface than Things 3, which is the price of the feature density — a Things user will notice the extra taps. And the habit and pomodoro features are either useful to you or clutter, with little middle ground.

Where does Any.do fit?

Any.do occupies the middle: a clean personal task manager that scales into light team boards. Premium is $4.99 per month billed annually and adds recurring tasks, WhatsApp reminders, AI features, colour tags and location reminders. Teams is $4.99 per member per month billed annually and adds a collaborative workspace, unlimited project boards, unlimited members, workflow templates and admin tools.

Worked example: a six-person client-services team on Any.do Teams pays 6 × $4.99 × 12 = $359.28 a year. That buys shared boards with permissions, which is genuinely more than TickTick offers at a similar price per head.

The compromise is depth. Any.do’s boards are simple, reporting is minimal, and there is no dependency planning or workload view. It suits a team that needs shared visibility more than it needs portfolio analytics, and it is one of the few options here with a native WhatsApp reminder channel, which matters in markets where WhatsApp is the default work channel.

Are the free options good enough?

For simple personal use, yes. Apple Reminders is free, syncs through iCloud, supports tags, locations and shared lists, and it is already on your devices. Microsoft To Do is free, cross-platform, supports shared lists and assignment, and integrates with Outlook tasks.

Each has a hard ceiling that shows up around month two of any real team. Reminders is Apple-only, with no web app worth using and no reporting. Microsoft To Do has no dependencies, no boards, no time tracking and limited search. Both are excellent at “don’t forget the milk” and poor at “who is doing the client handover on Thursday”.

The pragmatic path for a small team: stay on the free tool you already have until a specific failure occurs — a missed handover, a client asking for status, a task lost between two people. Then pay for the tool that removes exactly that failure. Buying first is how teams end up with three task apps and no plan.

How do you migrate out of Things 3 without losing your system?

Things 3 does not offer a first-party export, which is the migration’s main constraint. You will rebuild rather than transfer, and the quality of the rebuild decides whether the switch sticks.

Four steps that work. First, export what you can: Things supports printing and copy-paste, and community scripts can pull task lists via its URL scheme and Shortcuts. Accept that areas and headings will not map cleanly. Second, audit before migrating — most people carry 40% dead projects. Bring across active projects only, which typically halves the rebuild. Third, rebuild structure in the new tool before moving tasks: projects, labels, saved filters and your “today” view. A task list without a structure becomes an inbox with anxiety.

Worked example: 300 open tasks and 22 projects. Audited down to 180 tasks and 11 active projects. Rebuilding structure takes about four hours, bulk import and cleanup another three, and a week of dual-running to trust the new tool. At a $50 hourly rate that is roughly $400 of time — comparable to three years of a Todoist Pro subscription.

Fourth, keep one rule from Things: a daily review of the Today list, done before opening anything else. The tool changed; the habit is the asset.

Which option fits which workflow?

The trap in this table is the last two rows colliding. Teams often buy a project management tool to solve a personal capture problem, or a to-do app to solve a coordination problem. Diagnose which one you have before you shop.

What are the trade-offs nobody mentions?

One-time pricing looks cheaper until you count device changes. A $80 stack bought once is excellent value over five years; bought again after a laptop refresh in year two, it is a subscription with irregular billing and no upgrade path.

Subscriptions look expensive until you count the coordination they remove. The $576 Todoist Business bill for six people is roughly eleven hours of a $50 hourly rate. If shared tasks save one hour a month across the team, the subscription is free in real terms.

Feature density looks like value until adoption stalls. TickTick’s capability is real, and it also asks more of the user than Things 3 does. The app that gets opened at 8am beats the app with the better feature list — that is not a slogan, it is the most consistent finding in every tool migration I have watched.

Finally, ecosystem lock-in works both ways. Things 3 locks you to Apple hardware. Todoist and TickTick lock you to a subscription. Free tools lock you to a platform vendor’s roadmap, which is the least visible of the three until the vendor changes direction.

How does Doitify fit into this comparison?

Doitify is our product, so read this as disclosure. It is not a personal to-do app, and it is not trying to out-design Things 3. It is a workspace for projects, tasks, sub-tasks, checklists, owners and due dates, with Kanban boards, Gantt charts, roadmaps, calendars, workload views and work reports in one place, plus automations and project documents. Doitify Copilot turns a stated goal into tasks and a plan.

The honest framing: if your problem is that Things 3 has no shared projects, moving from a personal task manager to another personal task manager will not fix it. That is a category error, and it is the most common mistake in this migration. Choose Doitify if you need team visibility, workload and reporting. Stay on Things 3 or Todoist Pro if you need a fast personal list and nothing more; that is a legitimate answer, and the cost difference over three years is trivial.

Conclusion

The best Things 3 alternative is not the one with the longest feature list. It is the one that fixes the specific thing Things 3 cannot do for you. Solo and Apple-only? Stay where you are; roughly $80 once is unbeatable. Need speed on every device? Todoist Pro at $60 a year. Want maximum features for minimum money? TickTick at $49.99. Need a shared workspace for a small team? Any.do Teams or Todoist Business.

And if the real problem is that six people cannot see the same plan, stop shopping for to-do apps. That is a project management problem, and no amount of better design in a personal task manager will solve it.

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