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Todoist vs Notion is the wrong question roughly half the time, and the fastest way to waste money in 2026. Both apps can hold a checkbox. They are not built on the same idea: Todoist is a task list with deadlines, Notion is a database you can shape into anything — including a task list. You pick by what your work actually has more of: dates or context.
We have used both for client work, content calendars and personal admin. This comparison is about plans and money, because that is where the two products pull apart.
Quick verdict (TL;DR)
- ✅ Best for tasks with deadlines: Todoist Pro — $5/month billed yearly ($60/year), 300 personal projects, calendar layout, deadlines, custom reminders.
- ✅ Best for notes, docs and databases: Notion — $0 on the Free plan for one person, and the honest plan to buy is Business at $20/member/month if you want the AI features.
- 💸 Cheapest setup that actually works for one person: Todoist Pro + Notion Free = $60/year. Not $240/year on Notion Business.
- 🚫 Skip: Notion Plus for a solo user. You pay $10/member/month and still only get a trial of Notion AI. The tier that unlocks the real thing is Business. If you live in Notion alone, jump straight there — otherwise stay Free.
- 🚫 Skip: Todoist Business unless you run a team. $8/user/month for shared workspaces and admin controls buys you nothing as a solo user.
Todoist links in this page are plain, because we are not in its affiliate program — the only commercial link here is Notion’s, and it does not change the ranking. Check Notion’s current plans here.
How we picked
Three criteria, no feature-list theatre:
- What the plan unlocks at the moment you start paying. Not what the marketing page lists at the top.
- The renewal price, not the intro price. Both vendors bill per seat and re-count your seats at every renewal.
- What breaks first. For Todoist it is the 5-project cap on the free plan. For Notion it is the block limit the moment a second person joins your workspace.
Prices below are list rates read from the vendor pricing pages in September 2026. Verify before you subscribe — both companies changed packaging in the last year.
The real difference: deadlines versus context
Most “Todoist vs Notion” articles compare feature tables. The useful distinction is simpler.
Todoist is opinionated. A task has a date, a priority, a project and a label. Quick Add parses “report Friday 4pm #client” into a real task with a real date. Recurring tasks, reminders, filters and the calendar layout all exist to answer one question: what is due next? It refuses to be a document tool, and that refusal is the product.
Notion is unopinionated. It gives you pages, blocks, databases and relations, then asks you to assemble your own system. That is why the same app can hold a CRM, a content pipeline and a to-do list — and also why so many first attempts collapse into a half-built dashboard nobody opens twice.
Practical consequence: Todoist stays fast with 2,000 open tasks. Notion stays useful when the information about the task matters more than the task itself — research notes, briefs, client history, a published documentation wiki.
If you have ever kept a to-do list inside a document, you already know which side of that line you are on.
Todoist in 2026: what $5 actually buys
Todoist’s plan structure after the late-2025 pricing update:
- Beginner (free): 5 personal projects, 3 filter views, 1 week of activity history, 5 MB file uploads, list and board layouts, reminders, and a limited number of Ramble sessions (Ramble is the feature that turns dictated or messy text into structured tasks). No calendar layout, no custom reminders, no deadlines.
- Pro — $7/month, or $5/month billed yearly ($60/year): 300 personal projects, 150 filter views, calendar layout, deadlines, task duration, custom reminders, Task Assist, unlimited Ramble, full reporting history, 100 MB uploads.
- Business — $10/user/month, or $8/user/month billed yearly ($96/user/year): everything in Pro for every member, a shared team workspace, up to 500 team projects, granular activity logs, shared templates, roles and permissions, 1,000 team members and guests, centralized billing, SOC 2 Type II certification, 8 themes.
Five free projects is the number to test against your own life. One project per area — work, home, side project, reading, admin — and you are already at the cap. The Pro jump is cheap enough ($60 a year, the price of about three coffees a month) that most people who hit the cap should just pay it rather than build workarounds. Note the one real trap: nobody bills monthly on the annual rate, so if you want to try Pro properly, use the 7-day trial instead of subscribing monthly at $7.
Teams get better value than individuals on Business — a 5-person team pays $480/year for shared projects and admin control — but only if you are genuinely assigning work to other people. For everything else, Pro is the ceiling you need.
Notion in 2026: the $20 tier is the only one with AI
Notion restructured its AI offering in May 2025, and the 2026 packaging is the important part of this comparison:
- Free — $0/member/month: unlimited pages and blocks for individuals (limited once 2+ members join the workspace), 5 MB file uploads, 7-day page history, 10 guests, 1 chart, basic forms and published sites, Notion Calendar. Notion AI is a trial only.
- Plus — $10/member/month billed yearly ($12 monthly): unlimited file uploads and collaborative blocks, unlimited charts, custom forms and sites, 30-day page history, unlimited guests, database automations. Notion AI is still a trial.
- Business — $20/member/month billed yearly ($24 monthly): the full AI workspace — Notion Agent, AI Meeting Notes, Enterprise Search, Research mode — plus SAML SSO, granular database permissions, private teamspaces, 90-day page history.
- Enterprise: custom pricing, zero data retention with LLM providers, audit log, SCIM provisioning.
Two costs sit outside the plan price. Custom Agents — the autonomous agents Notion expanded in February 2026 — are free to try and then $10 per 1,000 Notion credits, so an assistant-heavy workflow can cost more than the seat. And a custom domain for a published Notion site is $8/month per domain billed yearly, $10 monthly. Both are optional, both are easy to forget when you compare $20 to $5.
The structural complaint about Notion Plus is fair: you pay double the Free plan and get no ongoing AI, because the standalone $10 AI add-on was retired for new customers. The tier that changes what the app is is Business. Teams that previously bought Plus + AI at $18–20/member now simply need Business at $20.
What it costs over three years
One person, annual billing, list rates:
- Todoist Beginner: $0 — 5 projects, 3 filters, 1 week of history.
- Todoist Pro: $180 ($60/year) — 300 projects, calendar layout, deadlines, Task Assist.
- Notion Free: $0 — unlimited blocks for one person, 7-day history, 5 MB uploads.
- Notion Plus: $360 ($120/year) — still no ongoing AI, 30-day history.
- Notion Business: $720 ($240/year) — Notion Agent, AI Meeting Notes, SAML SSO.
That spread is the entire argument. Four times the price of Todoist Pro buys you an AI workspace and a docs platform — not a better to-do list. If your problem is “I forget what is due”, the extra $540 over three years is not solving it. If your problem is “my team cannot find the brief from six weeks ago”, $720 is cheap.
The default we recommend for solo users: Todoist Pro for the list, Notion Free for the docs. $60/year total, and you keep both tools where they are strongest. It is not a compromise — it is the version of this stack that people actually keep using.
Comparison table
| Todoist Pro | Notion Plus | Notion Business | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price (annual billing) | $5/month ($60/yr) | $10/member/month ($120/yr) | $20/member/month ($240/yr) |
| Built for | Tasks with due dates | Docs, wikis, databases | Teams + full AI workspace |
| Free plan | 5 projects, 3 filters, 1-week history | unlimited blocks (1 person), 7-day history | — |
| AI | Task Assist, Ramble (unlimited) | Trial only | Notion Agent, AI Meeting Notes |
| History / recovery | full reporting history | 30-day page history | 90-day page history |
| Best for | freelancers, operators, anyone with deadlines | solo knowledge base | teams and AI-heavy workflows |
What to skip
- Notion Plus if you are alone. It is the awkward middle: no AI, and the Free plan already covers unlimited blocks for one person. If the block limit or the 5 MB uploads ever bite you, that is the signal to move — and Business is usually the destination that justifies the move.
- Notion Business for one person who just wants a to-do list. You would pay $240/year for an agent you will not use. Start on Todoist Pro.
- Todoist Business below 3 people. Shared team projects, activity logs and centralized billing only pay off when several people are actually assigned work.
- Paying for both plans on both apps at once. The most common version of this mistake is Todoist Pro plus Notion Plus “just in case” — $180/year for a second knowledge base you open twice a month.
How to choose
- Your work is a sequence of deadlines. Todoist Pro. The cheap annual plan is the whole cost.
- Your work is a body of information you must search. Notion Free first; Business when you need AI across the workspace or SSO.
- You are one person doing both. Todoist Pro $60/year + Notion Free. Revisit only when Notion’s block limit or upload cap interrupts real work.
- You run a team of 5+ on tasks and projects. Todoist Business ($96/user/year) if the work is task-shaped; Notion Business ($240/member/year) if the team mostly needs shared pages and meeting notes.
- Your list is really a content calendar. Neither app publishes anything — that is a different job. If you build posts in Notion and want them scheduled straight to your social channels, tools like Blotato exist exactly for that gap between the plan and the publish button.
FAQ
Is Todoist better than Notion?
For tasks with deadlines, yes — it is faster, cheaper and its free plan is enough for one person’s personal projects. For notes, documents and shared knowledge, Notion wins easily. Comparing them as if one replaces the other is what leads people to overpay.
Can I use Todoist and Notion together?
Yes, and it is the setup we recommend: Notion for documents and reference material, Todoist for anything with a due date. Expect some duplication — a task that needs three paragraphs of context will live in Notion with a Todoist entry pointing at it.
Which is cheaper in 2026?
Todoist Pro at $60/year is the cheapest paid plan that removes a real limit. Notion is free for one person and $120/year for Plus, but the plan with full AI is Business at $240/year per member.
Does Notion have a real free plan?
Yes for individuals: unlimited pages and blocks, 5 MB uploads, 7-day page history. It stops feeling free when a second person joins the workspace and the block limits kick in, or when you want ongoing Notion AI rather than a trial.
Does Todoist have built-in AI?
It does, and unlike Notion’s it is not locked behind a premium tier: Ramble sessions and Task Assist are usable on individual plans, with Ramble unlimited from Pro. That is a meaningful difference for anyone joining in 2026 expecting AI everywhere.
Verdict
Todoist Pro wins this comparison for most people, and Notion Business wins it for teams that live in documents. At $60/year, Todoist gives you the one thing a to-do app must do — hold deadlines without friction — for a quarter of what Notion’s AI tier costs. Notion remains the better product the moment your work is made of context rather than dates, and the honest entry point is Free, not Plus.
Buy one, not two: Todoist Pro $60/year plus Notion Free is the stack that most solo users should run in 2026. Upgrade to Notion Business only when AI across your workspace, not the plan badge, is what you are actually missing. Compare Notion’s plans and start with the free tier.
List prices read from the Todoist and Notion pricing pages in September 2026. Annual rates shown; monthly billing costs more on both products. See our notes on Notion vs Obsidian and the best note-taking apps if your decision is really about notes, or the best project management picks for freelancers for the client-work side.