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  • Solid free plan
  • Cheap upgrade
  • Great interface

TickTick Review

TickTick is a very simple task management tool which offers surprising flexibility and ease of use, placing it among our favorites. Though it's not as powerful as some competitors, it still helps you get a lot done, as you can read in this TickTick review.

Fergus O'Sullivan
By Fergus O'Sullivan (Writer, Former Chief Editor)
— Last Updated: 2024-02-03T12:21:55+00:00

If you’re not sure whether you need the best project management software or just a simple task manager, then TickTick may be an interesting choice. It straddles the line between task management and project management, and does so at a really good price and with great ease of use. This TickTick review will go over all the main points of this handy little tool.

Key Takeaways:

  • TickTick is a solid tool for freelancers or very small businesses that want to keep on top of tasks without too much of a learning curve.
  • It also has some advanced features, like a solid calendar and a kanban board, but it’s not as powerful as a full project management program.
  • If you’re just looking for an app to keep track of grocery lists and the like, TickTick will be OK, but Any.do will be better.

While TickTick is one of the best project management tools for freelancers, it won’t be replacing the full suites like monday.com or Asana anytime soon. It just doesn’t have the oomph for that.

However, if you use TickTick as intended, as a lightweight task manager with some advanced functions, you’ll quickly find you’re dealing with one of the best designed and most easy-to-use apps out there. Let’s take a look at what TickTick can do.

  • 09/10/2021 Facts checked

    Cloudwards completed a fresh review of TickTick.

Top Alternatives for TickTick

Strengths & Weaknesses

Pros:

  • Solid free plan
  • Cheap upgrade
  • Great interface
  • Solid, simple feature set

Cons:

  • Many upgrade reminders
  • Kanban view isn’t too useful
  • Kanban board is hidden away

Features

75 % – Good

At its core, TickTick is a to-do list: you organize your tasks in one or more lists and, as you move along, you tick things off the list. It’s a very simple concept, which makes it great for productivity apps or small programs that help you keep track of tasks. We offer a few more examples in our article on Wunderlist alternatives

ticktick list view
TickTick can be used for anything, but everything stems from its task list.

Looking at the basic list, TickTick doesn’t really stand out from other to-do apps. For example, Any.do has a much nicer and more responsive list (we talk about it at length in our Any.do review). If all you need is to keep track of day-to-day tasks, then there are better picks than TickTick.

Like Todoist (read our Todoist review), TickTick instead seems geared toward people who have a lot of different tasks they need to keep track of, or at least lots of different kinds of tasks. For example, TickTick allows you to track multiple lists of tasks on a single screen, which is very handy. All you need to do is put the lists in a folder, and you’re good.

ticktick multiple lists view
You can easily keep track of multiple tasks lists, thanks to color-coding and section breaks.

TickTick’s free version is pretty much just the list, with a kanban board added. In all honesty, we’re not blown away by the kanban view, and it won’t be making an entry in our best kanban app roundup. We like how columns added in their board automatically become sections in the list, but the presentation is just too uninspired, and you can only use it for a single list. Still, it’ll do in a pinch.

ticktick kanban view
Though it won’t win any prizes, TickTick’s kanban view is functional enough.

TickTick Premium Features

TickTick’s free tier is pretty much just the list and the kanban board, with some tags and such thrown in. Even if you don’t spend a penny, TickTick will help you track tasks and sort them. However, if you decide to pay for TickTick, you can get a lot more done — as TickTick never seems to tire of reminding you. The “upgrade” button is rather prominent.

For one, TickTick is the only to-do app we’ve reviewed that has its own calendar. The free plan relies on Google Calendar, much like Any.do and Todoist do, but upgrading gives you access to a built-in version that blows Google’s offering out of the water.

ticktick calendar integration
TickTick’s calendar view is one of the best out there.

In fact, TickTick is even better than full-on project management suites in this regard. For example, in our Wrike review we praise its calendar, but TickTick’s integration is a lot more solid. This is due to its smart use of color-coding for lists, and the fact that it allows you to add tasks. On top of that, there’s a handy fold-out view that lets you see undated tasks and move them into the calendar.

ticktick calendar view foldout
Very few task management apps show you undated tasks in the calendar like TickTick does.

Other Features

Other paid features are mostly aimed at mobile users, and include location-based reminders, which will alert you if you’re anywhere near a location for an errand, and some widgets that you can use to transfer items from your phone to the TickTick web app. 

TickTick also advertises something called “smart date parsing,” but as far as we can tell it’s just a system that puts together a reminder for you. We’re not sure exactly why TickTick announces this like it’s a revolutionary feature: many productivity apps offer a similar service; they just don’t use any fancy terminology.

Minor gripes like that aside, though, and we have to say we’re big fans of the feature set TickTick offers, especially if you take pricing into account. That brings us to our next section.

TickTick Features Overview

Management Views
Kanban board
List
Calendar
Timeline
Spreadsheet view
Gantt charts
Workload planning
Long-term planning
Management Features
Multiple project management
Dependency management
Native scrum management
Set user permissions
File storage
Time-tracking
Built-in integrations
Reporting features
General Features
Free plan
Free Trial
Web app
Windows
MacOS
Android
iOS
Support
Ticket-based support
Tutorials
Knowledgebase
Forum
Live chat
Phone support

Pricing

95 % – Excellent

TickTick is a great deal. While the free plan is more or less on par with that offered by either Any.do or Todoist, its premium version is a lot better. Not only does it offer some very nice and unique features, it does so at a steep discount compared to its competitors.

TickTick Pricing

Free
  • List, Basic filters, Kanban, Caps on use
Premium
  • Calendar, Extra filters, Track progress, Caps raised

Compared to Any.do’s $35.88 per year and Todoist’s $36 per year, TickTick’s $27.99 may not seem all that much cheaper, but it’s a solid percentage of the price, and it gets you some great benefits. It also significantly raises your activity caps — check out this handy table for the details.

TickTick Free vs Premium: Worth the Upgrade?

The biggest upgrade, as we mentioned in the features section, is TickTick’s excellent calendar view. If you’re a freelancer trying to keep track of tasks, that feature alone is worth the price of the upgrade. Add to that some other nifty little features, like location-based reminders, and we feel TickTick is well worth the money.

User-Friendliness

90 % – Excellent

Using TickTick is overall a very pleasant experience. While we have some minor gripes here and there, it boasts a very well-designed user interface that has practically no learning curve — looking at you, Podio.

Getting started with TickTick is easy: you can create a free account with just a few clicks before being dropped into the main view, where you put together your to-do lists. To create tasks, just click on the “add task” bar at the top of the screen. The details of each task — including any subtasks you create — will pop up in a pane to the right of the screen; it’s all pretty intuitive.

ticktick list subtasks
All you need to use TickTick is a working mouse.

As we mentioned earlier, TickTick also allows you to stack several lists into a single directory, making overview easy. If you need a complete overview of what needs to be done, just open the directory and you’re good to go. Much the same goes for the calendar: just open it and there are all your tasks, neatly arranged. 

We wish more task management apps took this broad approach rather than getting bogged down in details. Managers like Microsoft To-Do or even Google’s project management tools focus on completing tasks one by one, without regard for the bigger picture.

Moving Around TickTick

Another thing TickTick gets right is navigation: you move between panes with just a single click, and can assign tasks, change due dates, set recurring tasks and every other thing pretty much the same way. We sincerely doubt you’ll ever need help to use this app.

That said, TickTick isn’t perfect: some of its buttons are weirdly placed. For example, the button for the kanban board is hidden in a side menu for lists, which is weird. We were playing with TickTick for a few hours before realizing there even was a kanban option. Still, though, these are just small bumps on an otherwise smooth road.

ticktick smart lists
Why this was hidden here is anybody’s guess.

TickTick Mobile App

We’ll finish up this section and talk about the TickTick mobile app, which is pretty good. Much the same design philosophy for the web app was applied to the smartphone version, it seems, and everything can be handled with a single tap.

ticktick mobile app
TickTick has a solid app for mobile.

Still, though, you can’t escape the feeling that the web version is the “real” TickTick: there are more options there, and the mobile version, as good as it is, just feels like a port. Still, it’s a handy thing to have on your phone if you’re on the go a lot.

Security & Privacy

95 % – Excellent

TickTick’s privacy policy is a solid document that clearly outlines the data TickTick collects and why. It also pledges not to sell your data and to delete all your information within a week of deleting your account. It’s not always clear with other services whether this happens, so we give TickTick big kudos for this one.

Its security is almost as solid. We assume TickTick encrypts data in transit using TLS — we say “assume” as the company doesn’t provide much detail here — and, as it uses Amazon Web Services to provide server space, relies on that behemoth to provide security. Despite the occasional leaky bucket, AWS is a secure solution for your data, so there’s not much to worry about in this regard.

The company also pledges to let users know within 72 hours if there’s been a breach, but since there seems to have never been one, there’s no good way to check. However, seeing how quickly a company rep reacted to this Reddit thread, we feel confident in staying TickTick is a company that takes security seriously.

Service & Support

70 % – Decent

When it comes to support, TickTick does a decent job. There’s no real tutorial to speak of — very few to-do list apps have one, as there’s really nothing to learn — but it comes with a solid user guide that will help you get started using TickTick and get used to its more advanced functions. Between this guide and some common sense, you’re pretty much set.

ticktick support
The main support portal is where you can access the user guide as well as the rest of the knowledgebase.

Should you run into an issue not covered in the user guide, there’s a support portal, but it’s not the greatest. There are a few advanced guides and FAQs, but there’s no way to directly contact the company to get guidance. This costs it a few points here, but then again, we doubt you’ll ever need help to use this pretty simple piece of software.

Final Thoughts

TickTick is a solid app and maybe even the best task manager out there. TickTick has an excellent interface and it’s intuitive to use. It has many features on the free plan, but there’s plenty more to like on the Premium version. You’ll often see upgrade messages when attempting to use paid features on the free plan, but it’s really just a minor annoyance.

If you’re interested in TickTick, we recommend you give the free version a spin and see how you like it. If it works for you, the Premium plan is dirt cheap, so you’ve little to lose. If you’re planning on using TickTick as part of your organization suite, we suggest checking out other organization apps.

What are your experiences with TickTick? Did we miss any vital, powerful features it offers, or did we get it right? Let us know in the comments below and, as always, thank you for reading.

FAQ

  • TickTick is a task management app that lets you keep track of what you need to do, as well as plan tasks into the future.

  • TickTick has an excellent free version, as well as a cheap upgrade for $27.99 per year.

  • TickTick is definitely a contender, but we recommend checking out Todoist and Any.do.

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