Olive vs Todoist — Which Should You Use?

Todoist is a mature task manager built around projects, labels, filters, and 90+ integrations you set up yourself. Olive is shared memory: text her "call the plumber Monday" and the task is created from that sentence — no quick-add syntax, no project to file it into first. Choose Todoist to build your own system; choose Olive to skip building one. Free during beta.

Last updated: October 5, 2026

Gianluca Venturi — Founder, Olive (GV Digital Labs)

When Todoist is the better choice

If you’re the kind of person who likes building the system — naming your projects, deciding which labels mean what, setting up a filter that shows every priority-one task due today across six different areas of your life — Todoist is the better fit, and it’s good at this in a way few apps are. Its structure is the product: projects nest into sub-projects, labels cut across them, filters combine both into exactly the view you want, and 90+ integrations mean it can pull tasks in from email, calendars, and other tools you already use. None of that works without you setting it up first, and that’s the trade-off, not a flaw — a task manager built for people who want to design their own system has to ask something of you up front. If structuring your own task list sounds like a feature rather than a chore, Todoist rewards that instinct.

That upfront investment pays off most for recurring, structured work — a freelancer running five client projects with their own labels and due-date patterns, or someone who wants one filter view showing everything overdue across every area of life at a glance. Todoist’s reporting history and recurring-task handling are built for that kind of long-running system, and they stay useful precisely because you put the structure in place before you needed it, not after.

When Olive is the better choice

If building the system is the part you keep putting off — you’ve opened Todoist, stared at “create a new project,” and closed the app without adding the task you meant to add — Olive is the better fit. Olive (witholive.app) skips the setup step entirely: you text her “call the plumber Monday” the way you’d tell a person, and she sorts it into the right place without you naming a project or picking a label first. There’s nothing to configure before you can use it, because the configuration is her job, not yours. That matters most for the task that would otherwise never get written down at all — the one you think of in the car, half-formed, with no time to open an app and decide where it belongs. Olive takes it as a sentence and does the sorting work Todoist expects you to do yourself.

That also covers the tasks that don’t fit neatly into one project anyway — a voice note recorded on a walk about three unrelated things, a photo of a business card you need to follow up on, an idea that doesn’t belong to “Work” or “Home” but matters anyway. Todoist asks you to decide where each of those belongs before you can capture it. Olive takes the message as it comes and sorts afterward, which matters most in the moment you’re least likely to want to make a filing decision — mid-errand, half-distracted, trying to get the thought out of your head before it’s gone.

Does Olive have projects and labels like Todoist?

No, and this is a real difference, not a soft one. Todoist’s projects and labels are structure you design — you decide what “Work,” “Groceries,” or “Someday” means, and every task you add gets filed into that structure by you. Olive doesn’t ask you to design anything; she reads what you send and sorts it into a category automatically, without a project hierarchy for you to maintain. That’s a real trade-off, not a lesser version of Todoist’s approach: if you want to build a custom system with sub-projects and cross-cutting filters, Olive won’t replicate that today, and Todoist does it well. If what you actually want is to stop maintaining the system and have things end up in the right place without the upkeep, Olive’s automatic sorting does the job Todoist’s structure was built to do, from the opposite direction.

Can Olive parse a due date from a plain sentence?

Yes — text her “dentist next Tuesday at 4” and the date and time come straight from that sentence, the same way you’d mention it to a person, without a syntax to remember. Todoist’s Quick Add does something similar with its own natural-language date recognition, built specifically so typing “every Monday” or “tomorrow at 5pm” sets a recurring or one-time due date without opening a separate date picker — it’s a genuinely well-built feature on Todoist’s side, not a weak point. The real difference is where that sentence comes from: in Todoist, you’re typing into the Todoist app with its parsing in mind. In Olive, you’re texting the way you already text anyone else, and the date-parsing happens on a message you’d have sent regardless, inside WhatsApp rather than inside a dedicated task app.

Is Olive good for solo task management?

It depends on what “good” means to you. If solo task management means a list view, priority flags, recurring tasks, and the ability to filter six projects down to “what’s due today,” Todoist’s dedicated task-management screen does that job more completely, because that screen is the entire product. Olive doesn’t have an equivalent dedicated task-list view today — what she offers instead is a lower bar to actually writing the task down in the first place, since there’s no app to open and no project to choose. For someone who already has a task-management habit and wants to go deeper into it, Todoist is the more complete tool. For someone whose real problem is that tasks never get captured at all because opening the right app at the right moment is the hard part, Olive removes that first barrier, even without matching Todoist’s list-management depth once the task is in. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, either — some people keep Todoist for the structured parts of life and text Olive the stray tasks that would otherwise fall through the cracks between projects.

See how Olive fits people who think in brain-dumps rather than lists, compare more zero-structure options in 5 Notion alternatives for ADHD brains, or visit the Olive homepage for the full picture.

Start using Olive — free during beta and text her the task you keep meaning to add to a list you never open.