Caffeinated Calendar vs Todoist

Todoist is an outstanding task manager. It’s clean, adding a task is effortless, the Android widgets are great, and for a long time its free tier had just about everything I wanted. This comparison is not going to pretend otherwise.

Two things made me move my personal to-dos off it.

The first is that Todoist is more tool than I personally need. I track my actual professional work in dedicated project tools. What I wanted a task app for was the personal stuff: “clean out the garage,” “sweep the back patio,” weekend reminders. Todoist is an extremely capable project manager with collaboration, labels, saved filters, and productivity analytics. For a casual personal list, it’s overkill.

The second is where the tasks live. Todoist’s tasks live in Todoist’s cloud, in Todoist’s format. My to-dos sit on the same self-hosted CalDAV server (Radicale) as the rest of my calendars, in a standard format, alongside my business calendars from Google, Microsoft 365, and Zoho, all in one app and easily separated. The free tier also tightened gradually over the years, which made the trade I was already leaning toward an easy one.

So this is not “Caffeinated Calendar is a better task manager than Todoist.” It often isn’t. It’s about whether a powerful task SaaS or standards-based to-dos that live with your calendar fits how you actually work and what you actually need.

Where your tasks live

This is the difference that actually moved me, so it goes first.

Todoist stores your tasks on Todoist’s servers in Todoist’s proprietary format. It is well run and reliable, and you can export your data, but your to-dos are not portable in a standards sense: there is no CalDAV, so another app cannot just read and write the same list. You are choosing Todoist the service and platform, not only Todoist the app.

Caffeinated Calendar can store your tasks in its internal calendar format, or it can use CalDAV. They are standard CalDAV VTODOs on whatever server you point it at: iCloud, Zoho, or a self-hosted CalDAV server like Radicale or Nextcloud. You can also run Caffeinated Calendar using only its internal calendars, and have them local to the device it’s running on. Nothing routes through Caffeinated’s infrastructure unless you choose to purchase a Caffeinated Account subscription, at which time your devices’ Caffeinated calendars can also sync. I run Radicale on a NAS; so my tasks sync directly between my devices and that server, and any other CalDAV client can read the exact same list. That is how I moved in, and how I could move out again without losing anything.

Tasks next to your calendar

Todoist is a task app. It has a calendar layout and can show tasks on a connected Google Calendar, but it is fundamentally its own silo with its own data.

Caffeinated Calendar is a calendar with first-class tasks. The same to-dos show up in the Agenda and Day views next to your events, in the home-screen widgets, with priorities, due and start dates, percent-complete, categories, nested subtasks, and recurring tasks that roll forward on completion. For “what do I actually need to deal with today,” having tasks and events in one timeline is the whole point for me.

Platform support

Pricing and the free tier

I was a free-tier Todoist user for years and never paid, because for my casual use I could not justify the cost. Over time the free tier got more restrictive: limits on active projects and filters, and reminders moved behind the paywall. None of that is wrong of Todoist; it is a business. But it is the backdrop for why a free, standards-based option appealed to me.

Caffeinated Calendar’s task story has no freemium ladder. The app is free on every platform, and your tasks sync through whatever CalDAV provider you already use, your own Radicale, Nextcloud, iCloud, or Zoho (via CalDAV), at no charge. A Caffeinated subscription exists, but it only syncs the app’s own local settings (filters, calendar groups, account configuration, native Caffeinated calendars) and the internal Caffeinated calendars between your devices. Your CalDAV tasks are not gated behind it.

How Caffeinated thinks about subscriptions

Todoist’s model is a freemium SaaS: the service hosts your data and paid plans unlock capability. Caffeinated takes a deliberately different position, and it is worth being explicit since this comparison keeps touching it.

Every feature in Caffeinated Calendar works for free, on every device, on every platform, with nothing gated and no ads. Your calendars and CalDAV tasks sync directly with whatever providers you use, free, with nothing routed through Caffeinated’s servers.

The only thing a Caffeinated subscription pays for is cross-device sync of the app’s own local configuration (filters, calendar groups, account credentials, and native Caffeinated calendars) and multi-user sharing. If you only use one device, or your tasks live on your own CalDAV server, you can use Caffeinated Calendar indefinitely without paying anything. The same subscription, if you want it, covers the whole Caffeinated suite.

What Caffeinated Calendar doesn't have

• Best-in-class natural-language task entry. Typing “every other Friday submit report p1 #work” and having it parsed perfectly is Todoist’s signature, and Caffeinated Calendar does not match it for tasks.
• Collaboration. Shared projects, assignees, and comments. Caffeinated Calendar’s tasks are personal; it is not a team tool.
• Labels and saved filter queries. Todoist’s query language and saved filters are more powerful than Caffeinated Calendar’s filter views.
• Productivity features like trends, karma, and goals.
• Project templates and a large third-party integration, automation, and browser-extension ecosystem.
• A polished web app and onboarding that needs zero infrastructure on your part.