Making the work
Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover project management. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
A board for the vague part of a project
A task list that survives being ignored for a week
Milanote | Todoist | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $9.99 | From $5 |
| Pricing model | Free plan, paid tiers | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | None | None |
| Runs on (they differ) | Web, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
A board for the vague part of a project
Milanote is a freeform board for notes, images, links and files, which is what planning looks like before it is a task list. Moodboards, story outlines and channel plans all sit better here than in a document. The free account has no time limit and stops at a hundred items, which is a real project rather than a demo. Anybody who wants deadlines, assignees and a burndown should buy a project tool instead, because this deliberately has none of that.
Our note
The hundred-item limit counts everything on every board, so it arrives faster than it reads and usually mid-project, which is the worst moment to be asked for a card. If you plan visually at all, budget for the paid tier from the start rather than treating the free one as a trial.
A task list that survives being ignored for a week
Todoist takes a typed sentence like "post the newsletter every Tuesday at 9" and turns it into a scheduled recurring task, which is the feature the whole product is built around. Five projects on the free account is enough for one person running one operation. Paying raises the limits, adds reminders and calendar layouts, and opens filters that make a large list usable. Teams get their own tier above that, and none of it tries to be a project management suite.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.
| Web, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Linux |
| Covers | Project Management | Project Management |
|---|
| Works with | Nothing in particular | Nothing in particular |
|---|
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
|---|
| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
|---|
| Live deals | None right now | None right now |
|---|
Our note
Treat the five-project free limit as the decision point rather than any feature, because a creator usually needs one project per channel and hits it in a month. At $5 the upgrade is not the question; whether you want a task list at all rather than a calendar is.