Toodledo vs. OmniFocus 2

I re-evaluate my task tracking system regularly. Toodledo was just resurfaced to me - when I had first evaluated it, it was significantly lacking features that I relied upon. This time around, I was much more impressed.

Feb 2019 EDIT OmniFocus has now replaced contexts with tags, which on mobile devices can have locations added to them for proper context alerting. OmniFocus 3 is a huge step forward for OmniFocus and will make it even harder to compete with.

Things that OmniFocus has, that Toodledo is missing

Nested folders

I have a lot of projects, and a lot of different ways that these projects are grouped. For example, I have top level folders for Work, and for Personal. Within those folders I have sub-folders defining groupings of projects. In my Personal folder, my sub-folders include: Finances, House, Health, Learning, Horses, Friends, Career. This allows me to have added categorization for my projects - it is very clear what the project is in reference to.

Nested contexts

I would actually be ok with forgoing nested contexts with the addition of a good location feature. As location is the sole reason I use nested contexts.

The concept of a project

I know there are many workarounds for creating projects in Toodledo - I’ve read the forums and was impressed with the creativity that users have when factoring solutions to this problem. Fundamentally, I really need to be able to define a project. Toodledo gets close to this with the Outline feature - this to me is really a project. However, there is no way to set due dates, contexts, locations, etc on each of the tasks created in an outline, and there is no way to export an outline to a folder or task with sub-tasks.  This is something that OmniFocus does really well.

Deferring tasks

The ability to defer a task or project to a later date, and completely 

Project types 

(Parallel, Sequential, Single Actions)

Repeat options

OmniFocus does a much better job providing advanced options for recurring time frames. The ability to defer or due after the last item was checked off is awesome.

Focus

One of my favorite features of OmniFocus is the ability to click a top level folder (Work) and focus only on that. It will then hide everything from me that is not in the Work parent folder allowing me to only see the things that are relevant to my job.

Things that Toodledo has, that OmniFocus is missing

Location

#1 thing I want in OmniFocus. With Location combined with Contexts I am able to remove duplicate Contexts, and filter by location

Habits

This is a really cool feature, and is better done than any other habit tracking app that I’ve ever used. The way you’re able to customize how you want to score or track your habit is a really nice feature, and the calendar view to give a high level insight is awesome.

Lists

These are really cool. It’s like an excel sheet inside of a task app. I’ve struggled in the past with using OmniFocus for quick lists - it never quite felt right titling a Project “Shopping list 3/15/2016”. Even if I clone it or make it recurring in some way.

Saving advanced searches

OmniFocus lets you do this in the pro version, but the “saved search” is presented in a different way, as Perspectives. The advanced searching tools in Toodledo are easy to use, clear, and can be saved for repeated use. 

Tags

I wish that tags would persist even if there weren’t any items associated with it. It helps trigger things to remember. I also could have easily gotten around using nested folders by really smart use of Tags - if they persisted that is.

Summary

Overall, OmniFocus is more aligned with my needs. That said, I’ll be keeping an eye on Toodledo to see if they improve on the features I find lacking.