If you run a small business and already use Todoist for yourself, bringing the team into it is the obvious next step. You know the app, capture is fast, and your own projects are already there. It is a reasonable instinct, and for some teams it is the right one.

This is an honest look at Todoist for teams from the point of view of a business with 3 to 20 people: where it fits well, the points at which teams tend to outgrow it, and what the bill looks like as the team grows. We make a competing product, so we will say where Todoist is better as clearly as where it is not.

Where Todoist for teams works well

Capture is the best there is. Todoist's natural language entry, "invoice Acme every Friday p1", is still the fastest way to get a task out of your head and into a list. For a team whose main problem is things getting forgotten, that speed matters more than any structure.

It is already familiar. If half the team uses Todoist personally, there is almost nothing to learn. Adoption is the hardest part of any team tool, and familiarity solves most of it.

Integrations. Todoist connects to email, calendars, Slack and a long list of other tools. If your business runs on a stack of connected apps, that ecosystem is years ahead of most alternatives, ours included.

Starting is free. Todoist offers one free team on its personal plans, which is enough to try the idea with a couple of people before paying anything.

If your team is 2 or 3 people, the work is mostly one-off tasks, and the main job is not forgetting things, Todoist for teams may be all you need. Stop reading here and use it.

Where small business teams tend to outgrow it

The pattern is consistent enough to describe. A team starts in Todoist, it works, and somewhere between month 2 and month 6 one of these starts to hurt.

There is nowhere to put the why

Todoist manages tasks and projects. It does not have goals. So when the owner wants the team working towards "40 repeat customers by December" or "open the second site in spring", that objective lives in a spreadsheet, a slide or someone's head, and the projects in Todoist have no visible connection to it.

In a small business with limited hands, this is the expensive gap. Projects get chosen by urgency rather than by what they are for, and nobody can tell at a glance whether the work this month moved the thing that matters.

Recurring work has no history

A recurring task in Todoist regenerates when it is completed. That is fine for reminders. It is less good for the routines a small business depends on, like the weekly stock order, the Friday invoicing or the follow-up on quotes older than 7 days, because what you want to know is not "is this week's done" but "how often does this actually happen".

When the recurring work is a routine with a record, you can see that quote follow-ups happen 3 weeks in 4 and do something about the fourth. When it is a task that resets, that information is gone.

The cost scales from the first head

At the time of writing, Todoist's pricing page lists its team plan at $8 per user per month, billed yearly. Per-seat pricing is simple and predictable, and for a company that budgets per head it is the normal way to buy software.

A small business usually thinks in totals, though. At 8 people that is $64 a month, and the part-timer who does the books costs the same as the founder. It is not unreasonable, but it is worth doing the sum at your size and at double it before committing.

Personal and team work start to blur

When everyone's personal Todoist and the team's projects live in the same app, the boundary is only as clean as each person keeps it. That works well for disciplined people and less well for everyone else, and it comes up often when teams describe why they moved off it.

What the alternative shape looks like

The reason we built EvyOS the way we did is that these 4 problems have the same cause: a task list is one layer of a system, and a small business needs the others too.

In an EvyOS shared workspace:

Where Todoist is still better

To be plain about it:

How to decide

Ask 3 questions about your business.

  1. Is the problem forgetting things, or doing the wrong things? If it is forgetting, Todoist is excellent. If it is that the team is busy but the goals do not move, you need goals in the same system as the work.
  2. How much of the work is recurring? If the business runs on weekly routines, you want a record of how often they happen, not just a reminder that they are due.
  3. What does the bill look like at twice your size? Do the sum both ways.

If you land on Todoist, use it well: one project per client or area, dates on everything, a weekly weed. If you land on something with goals and routines built in, the Todoist alternative page has the full comparison, and the teams page covers how a workspace runs day to day.

Start on EvyOS. The free plan is a single-person space, so it is a good way to try the goals-projects-tasks structure yourself before bringing the team in on Pro.