Written by Shahzaib Ali
Things 3 vs TickTick
I have a problem that I suspect a lot of productivity-obsessed people share: I spend more time picking the perfect task manager than actually completing tasks.
I’ve tried most of the major ones over the years. Todoist for a long stretch, OmniFocus until the complexity made me feel like I needed a manual just to add a grocery item, Notion-based task systems that looked beautiful and fell apart within three weeks because they were too slow to capture a quick thought.
About six months ago I finally narrowed it down to two finalists: Things 3 and TickTick. They kept coming up in every comparison thread I read, recommended by people who seemed to actually use their task managers rather than just configure them endlessly. So I committed to something uncomfortable — I’d use each one as my sole task manager for two months, no switching, no hedging, and write down what I actually thought.
Here’s what happened.
What These Two Apps Are Actually Trying to Be
Before diving into specifics, it’s worth understanding that Things 3 and TickTick are built on genuinely different philosophies. This isn’t like comparing two apps that do the same thing with slightly different interfaces. They represent two distinct ideas about how people should manage their work.
Things 3, made by Cultured Code, is a premium Apple-ecosystem task manager built on the Getting Things Done philosophy. It’s opinionated, deliberately minimal, and beautiful in a way that most productivity apps aren’t. It costs a flat fee — $49.99 for Mac, $9.99 for iPhone, $19.99 for iPad — with no subscription and no upsell.
TickTick is a cross-platform task manager that tries to be everything: task lists, habit tracker, Pomodoro timer, calendar view, collaborative tool, and more. It’s available on every major platform and has a free tier, with a premium subscription at around $27.99 per year.
Same category, totally different personalities.
Two Months With Things 3
I started with Things 3, partly because it’s the one I’d been curious about longest and partly because I was coming off a period of app overload and wanted something calmer.
The first week was one of the nicest onboarding experiences I’ve had with any productivity software. Things 3 doesn’t overwhelm you with features. You have Areas (big life categories like Work, Personal, Health), Projects (specific goals with a defined endpoint), and Tasks. That hierarchy makes intuitive sense, and I found myself setting it up correctly almost by instinct.
The Today view became my home base almost immediately. Every morning I’d open Things 3, see what was scheduled for the day, and drag in anything from my inbox that needed to happen today. That simple ritual — which takes maybe five minutes — replaced the vague anxiety I usually carry about whether I’m working on the right things.
The “Upcoming” view is quietly one of the best features in any task manager I’ve used. It shows you a week-ahead timeline of what’s coming, sorted by date, without cluttering your Today view with things that aren’t relevant yet. It sounds simple because it is. But the implementation is so clean that I found myself actually checking it instead of ignoring it, which is more than I can say for most apps’ future-planning features.
Natural language input was genuinely impressive. Typing “call dentist tomorrow at 9am” creates a task, schedules it for tomorrow, and sets a 9am reminder — all from one line of text. That speed of capture matters, because the best task manager is the one you actually add things to.
What surprised me about Things 3: I expected to miss features after coming from more complex apps. I didn’t, for the first six weeks. The constraints felt like design rather than limitation. I got more done, I think, partly because the app never gave me the option to reorganise my entire system instead of doing actual work.
Where I hit friction: Week seven. A project at work got complicated, and I needed to share a task list with a colleague. Things 3 has no collaboration features whatsoever. Zero. I ended up maintaining a parallel list in a shared document, which defeated the point. I also wanted a recurring habit tracker — daily writing, exercise logging — and Things 3’s repeating tasks work fine for reminders but don’t track streaks or completion history the way a dedicated habit tool would. I found myself opening a second app anyway.
The other limitation is the platform lock-in. Things 3 is Apple only — Mac, iPhone, iPad. If you ever need to check your tasks on a Windows machine, a Chromebook, or Android, you’re locked out. For most people reading this, that might be fine. For me, I occasionally use a work Windows laptop and it was a genuine problem.
Two Months With TickTick
Switching to TickTick after Things 3 felt like going from a carefully curated independent bookshop to a large department store. More of everything, everywhere, all at once.
The first thing I noticed: TickTick is available on literally everything. Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android, web browser, browser extension. That cross-platform consistency is a real advantage if your life involves multiple devices or operating systems, and it solved my Windows laptop problem instantly.
The feature set is genuinely impressive. TickTick Premium gives you calendar view (so you can see tasks alongside your actual calendar events), a built-in Pomodoro timer, habit tracking with streak counts, kanban board view, collaboration and task sharing, and smart date parsing. It’s a lot, and some of it is very good.
The habit tracker is where TickTick meaningfully beats Things 3 for my lifestyle. I track six daily habits — writing, exercise, reading, language practice, no alcohol, and a couple of others — and TickTick’s habit feature logs these with streak counts and a calendar completion view. Watching the green dots accumulate works on me psychologically in a way that probably shouldn’t, but does. Things 3 couldn’t replace this without a separate app.
The calendar integration view — where you can toggle on your Google Calendar or Apple Calendar alongside your tasks in the same view — is something I didn’t know I needed until I had it. Being able to see “I have three meetings before lunch and also had five tasks due by noon” in one place catches scheduling conflicts that I used to discover the hard way.
What surprised me about TickTick: The Pomodoro timer. I’ve tried standalone Pomodoro apps and never stuck with them because of the context-switching between apps. Having it built directly into the task I’m working on is a different experience. I started actually using Pomodoro technique for the first time in years, because the friction of starting a timer dropped to essentially zero.
Where I hit friction: The interface is busier than Things 3 in a way that I never fully got used to. There are more menus, more options nested inside options, more ways to configure things. For some people that’s a feature. For me, it occasionally triggered the thing I was trying to avoid — spending time managing the system instead of using it.
The natural language input is also weaker. “Call dentist tomorrow at 9am” sometimes parses correctly and sometimes just creates a task called “Call dentist tomorrow at 9am” with no date. The inconsistency is annoying in a way that’s hard to explain — you stop trusting quick capture and start double-checking everything, which slows you down.
And the design, while functional, doesn’t give me the same sense of calm that Things 3 does. I know this is subjective. But I opened Things 3 in the morning and felt organised. I open TickTick and feel like I’m looking at a control panel.
Direct Comparison: The Things That Actually Matter
Capture speed: Things 3 wins. The natural language parsing is faster and more reliable, and the app opens instantly on Mac with a keyboard shortcut even when it’s not the active window.
Collaboration: TickTick wins outright. Things 3 has nothing here.
Habit tracking: TickTick, not close. Things 3 doesn’t track habits in any meaningful sense.
Cross-platform access: TickTick, definitively. If you’re not exclusively Apple, Things 3 doesn’t work.
Design and focus: Things 3, for most people. The calmer interface produces fewer decisions and, at least for me, better follow-through.
Calendar integration: TickTick wins. Seeing tasks and calendar events in one view is genuinely useful.
Price: Things 3 is a one-time purchase. TickTick Premium is a subscription. Over two or three years, Things 3 is almost certainly cheaper if you’re on Apple. Over one year, TickTick Premium (~$28) is significantly cheaper than the full Things 3 suite (~$80 for Mac + iPhone + iPad).
Recurring tasks: Close, but TickTick is more flexible with complex recurring patterns. Things 3 handles most common repeating tasks fine but gets limited with things like “first Monday of every month.”
The Mistakes I Made That You Can Avoid
I tried to migrate my entire existing task system into each app perfectly before I started using it. That took days the first time and was completely unnecessary. The better approach: start fresh with just your current active tasks and add historical stuff only if it comes up. You won’t miss 90% of what you spent hours migrating.
I also ran both apps simultaneously for a brief, chaotic period when I was “testing.” Having two task managers is worse than having zero task managers. You spend every moment wondering which one has the real list. Pick one and delete the other from your phone.
And I kept trying to make Things 3 do things it wasn’t designed to do — collaborative lists, habit tracking — instead of accepting that these were genuine gaps and evaluating whether those gaps mattered for my specific life. Evaluate the app you’re actually going to use, not the app you wish existed.
Who Should Use Which
Get Things 3 if: You’re fully in the Apple ecosystem, you work mostly independently, you value design and simplicity over feature breadth, and you’re willing to pay a one-time higher price for software that will work the same way in five years without a subscription renewal.
Get TickTick if: You use multiple platforms or non-Apple devices, you want collaboration features, you’re serious about habit tracking, you like having everything — tasks, calendar, habits, Pomodoro — in one place, or you want to start with a free tier before committing.
Honest personal verdict: I’m currently on Things 3. The design and capture speed won me back after my TickTick months, and I solved the habit tracking problem by keeping a tiny separate app just for that (Streaks, if you’re curious). My workflow is almost entirely Apple, so the platform limitation doesn’t bite me.
But if I used an Android phone or a Windows machine at work, I’d be on TickTick without hesitation. Platform availability isn’t a minor consideration — it’s a dealbreaker if the app isn’t there when you need it.
The best task manager is the one you’ll open every single day. Both of these are genuinely good. The question is just which one fits the shape of your actual life.
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