Sixteen of these 22 tools hand you a free plan that never expires. Almost none of them hand you the AI on it.

That's the shape of this market. The AI usually sits one tier up, the way Linear puts Triage Intelligence and Linear Asks on a $16 Business seat while the $10 Basic tier gets none of it. Where it doesn't sit a tier up, it lands on your bill as its own line: ClickUp Brain rides on top of your seat at $9 to $28 per user per month, and Notion charges $10 per 1,000 credits once the free window closes. Meanwhile the tools where AI genuinely drives the product charge you from day one: of the six entries here with no free plan at all, five are AI planners built to schedule your week. Which is the other half of the story, because the top of this ranking went to tools that were excellent at holding tasks first and added AI second.

So what should you pick? Linear ranks first for sheer speed and a near-zero learning curve, if you ship software. Trello and TickTick are the safest low-cost picks for personal use. Reclaim.ai will block out your day on a free plan, and Motion does it harder for $19 a seat from the first day. Among the free plans that spell out what their AI includes, Dart's is the one that doesn't ration it, since Hive meters you 1,000 credits a month and Reclaim.ai caps its free tier at 5 AI Agents. Dart ranks 17.

Here is the whole ranking in seven lines, in case you want to stop reading after this one.

Fastest to work in: Linear, rank 1, because there is almost nothing to configure before you start.
Most dependable: Trello, rank 2, on a 99.99% uptime guarantee and the largest review base here.
Cheapest paid plan for personal use: TickTick, rank 3, at $49.99 a year with 4.7/5 across 129 reviews.
Easiest start outside software teams: Any.do, rank 4, with a 4.8/5 ease-of-use subscore on Capterra, just behind Linear's 5.0.
Strongest free plan for a duo: Asana, rank 9, if your team is exactly two people.
Best for a crowded tool stack: Jira, rank 10, at 3,000+ third-party connections plus native links across Atlassian.
Best value: Dart, rank 17, for unlimited AI model usage at $0.

Which family are you actually shopping in?

Two families live on that list, and picking from the wrong one costs you a subscription you never needed.

Most of these tools hold your tasks. That group covers Linear, Trello, TickTick, Any.do, Todoist, ClickUp, Notion, Dart and Superlist, plus the enterprise suites further down the list. You type the task there, you finish it there, and the app you opened in the morning is the same app that still holds the work at the end of the week.

Four others are AI planners. Reclaim.ai, Morgen, Akiflow and Sunsama don't want to be your list. They pull tasks out of the apps you already use, then turn them into protected blocks on your calendar, which leaves the app you already pay for holding the work itself. Reclaim.ai works as a scheduling layer over tasks kept elsewhere rather than a replacement for them, syncing from Asana, ClickUp, Todoist, Jira, Linear and Google Tasks. By their own counts, Morgen syncs eight task tools and Sunsama nine, while Akiflow lists sixteen native two-way connectors spanning task apps, chat and calendars alike.

Why does that matter to your wallet? Because a planner is usually a second subscription, sitting on top of the app that holds the work. Sunsama runs $17 a month billed yearly, Akiflow $19, Morgen $15. None of the three has a free plan. Put a $7 Todoist Pro underneath one of them and you're paying $22 to $26 a month for what feels like one app doing one job.

Motion and BeforeSunset AI try to be both at once, and neither of them offers a permanent free plan.

So how far does a free plan really get you?

Those two make you pay to start. Most of the list doesn't, and here is the part people skip and then regret. A free plan is not free if you hit the ceiling in week two. The caps below are the documented ones, and some are tighter than they sound. 99 tasks per list is a busy Tuesday once your week fills up with small jobs.

Tool	What the free plan caps	First paid price, per person	AI on the free plan?
Linear	2 teams, 250 issues	$10/user/mo Basic (annual commitment)	No
Trello	10 boards per Workspace, 10 collaborators	$5/user/mo Standard (annual commitment)	No
TickTick	9 lists, 99 tasks per list	$4.17/mo, $49.99 billed yearly (annual commitment)	Not stated
Any.do	Tasks, lists, reminders, calendar, daily planner, sync	$4.99/mo Premium (annual commitment)	No
ClickUp	60MB storage, 5 Spaces, 40 Lists per Space	$7/user/mo Unlimited (annual commitment)	No
Hive	10 workspace members, 200MB, 1,000 AI credits/mo	$5/user/mo Starter	Yes
monday.com	2 seats, 3 boards, 3 docs, 8 column types	$27/mo real floor (3 seats x $9)	No
Todoist	5 personal projects, 3 filter views, 1 week of history	$7/mo Pro	No
Asana	Up to 2 users can collaborate	$10.99/user/mo Starter (annual commitment)	Not stated
Jira	10 users, 2 GB storage, 100 automation runs/mo	Calculator only, no flat price	No
Reclaim.ai	1 user, 5 AI Agents, 1 Calendar Sync, 1 Scheduling Link	$10/mo Starter, billed monthly	Yes
Wrike	Board and table views only	$10/user/mo Team	No
Taskade	3 AI apps, 1 AI agent, 6,000 one-time AI credits	$10/mo Pro (annual commitment)	Once, then no
Notion	10 external guests, 7-day page history	$10/member/mo Plus	No
Dart	Up to 4 teammates	$8/user/mo Premium	Yes
Superlist	5 private and shared lists, 5 people per shared list	$5/person/mo Basic	No

Now the six that never give you one.

Tool	Trial	Billed yearly	Billed monthly	What the AI is
Smartsheet	30-day	$9/member/mo Pro	-	Nine named AI features, tier not stated
Sunsama	14-day	$17/mo	$22/mo	Sunny assistant on the only plan
Morgen	14-day	$15/mo	$30/mo	AI Planner on Pro
Motion	Trial only	Not stated	$19/seat/mo Pro AI	7,500 credits, then 25 cents per 100
Akiflow	7-day	$19/mo	$34/mo	Aki assistant on Pro
BeforeSunset AI	Trial only	$96/yr, or $8/mo	Not stated, annual is a stated 55% saving	Unlimited AI assistant credits

Back up one table, because the free-AI column is the one worth rereading. Three free plans include AI you can genuinely use: Hive, Reclaim.ai and Dart. Taskade is a near-fourth, since it hands you 6,000 credits once and never renews them, which makes it a long trial wearing a free plan's clothes. Two cells read Not stated, so confirm which tier carries the AI before you pay.

So how do the rest charge you for the AI?

Pricing pages love the phrase "AI included." Included in what, though? Three answers, and they land very differently on your invoice.

Bundled into a tier you already pay for

The friendliest model. You buy the seat, the AI comes with it, and nothing else shows up on your invoice at the end of the month, which is what you want if you hate surprises. Hive and monday.com go further and publish the monthly credit allocation per tier, so you know what "included" means. Bundled doesn't mean cheap, though. Linear puts Triage Intelligence and Linear Asks in Business at $16 per user per month, which is 60% more than its own $10 Basic tier.

Sold as a separate add-on

ClickUp is the clearest case here. ClickUp Brain is billed on top of your seat, at $9 to $28 per user per month. Take a Business seat at $12 per user per month, add Brain at its $9 entry price, and you are at $21 a person before you have done anything unusual, with the same add-on reaching $28 per user per month at the top of that range. Wrike does something similar more quietly: its AI Elite Action Pack is one of several add-ons priced outside the plan, on a contact-sales basis rather than a published one.

Metered by credits

At least an add-on is a number you can predict. Credits are not. You pay for a pool, and when the pool empties, something happens. Sometimes that is an overage charge. Sometimes the AI simply stops. Notion's agents auto-pause when the credits run out, which is worth knowing before you hand one of them a workflow you depend on every morning.

How the AI is billed	Tool	The number to know
Bundled	Linear	Triage Intelligence and Linear Asks start at $16/user/mo Business
Bundled	Trello	Atlassian Intelligence is generally available for Premium and Enterprise
Bundled	TickTick	AI Voice Add and recording summaries in-app, tier not stated
Bundled	Any.do	AI-powered features on Premium, $4.99/mo billed annually
Bundled	Hive	1,000 credits/mo free, 3,000 on Starter, 5,000 on Teams
Bundled	monday.com	Basic 1,000, Standard 2,000, Pro 3,000 AI credits per month
Bundled	Todoist	Task Assist and unlimited Ramble on Pro, $7/mo
Bundled	Asana	AI Teammates and AI Studio, tier not stated
Bundled	Jira	Rovo AI included on Premium
Bundled	Smartsheet	Nine named AI features, tier not stated
Bundled	Reclaim.ai	5 AI Agents on free Lite, 10 per seat on $10 Starter
Bundled, plus paid add-ons	Wrike	AI Essentials on the $10 Team plan, AI Elite starter on $25 Business, AI Elite Action Pack contact-sales only
Bundled	Sunsama	Sunny assistant on the only plan, $17/mo billed yearly
Bundled	Dart	Unlimited AI model usage on the $0 Personal tier
Bundled	Morgen	AI Planner on Pro, $15/mo billed annually
Bundled	Akiflow	Aki assistant on Pro, $19/mo billed annually
Bundled	Superlist	Voice AI on $5 Basic, unlimited AI Meeting Notes on $21 Super
Bundled	BeforeSunset AI	Unlimited AI assistant credits on Personal Pro, $8/mo billed annually
Separate add-on	ClickUp	Brain at $9 to $28/user/mo on top of the seat
Metered	Notion	$10 per 1,000 credits, agents auto-pause at zero
Metered	Motion	7,500 credits/seat on $19 Pro AI, overage 25 cents per 100
Metered	Taskade	6,000 one-time free credits, 50,000/mo on $10 Pro

Tip: price the seat and the AI together before you compare anything, because a $12 seat carrying a $9 add-on looks cheaper than a $16 all-in tier right up until the second line of your invoice.

Ranks 1 to 4: light, cheap and quick to set up

That math is kindest at the top of the list. These four share something the rest of it mostly doesn't: you can be useful in them the same afternoon you sign up. Their ease-of-use scores sit near the top of the published set, though Todoist's 9.3 on G2 edges Trello's 9.0 and Sunsama matches Any.do's 4.8 on Capterra, and each of the four opens its paid range at $10 a seat or less, even if the tiers above that climb higher: Linear's AI sits on a $16 Business seat, and Trello's Enterprise runs $17.50 per user per month.

1. Linear, fast enough that you stop noticing the tool

Free: 250 issues, 2 teams. First paid: $10/user/mo Basic. AI: $16/user/mo Business.

Linear is built for software teams and doesn't pretend otherwise. Issues, cycles, roadmaps, initiatives, all in a shape you don't have to bend first. Capterra gives it a 5.0/5 ease-of-use rating, and reviewers describe pages that load instantly with almost nothing to configure before you start working. It holds roughly 4.5 to 4.6 out of 5 across 91 G2 reviews. That is a small base telling a consistent story, and the official site says more than 40,000 companies use it.

So where's the catch? Basic buys you 5 teams and unlimited issues, and it buys you no AI whatsoever, because the named features, Triage Intelligence and Linear Asks, arrive one tier up on Business. Reviewers also report thin permission controls, limited sorting and filtering, and sync bugs when they edit several things in quick succession.

Now the reason it still ranks first. Native connectors cover GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Figma, Notion, Sentry, Zendesk, Zapier, Discord, Raycast and VS Code, and an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Devin reach your issues directly instead of making you copy things between windows all day. If you ship software and you want the tool to disappear underneath the work, this is the one.

2. Trello, the boring one, and that is the compliment

Free: 10 boards per Workspace, 10 collaborators. First paid: $5/user/mo Standard, annual. AI: Atlassian Intelligence on Premium.

Most dependable. Linear wins on speed. Trello wins by lasting: it has been around since 2011 and belongs to Atlassian. It publishes a 99.99% uptime guarantee, and its Trust Center lists SOC2 Type II, SOC3, ISO 27001, ISO 27018, PCI-DSS and FedRAMP. The review base is the biggest in this ranking: 4.4/5 across 13,879 G2 reviews and 4.5/5 across 23,503 on Capterra. When 37,000 people mostly agree, you're holding a different kind of evidence than a 4.8 from a few dozen. Your free boards carry unlimited cards, and Premium at $10 per user per month annually, or $12.50 month to month, is where the Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard and Map views live.

Trello's AI is Atlassian Intelligence, which pulls due dates and action items out of your email and Slack, drafts checklists for you, and builds whole boards, none of it available on the free plan. Reviewers name the same limits every time: no native time tracking, thin built-in reporting, and boards that get cluttered as your work grows.

3. TickTick, a to-do list and a calendar in one app

Free: 9 lists, 99 tasks per list. First paid: $4.17/mo ($49.99 billed yearly). AI: tier not stated.

Cheapest paid plan for personal use. Where Trello keeps one shape and does it well, TickTick packs a startling amount into one app. List, Kanban, timeline and agenda views. An Eisenhower Matrix, habit tracking, a Pomodoro timer, natural-language capture and voice input. Capterra reviewers rate it 4.7/5 across 129 reviews, and the theme they repeat is simplicity. One reviewer's framing sums up the appeal: it is the easiest one they actually keep using. A well-known tech reviewer is quoted on TickTick's own homepage calling it "my favorite app of the entire year."

Its weak spots are narrow but annoying. Third-party automation is largely limited to Zapier and IFTTT, reminders sometimes fail to fire on mobile, and the free plan holds you to 1 attachment a day and 2 reminders on top of those list caps. On security, its own page documents encryption at rest on AWS, automatic backups with point-in-time recovery, and a 72-hour breach-notification pledge.

The AI is useful rather than decorative, because AI Voice Add works out the date, the list, the tags and the priority from whatever you happen to say out loud, and audio attachments get one-tap transcription and summaries. Both need mobile app 7.4.70 or later, or desktop 6.1.40 or later. Premium is a flat $49.99 a year, roughly $4.17 a month, which is the cheapest flat published price in this ranking, though several free plans here cost nothing at all, Dart's included. Everything, though, is not the same as easy.

4. Any.do, an easy place to start

Free: tasks, lists, reminders, calendar, daily planner and sync. First paid: $4.99/mo Premium, billed annually. AI: on Premium.

Easiest start outside software teams. Easy is exactly what Any.do sells. It earns a 4.8/5 ease-of-use subscore on Capterra, just behind Linear's 5.0, sits at 4.7/5 across 1,095 reviews there, and takes 4.2/5 from 197 reviews on G2. Reviewers keep reaching for the same two words: simple and intuitive. The company says over 40 million people use it, and it points to Editor's Choice recognition in both app stores.

What you get is broader than a to-do list. Calendar, daily planner, Kanban, table and Gantt views. Time tracking, collaborative boards with chat, shared grocery lists. Any.do puts its integration reach at 6,000+ apps, including Slack, Teams, Zoom, WhatsApp, Gmail, Jira, Trello and Asana.

The AI here asks before it acts. It suggests lists, breaks a task into subtasks and drafts board checklists, and you confirm every one of those before anything saves. That is deliberate, and it is the opposite of what Motion does further down. It also sits behind Premium, alongside recurring tasks and WhatsApp reminders. Family is $8.33 a month for 4 members on annual billing, and Teams is $4.99 per member. Users report occasional sync delays and notification pop-ups that clear before they can respond.

Ranks 5 to 11: what does more power cost you?

Move past those four and the trade changes. You get more power and you pay for it in setup time. Six of these seven are genuine work platforms rather than task apps, and a steep learning curve is the recurring complaint for five of them: ClickUp, monday.com, Asana, Jira and Smartsheet. Hive's reviewers name mobile apps and slowdowns instead, and Todoist's name the thin free tier and last December's price rise. Todoist sits in the middle of the group and is nothing like the rest of it, which is worth saying out loud before you compare prices.

5. ClickUp, everything in one place if you survive the setup

Free: 60MB storage, 5 Spaces, 40 Lists per Space. First paid: $7/user/mo Unlimited, yearly. AI: Brain add-on, $9 to $28/user/mo on top of the seat.

ClickUp takes that trade to its limit. By its own count it offers 15+ views, including List, Board, Gantt, Calendar, Whiteboard and Mind Maps, connects 1,000+ tools, and imports in one click from Asana, Trello, Jira and Monday.com. Capterra puts it at 4.6/5 from 4,620 verified reviews, and the company claims 5+ million teams along with 85% of the Fortune 500.

The AI is real, too. ClickUp Brain gives you multi-model access across GPT, Claude Opus and Gemini, plus autonomous Super Agents that handle intake, assignment and tracking without you steering each step. It is also a separate line item, so price it against your budget before the demo talks you into anything.

Capterra rates ease of use 4.3/5. Bounced off ClickUp before? Reviewers still report the things that most likely sent you away: a steep learning curve, a cluttered and overwhelming interface at first, and a mobile app noticeably weaker than the desktop one. If you get as far as Business at $12 per user per month yearly, your automations cap at 5,000 a month.

6. Hive, seven views and AI credits on every plan

Free: 10 workspace members, 200MB, 1,000 AI credits a month. First paid: $5/user/mo Starter. AI: on the free plan.

ClickUp charges extra for the AI. Hive is the rare tool here that puts AI credits on the free plan and tells you exactly how many. Starter raises that to 3,000 credits a month and up to 10 projects with unlimited storage. Teams at $12 gets you 5,000 credits and unlimited members.

So what does the $5 buy you? Seven work views, which means you can read the same project as a Calendar, a Kanban board, a Gantt chart, a Timeline, a Table, a List or a Portfolio without rebuilding it each time. Time tracking, automations, approvals and resource management come along with that, and you can bolt on CRM, finance, proofing and timesheets when your work needs them.

G2 reviewers give it 4.6/5 across 655 reviews, with ease of use at 9.1/10 and support quality at 9.3/10, which is a strong showing on a decent base. The complaints cluster on mobile apps, limited time tracking, and occasional unexplained slowdowns.

The AI has names and jobs. Buzz plans and assigns your work and follows up, Sidekick handles your meetings, and there's AI proofing on top. Hive states zero data retention and zero model training on its AI, alongside SOC2, GDPR, CCPA and ISO 27001 compliance. If you want AI in your task manager without a second invoice and with a documented answer to the data question, $5 buys you both. Dart hands out more AI at $0, so if price alone decides it, start there.

7. monday.com, flexible, popular, and floored at three seats

Free: 2 seats, 3 boards, 3 docs, 8 column types. First paid: $27/mo real floor (3 seats at $9). AI: 1,000 credits a month on Basic.

Hive keeps it cheap. monday.com goes the other way and sells you an ecosystem, starting with satisfaction numbers that are excellent: 4.7/5 across 18,961 G2 reviews. The ecosystem itself runs to 850+ integrations with open APIs and a marketplace serving 225,000+ customers, and over 60% of the Fortune 500 use it, all per the company's own pages. Compliance covers GDPR, SOC2, ISO and HIPAA, with AI governance controls including agent activity logging and a human-in-the-loop simulation mode.

Where does it pinch? Pricing, if you are on your own. Basic is $9 per seat per month, but every paid plan carries a 3-seat minimum, so your real floor is $27 a month even when you're the only person using it, and $27 is the number to carry into your comparison. Your 1,000 monthly AI credits arrive at the same tier, and Standard at $12 doubles them.

Watch the performance reports if your boards get large. Capterra reviewers describe pages taking 10 to 20 seconds to load. Notification setup gets its own complaint category.

8. Todoist, capture-first, and recently more expensive

Free: 5 personal projects, 3 filter views, 1 week of history. First paid: $7/mo Pro. AI: Task Assist and Ramble on Pro.

After all that platform machinery, Todoist does one thing beautifully. You type "call the dentist Tuesday 3pm every 6 months" into the box, and it parses every part of that correctly and files it where you expect. G2 gives it a 9.3 ease-of-use subscore and 4.5/5 across 826 reviews. Capterra sits at 4.6/5 across roughly 2,620. The company reports 50 million professionals. The AI is a set of small helpers rather than a planning engine: Task Assist, Filter Assist, Email Assist, and Ramble for voice capture. Todoist documents its security too: TLS 1.2/1.3, encryption at rest on AWS, SOC2 Type II, daily backups and a bug bounty program.

So what should give you pause? Two things. That free tier is thin, and you'll feel it by the second week. And prices went up: Pro moved from $5 to $7 a month and Business from $8 to $10 per user per month, effective December 10, 2025, and users pushed back visibly, with some comparing the value unfavorably to TickTick. Annual billing softens Pro to $5 a month, at $60 a year. There is no native time tracking, and no Gantt or roadmap view.

9. Asana, the free plan for exactly two people

Free: 2 collaborating users. First paid: $10.99/user/mo Starter, annual. AI: tier not stated.

Strongest free plan for a duo. Todoist's free tier is thin. Asana's sounds worse, capped at two collaborating users, and it is still one of the strongest $0 offers here. So here's the reasoning. At $0 forever you get a platform that, per its own homepage, 85% of the Fortune 100 uses. It documents SOC 2 Type I and II and HIPAA audits, and ISO 27001:2013, 27017:2015, 27018:2019 and 27701:2019 certifications. G2 rates it 4.4/5 across 14,009 reviews with a 9.37/10 recommend score. Capterra says 4.5/5 across 13,579. If you're a freelancer working with one collaborator, that is a lot of platform for nothing.

Add a third person and the plan dies immediately, which puts you on Starter. Advanced at $24.99 per user per month annually adds unlimited portfolios, goals tracking and workload management, and that is a different conversation from the one you're having this month.

The AI layer is unusually built out. AI Teammates launched with 30 prebuilt agents, including Launch Planner and Status Reporter, running on Asana's Work Graph. Native connectors reach OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft Copilot. The recurring gripes? A steep learning curve on automations, rules, workload and custom fields, and notification volume that gets noisy as projects multiply.

10. Jira, 3,000 integrations and a learning curve to match

Free: 10 users, 2 GB storage, 100 automation runs a month. First paid: calculator only, no flat price. AI: Rovo on Premium.

Best for a crowded tool stack. Asana wires itself into the model providers. Jira wires itself into everything else: Atlassian counts over 3,000 third-party integrations, plus native connection into Confluence, Figma and the rest of Atlassian. That is not the largest connector count in this ranking, since Any.do puts its own reach at 6,000+ apps and Sunsama rides Zapier's 9,000+, but Jira's catalog points at the systems engineering and IT teams already run. If your work already touches many of them, that coverage can decide this for you.

The free plan is generous by the standards of this ranking, and it asks you for no credit card. Standard scales you to 35,000 users per site with 250 GB of storage, and Premium is the tier carrying Rovo AI, a sandbox and a 99.9% uptime SLA (service level agreement). You won't find a flat per-user price for either: Atlassian quotes them through an online calculator, and describes Premium as about 2X your current average cost per user versus Standard, for instances over 100 users.

Capterra aggregates 15,460 reviews at 4.4/5 with 91% positive sentiment, a deep base by any standard, though Trello's 23,503 on the same site is deeper. The same reviewers report a steep learning curve for non-technical people, slowdowns on large projects, and automation glitches that need a refresh. Rovo needs an org-admin opt-in and a paid plan, so your free tier gets none of it.

11. Smartsheet, if your brain already works in spreadsheets

Free: none, 30-day trial. First paid: $9/member/mo Pro, billed annually. AI: tier not stated.

Jira at least starts free. Smartsheet doesn't. Who is it for, then? Someone else's budget. No free plan, a 30-day trial, $9 a month per member, and a Business tier at $19 that needs three of you before it will sell you anything. If a job is not paying for this one, it is not your first app.

What your employer gets for the money is a grid you already know how to read, with project management wrapped around it. Nine named AI features sit on top, from a conversational Smart Assist to formula writing and dashboard building, and the integrations reach the systems a large employer already runs, Salesforce and SAP and Jira among them. Capterra rates it 4.5/5 across 3,540 reviews, with a 4.3/5 ease-of-use subscore.

Two problems come up repeatedly. Advanced formulas and automation building get steep fast, and the cost climbs on you once your collaborator count grows.

Ranks 12 to 16: five tools that expect you to change how you work

Everything in that last stretch charged you in setup time. These five charge you in habits, which is the steeper price. A scheduler, an enterprise suite, a paid daily ritual, an agent platform and a workspace: they are not competing for the same slot in your week, so read each one for what it actually is before you compare its price to Todoist's.

12. Reclaim.ai, the AI scheduler for tasks you keep somewhere else

Free: 1 user, 5 AI Agents, 1 calendar sync, 1 scheduling link. First paid: $10/mo Starter, billed monthly. AI: on the free plan.

Reclaim.ai is the clearest example of the planner family. It reads your tasks out of Asana, ClickUp, Todoist, Jira, Linear and Google Tasks, then finds and defends time for them on your calendar, rescheduling automatically when a meeting lands on top of your afternoon. The named features are Focus Time, Smart Meetings, Habits, Buffer Time, Scheduling Links and Planner. The company reports 600,000+ users across 70,000 companies, naming GitHub, Zapier, Indeed, 1Password and Grafana. It claims 7.6 more focus hours a week and 2.3 fewer meetings.

Users rate it about as highly as anything here, on a mid-sized base. G2 puts it at 4.8/5 across roughly 130 reviews. Capterra says 4.7/5, with a 4.6/5 ease subscore and 4.8/5 for customer service.

The free Lite plan is real, and the AI on it works. Starter, or $12 a month if you pay yearly, buys you 10 AI Agents per seat and an 8-week scheduling range. Business at $15 monthly raises that to 100 agents and unlimited calendar syncs. Users are honest about two things. The AI sometimes schedules your day differently than you would, and the Microsoft and Outlook side feels weaker than Google's, with no native Android app.

13. Wrike, deep and enterprise-shaped, with a support problem

Free: board and table views only. First paid: $10/user/mo Team. AI: AI Essentials on the $10 Team plan.

Reclaim.ai's users are among the happiest here. Wrike's are not. What pulls its ranking down, then? Not the software. Across 218 Trustpilot reviews Wrike carries the lowest sentiment score in this set, and the theme is service: reviewers describe slow, email-only support with multi-week reply times, and rigid contract renewals that leave long-time customers with little flexibility when they want out. Some also find the workflows overly complicated for basic tasks. If support responsiveness matters to you, weigh that before you read another line about the features.

The software itself is strong. Ten dollars a user buys interactive Gantt charts, shareable dashboards, and AI Essentials, which drafts and edits content, summarizes a comment thread, and turns a plain-English sentence into an automation rule. That tier is sized for 2 to 15 people, so it is shaped for a small team inside a bigger company rather than for you on your own, and free gets you board and table views and little else.

Above that, Business at $25 per user per month adds an AI Elite starter package, and that is the point where this stops being a decision you make on your own card. Several other add-ons, the AI Elite Action Pack among them, carry no published price at all and route you to sales. The rest of what Wrike sells, resource management, time tracking, approvals, whiteboarding and request forms, spreads across those tiers. Its marketplace lists 60 integrations, including direct connectors for ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, plus an open REST API. It cites ISO 27001, SOC 2/3 and GDPR compliance.

14. Sunsama, a paid ritual for planning your day

Free: none, 14-day trial. First paid: $17/mo Pro, billed yearly. AI: Sunny on the only plan.

Wrike sells you a company's worth of process. Sunsama sells you a morning. It is a daily planning practice sold as software: you plan at the start of the day, pull tasks in from other tools, time-box them against your calendar, and close with a shutdown ritual. Sunny, the built-in assistant, reads and writes your tasks, calendar, backlog and objectives through chat or voice. The app also predicts time estimates and tags channels as it learns your patterns. Sunsama lists an integration surface that is wide for a planner: nine task tools including Asana, ClickUp, Jira, Linear, Notion, Todoist and Trello, three calendar providers, plus Gmail, Slack, Teams, Toggl, Zapier's 9,000+ apps and an MCP server.

Then there's the money. There is no free plan, only a 14-day trial, and paying month to month costs $22 instead. Capterra rates it 4.7/5 with a 4.8/5 ease subscore, though on 27 reviews, so treat that as a promising signal rather than a settled one. Students and solo users call the monthly price high. Reviewers also note it thins out for long-term team project management, with syncing and reload issues in collaboration and a weaker Android app.

15. Taskade, AI agents living inside the task list

Free: 3 AI apps, 1 AI agent, 6,000 one-time credits. First paid: $10/mo Pro, billed annually. AI: on the free plan once, then Pro.

Sunsama puts a human ritual around your tasks. Taskade puts agents inside them, and it is AI-native in a way most of this list isn't. You deploy trainable agents with persistent memory, then chain them into researcher, writer and reviewer handoffs, with branching and looping logic, so what you build here sits closer to a small workflow than a checklist. A hosted MCP server connects Claude Desktop, Cursor and VS Code straight into your workspace, and Taskade lists 146 integrations behind that, Stripe, Shopify, Salesforce and GitHub among them.

The pricing is all about credits, and the first number is the one that matters to you. Free hands you 6,000 credits once, arriving as 1,000 on verification and 5,000 on your first build. Pro is $10 a month billed annually for 50,000 a month. Above that the numbers get big and stop being about you. Watch the trial conversion either way, because reviewers report unexpected charges when a free trial rolls into a paid plan.

Capterra reviewers rate it 4.7/5 across 67 reviews, with 4.6/5 on ease and 4.8/5 on value for money, a small base carrying a lot of weight. Reviewers also flag feature overload and no offline access. On security, Taskade's own page documents TLS in transit, AES-256 at rest, and a contractual zero-training policy. It also states that SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and full GDPR/CCPA compliance are still in progress. The company was founded in 2017 and lists a team of 10 to 50 people.

16. Notion, a workspace that can hold your tasks

Free: 10 external guests, 7-day page history. First paid: $10/member/mo Plus. AI: Notion Agent on $20 Business, then $10 per 1,000 credits.

Taskade ships you agents. Notion ships you parts. It isn't a task manager: it's a set of databases, boards, calendars and docs, flexible enough to become one if you build it that way. That's the appeal, and the trap.

Reviewers love it: 4.6/5 across roughly 13,834 G2 reviews, and 4.7/5 across 2,806 on Capterra. They also report a steep learning curve that sends people to outside tutorials, slowdowns on large databases, and a weaker mobile experience.

Plus buys you 30-day page history and unlimited uploads. Business at $20 per member per month is where Notion Agent, AI Meeting Notes and SAML single sign-on appear. Enterprise is custom and adds zero data retention with AI providers, plus audit logs, if your clients ask for that.

Custom Agents ran free through May 3, 2026. After that, usage converts to $10 per 1,000 Notion credits. And when your credits run out? The agents pause. Build a scheduled agent across Gmail, Slack, GitHub or HubSpot, and that meter becomes part of your monthly cost, on top of the seat.

Ranks 17 to 22: small teams, big AI ambitions

Notion asks you to build your own system. These last six arrive with opinions about your day already installed, and most of them bill you from the first day rather than earning their way up from a free plan. Four of the six have no permanent free plan at all; Dart and Superlist are the exceptions. Four of the six schedule your day with AI. Morgen expects your tasks to live in another app, while Motion and BeforeSunset AI hold the tasks themselves. The review bases run from 445 App Store ratings down to 12 total reviews, so weigh those numbers accordingly when you set them next to the giants above.

17. Dart, unlimited AI on a free plan

Free: up to 4 teammates. First paid: $8/user/mo Premium. AI: on the free plan, unlimited model usage.

Best value. Start with the one that gives the most AI away. Dart's Personal tier costs $0 per user per month and gives you unlimited tasks, unlimited docs, unlimited AI model usage and AI agents. The other free plans here that carry AI ration it: Hive at 1,000 credits a month, Reclaim.ai at 5 AI Agents, Taskade at 6,000 credits handed over once. Two free plans list their AI as not stated, so check those before you assume either way. On the non-AI side, other free tiers hold their own: Jira's carries 10 users, 2 GB of storage and 100 automation runs a month.

Now the caution, and keep it in proportion. Dart is a Y Combinator Winter 2022 company that lists 10 employees, there are 12 total reviews across Trustpilot and Capterra, and the company claims 100,000+ teams, which adds up to a small team supporting a lot of users. Users also report minor cross-device sync delays, and a finicky task-selection interaction where clicking a task can start editing its title.

What you get is boards, calendars, roadmaps, docs, forms, time tracking, duplicate detection and AI subtask generation, plus three ready-made agents: Sara for support, Rob for code review and Scout for sales. Dart counts 20+ integrations, including Slack, Discord, Teams, GitHub, Jira, Notion, Google Workspace, ChatGPT, Claude, n8n and Zapier, plus an API, a command-line interface and MCP support. Outgrow the free four seats and Premium lifts the cap, with Business at $12 adding SAML single sign-on and SCIM provisioning. One Capterra reviewer calls it the fastest task management system they have used, and at $0 it costs you nothing to find out.

18. Morgen, the planner that asks permission first

Free: none, 14-day trial. First paid: $15/mo Pro, billed annually. AI: AI Planner on Pro.

Dart's AI runs unrationed. Morgen's runs on a leash, by design. Its AI Planner drafts your day and then waits, and nothing moves onto your real calendar until you approve it. That's the philosophical opposite of Motion, and a genuine comfort if you've ever watched software rearrange your afternoon. Kai, its separate assistant, handles email triage, meeting transcription and action-item capture across Gmail, Outlook, Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex and Slack Huddles.

The connection list is the best reason to look.

Six calendar providers: Google, Outlook (including Microsoft 365 and Exchange), Apple iCloud, Fastmail, Zoho and CalDAV.
Eight task tools with two-way sync: Notion, Todoist, ClickUp, Linear, Google Tasks, Microsoft To Do, Apple Reminders and Obsidian.

Privacy is a real selling point too, all of it per Morgen's own policy: calendar events and third-party tasks aren't stored on its servers, data is not sold, data centers sit in Switzerland and the EU, and OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are named as the AI processors it uses.

Pay month to month and Pro costs $30 instead, so the annual commitment is doing real work on that price. Team is $25 per seat monthly, or $10 annually, with a 2-seat minimum. Across about 20 G2 reviews the praise goes to the interface and the consolidation. The criticism is blunt: the AI feels less mature than competitors, task dependencies and start dates are missing, and the mobile app has performance issues. Morgen AG was founded in 2020 in Zurich and reports 248,000+ professional users.

19. Motion, the one that rebuilds your day for you

Free: none, trial only. First paid: $19/seat/mo Pro AI. AI: 7,500 credits a seat, included.

Morgen waits for your nod. Motion never asks for one. Its Task Planner and Calendar Assistant auto-prioritize your work and rebuild your schedule as meetings and deadlines shift, without stopping to check with you. Capterra reviewers describe it keeping them on track by automatically organizing tasks. Users with ADHD repeatedly name reduced decision fatigue as the payoff. The feature set stretches across AI Chat, projects and tasks, calendar and meetings, docs and notes, an AI writer, team capacity planning, Gantt views and time tracking.

Hand software that much control and the data question follows close behind. Motion documents more of its security posture than most tools this size. SOC 2 Type II audited by Prescient Assurance. Encryption in transit and at rest. Annual third-party penetration testing, GDPR compliance, and an explicit policy that customer data never trains AI models.

Now the meter, which is the part that should shape your budget. Pro AI carries 7,500 AI credits per seat with overage at 25 cents per 100 credits after that, and Business AI is $29 per seat with 15,000 credits and 19 cents per 100 in overage. So your bill has a floor, not a ceiling. How high can it climb? That depends entirely on how hard you lean on the AI.

Reviewers rate ease of use 4.2/5 and cite setup complexity around project and AI configuration. They also flag a mobile app behind the desktop one, and a price that feels steep for individuals. Native integrations are thin: task capture from email and Siri, plus Google, Outlook and iCloud calendar sync. Everything else goes through Zapier or the API.

20. Akiflow, one command bar for everything

Free: none, 7-day trial. First paid: $19/mo Pro, billed annually. AI: Aki on Pro.

Where Motion leans on Zapier, Akiflow builds the connections itself, and its whole pitch is consolidation. A universal inbox catches your work from sixteen native two-way integrations, by Akiflow's own count, among them:

Slack, Gmail, Microsoft Teams and Zoom
Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar
Notion, Asana, ClickUp, Jira, GitHub, Linear, Trello, Todoist and Microsoft To Do

Zapier, IFTTT and an MCP connector extend that reach. A command bar lets you triage and time-block quickly, Aki takes natural language and voice for capture and scheduling, and daily briefings, a focus mode and conflict resolution across your merged calendars fill in the rest.

G2 reviewers rate it 4.8/5 across a base in the mid-90s, praising the interface and the inbox-to-calendar speed. Their complaints are specific. The mobile app is buggy and slower than desktop. You need a Google or Microsoft account to use it at all. And some integrations sync one way, despite the two-way promise.

Pricing is where it'll test you. Month to month runs $34, so the annual figure is the only one worth quoting. Team pricing is quote-only, so you have to ask. Akiflow is Y Combinator-backed and reports 100,000+ users.

21. Superlist, lovely to look at, with reliability reports you should read

Free: 5 private and shared lists, 5 people per shared list. First paid: $5/person/mo Basic. AI: Voice AI on $5 Basic.

Akiflow's problems are annoyances. Superlist's are a different category, so read the App Store reviews before you move anything in. Multiple reviewers report sync failures with partial data loss, one saying it only synced 1/3 of the content and another saying the offline mode bricks itself without connectivity. If this app holds the only copy of your day, that risk is the whole conversation, and it is why a well-made product sits at 21.

The craft is genuinely there. Superlist comes from the Wunderlist founding team, and the design pedigree shows, with notes and tasks living together in one workspace. The AI covers voice-to-task capture and meeting-note transcription that generates action items. A native MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor create and triage tasks directly. On the App Store it holds 4.5 out of 5 from 445 ratings.

Your free lists carry unlimited tasks and notes, which is more generous than the list cap sounds. Basic, $59 a year if you pay yearly, unlocks unlimited lists, all integrations and Voice AI. Super is $21 per person per month, or $249 a year, for unlimited AI Meeting Notes, unlimited AI Chat and Make AI generation. Reviewers also miss basics like home-screen widgets and bulk actions, and those you can work around.

22. BeforeSunset AI, a simple daily planner at $8 a month

Free: none, trial only. First paid: $8/mo Personal Pro, billed annually. AI: unlimited assistant credits, included.

Superlist wants to hold everything. BeforeSunset AI does one job: turn your goals into a planned day. Two named AI features do the work. Create My Tasks and Todo Assistant break goals into tasks, categorize them, and estimate how long each will take. Around that sit subtasks, due dates, priority tags, recurring tasks, notes, bookmarks and Pomodoro-style timers, along with weekly and monthly views, progress analytics and a focus mode called Oasis.

Personal Pro gives you unlimited AI assistant credits and unlimited calendars, which is unusual at this price: $96 a year on annual billing, which works out to $8 a month. Paying month to month costs more, since the company puts the annual saving at 55% on both paid tiers, though the month-to-month rate itself isn't stated. Team Pro is $12 per member per month, or $144 a year. Both plans carry a 7-day money-back guarantee. There is no permanent free plan.

G2 reviewers rate it 4.8/5 from 33 reviews, praising the planning interface and responsive support, though keep that base size in mind when you weigh the number. The real constraint is connections. Google Calendar and Outlook are live, Apple Calendar is listed as coming soon, and the official features page names no Slack, Zapier or public API. Reviewers also find the mobile app limited next to the web version. The company shipped a companion app, Unlock by BeforeSunset AI, on June 30, 2026, and its privacy policy commits to never selling personal data.

Questions people ask before they pick one

That's the ranking, top to bottom. Four questions tend to survive it, and they're the ones the tables above can't settle for you.

Can I use the AI features on a free plan, or does AI always require paying?

Three include AI you can genuinely use: Dart, Hive and Reclaim.ai. Taskade is a fourth, sort of: 6,000 credits once, and they never renew. The more useful question is what happens when a free allowance empties, because the answers differ more than you'd guess. Notion's agents auto-pause at zero, so a workflow you lean on every morning simply stops until you buy credits. Motion keeps working and bills you 25 cents per 100 credits over. Hive's 1,000 credits refill every month, so the meter resets on its own. Find out which of those behaviors your tool has before you build a routine on free AI.

Do I need a separate app to schedule my tasks, or can one tool do both?

Morgen, Reclaim.ai and Sunsama are schedulers by design, and they expect your tasks to live in another app, so budget for two subscriptions if you go that way. Want a single product instead? Motion and BeforeSunset AI hold the tasks and schedule them.

Which are easiest to learn if I have never used a task manager?

Linear carries a 5.0/5 ease-of-use rating on Capterra, and nothing else here matches it. Any.do sits just behind on the same subscore at 4.8/5, level with Sunsama. TickTick publishes no ease subscore, though its overall Capterra rating is 4.7/5 across 129 reviews and reviewers there keep naming simplicity and ease of use. Trello's 9.0 on ease of use at G2 comes off a very large base, which makes it the steadiest of those numbers, and Todoist's 9.3 on the same scale is higher still. On the other side, a steep learning curve is one of the two most common complaints in this set, alongside weak mobile apps, and it comes up for ClickUp, Notion, Jira, Asana, Smartsheet, monday.com, Taskade and Motion. If a weekend of setup killed your last app, start with the first group.

Which have real security certifications if I am putting work data in them?

These name specific certifications in their own materials.

Tool	What it names in its own materials
Trello	SOC2 Type II, SOC3, ISO 27001, ISO 27018, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP
Asana	SOC 2 Type I and II, HIPAA, ISO 27001/27017/27018/27701
ClickUp	SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA
monday.com	SOC2, ISO, GDPR, HIPAA
Hive	SOC2, ISO 27001, GDPR, CCPA
Wrike	ISO 27001, SOC 2/3, GDPR
Motion	SOC 2 Type II, audited by Prescient Assurance
Todoist	SOC2 Type II
Taskade	SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 still in progress

Rule of thumb: if a certification is a requirement where you work, confirm it on the vendor's own trust page before you migrate anything.

Five questions to answer before you commit

A trust page is the last thing you check, though. Here is what to settle first, because you are picking one app this month, not running a procurement process. Answer these five and the list narrows itself in about ten minutes.

How many lists or projects do you actually have right now? Go and count them, because if the answer is 12, then TickTick's 9-list free plan and Todoist's 5-project free plan are both trials in disguise. Price the paid tier instead.
Is the AI on your plan, or is it a second bill? The line under each tool name answers this. Add the AI cost to the seat cost before you compare anything. A $12 seat plus ClickUp Brain and a $16 Linear Business seat are different products at similar money.
Does this tool hold your tasks, or does it need another app underneath? Reclaim.ai, Morgen and Sunsama all need a task app underneath. That's a feature if you already love your list. It's a surprise second subscription if you don't.
How much of your work happens on your phone? A weaker mobile app is a documented complaint at ClickUp, Motion, Hive, Akiflow, Morgen, Sunsama, Notion and BeforeSunset AI. If you capture tasks while walking, that moves to the top of your criteria.
Does anyone certify how your data is handled? If that matters to your clients or your employer, check the table above, then confirm on the vendor's trust page. If you are the only stakeholder, spend that attention on sync reliability instead, which is where Superlist's reviewers raised the loudest alarm.

Then pick one, and give it two weeks of real use before you judge it. The app that wins is rarely the one with the longest feature list. It is the one you still open on a bad Thursday.

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