I’ve been a Todoist user for years, but once they started really pushing their paid tiers and the AI features felt more like upsells than actual helpers, I started looking for a todoist alternative free ai 2026. Enter taskly — a daily planner that promises to organize tasks, goals, and to-do lists without the premium paywall. I spent a couple weeks working out of it to see if it holds up.
How Taskly’s AI Actually Works
The AI angle is the main draw here. When you dump a bunch of tasks into Taskly, it tries to surface dependencies and suggest a schedule. I tested this with a messy Monday: I had a report due, a client call, groceries, and a reminder to water the plants. The AI correctly flagged the report as high priority and scheduled the call before lunch. But it also suggested I do groceries at 2 PM right after the call, which didn’t match real life (the store is 30 minutes away and I had a 3 PM meeting). It’s useful as a starting point, but you still need to manually adjust. The suggestions aren’t as context-aware as I’d hoped.
Free Tier Reality Check
Unlike Todoist’s recent bait-and-switch (where basic features like reminders got locked), Taskly gives you a genuinely usable free plan. You can set recurring tasks, create projects, and use the AI scheduling. The main tradeoff is that you only get a limited number of AI-powered suggestions per week — around 50, from what I could tell. That’s fine if you’re a light planner, but heavy users might hit the ceiling quickly. I hit it by Wednesday, and the app basically turned into a plain to-do list after that. Still better than paying $5 a month for a feature you may not need.
Where the Planner Feels a Bit Rough
Taskly’s daily view is clean, but setting up a “goal” (like “improve fitness”) and breaking it into weekly actions felt unnecessarily manual. I wanted the AI to split it into micro-steps automatically, but it just gave me a blank template. There’s also no good way to drag tasks across days on mobile — you have to reopen and reassign dates. That friction made me fall behind on planning after a few days. For what it’s worth, the team seems active; I saw a “coming soon” note about habit tracking, so maybe that’ll smooth out.
Is It a True Todoist Alternative?
If you rely on Todoist’s natural language input (type “buy milk tomorrow at 8am” and it works perfectly), Taskly’s parser is less forgiving. It missed “next Wednesday” a couple times, defaulting to tomorrow instead. But for someone who wants a free ai to do list app 2026 that won’t constantly nag you to upgrade, Taskly gets the basics right. The AI isn’t magic, but it saves you five minutes of reordering every morning — that’s about right for a free tool.
If you’re after a taskly ai task management experience without spending anything, this is worth trying. It won’t replace a full project management suite, but as a ai task management app free option for personal productivity and light work planning, it does its job without the premium push. Just know that you’ll have to fill in the gaps yourself.
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