I’ve been a Nozbe fan from day one. In fact, that’s what got me interested in GTD. I wanted a web-based to-do list with great iPhone support. I found Nozbe, realized that it was GTD based, watched some of their videos, and then eventually got the GTD book and dove in.
After I realized I was a fan of GTD (and not necessarily Nozbe), I started looking for alternatives to make sure I wasn’t missing something better. I tried quite a few, but the only one that came close was Toodledo. I liked it enough that I decided to dive in and run them both for a few days, which made me very unproductive. 
I came close to switching over to it, but eventually decided to stay with Nozbe. Here’s a few reasons why:
Projects
Nozbe has Projects, and it lists them down the side. In Toodledo, you have Folders instead. No problem there. The issue is that it is hard to view all of them at once when you have more than 6 or 8 of them going (and I have about 30). Many Toodledo users create basic folders instead (such as “Home”, “Work”, etc) and then create a Task for each project. With Toodledo, you can create sub-tasks (which is great!), thus making that system work.
However, that leads to a few issues. First, it’s essentially a hack. Why use a hacked-together solution for a problem that Nozbe solves perfectly? The other problem is that it makes it hard to see exactly what project each task is for. Using folders as projects, I could see the folder name (“My Site #1″) and the starred tasks (Next Actions) for it. Now I see folders titled things like “My Sites” with a bunch of starred tasks, but I don’t know which site each task is for unless I click on it. Not a huge deal, but it makes it a royal pain to scroll through a list and see what I need to be working on.
Filtering
Toodledo has some incredible filters — far better than Nozbe’s. However, they’re missing the key one — filtering projects. With Toodledo, your folders have names and no other data. With Nozbe, they can have tags and descriptions. The project tags are gold. When I get to work, I can pull up my Next Actions page, filter by “Work” and only see actions from projects that I’ve tagged for work. Same when I get home. With Toodledo, there is no good way to do that.
The workaround is the same as above — use folders for broad categories, then use tasks and sub-tasks for your projects. That way I can just view the “Work” folder at work and it gets the job done, but it still leads to the problems I mentioned before.
Sharing
Both sites allow you to collaborate on items, but Nozbe’s implementation is a little better. They do it on a per-project basis, and free accounts are allowed five projects. That means you can collaborate with users on small things without them having to pay for an account.
With Toodledo, it’s a bit more complex. You can share folders, but that gets strange if I only want to share a certain project with someone, since it’s just a task in a folder — I have to share the entire folder. Not only that, but they need to pay for an account to be able to edit items in the shared folder.
That’s not to say it’s all bad. Toodledo has some great things going for it:
- It looks better. Nozbe has a big redesign coming soon, but Toodledo looks a little better today.
- It has an iPhone app. Nozbe has an excellent iPhone-formatted site, but no native app. Again, it’s coming soon (within a few weeks, hopefully), but Toodledo has it today.
- It has a much more active community. Nozbe just redid their forums and hopefully that’ll help, but Toodledo has thousands of posts in theirs and it’s a great resource.
- It’s less expensive. $15/year instead of $7/month.
Most of the rest of the features are about the same in both places — after all, they’re both based on GTD. The bottom line is that Nozbe helps me get things done better than Toodledo does. What else really matters in this discussion?
I’ve shown Nozbe to a couple people (both of them were non-GTD folks), and their comment is was “that just makes sense”. The flow is very logical. They both signed up, and both later upgraded to paid accounts.
I’m anxious for the Nozbe iPhone app to come out, but it’s not as big of a deal as I once thought. As I said before, I really wanted a system that I could manage from my iPhone. The beauty of GTD is now that everything is out of my head and in a system, I no longer worry about it all the time and I rarely access it from my phone. If I have a new thought when I’m away from a PC, I just fire it through Jott and move on.
So there you have it. I like Nozbe a little better than Toodledo and I’ll continue to use it, but you really can’t go wrong with either service.
Which do you prefer?
Excellent appraisal. While I’ve not used Toodledo, I have looked at other GTD apps and compared them with Nozbe. The only one that comes close for me is Omnifocus, but without a full web client or Windows app, it won’t work for me. Web apps may not be quite as powerful – Omnifocus has incredible filtering and searching on both active and completed projects – but there is nothing beating a web client for convenience and access. John
Omnifocus looks nice, but I didn’t dig into too much because I wanted a web-based app. While desktop apps have some advantages, I simply needed a web-based solution. I’m on three different PCs many days (home desktop, work desktop, laptop) and I didn’t want to have to transfer files to keep them current.
I also had looked at Vitalist (which feels a lot like Toodledo, but with fewer features) and being an Evernote user I looked at cobbling that together as a GTD solution as well.
I used Zenbe Lists on my phone in my pre-GTD days for simple to-do lists. It’s GREAT for that, but doesn’t manage the full GTD system very well. At the end of the day, nothing can touch Nozbe — at least for now.
I checked a few GTD sites recently (trying to pick one for my use – at the moment I picked Nozbe), and my feeling on ToodleDo was: ugh, those guys did any function they could find (to put pretty checkmarks on comparisons), but failed to make the single picture. Simple example: they have notebook for notes. But this notebook is just a separate item in the menu, which I must visit separately. And so on. Everything is here, but does not play together.
If I were to switch from Nozbe, I’d seriously consider Vitalist which is different but also seems well thought out. But their “small” plan allows only for 25 projects (while Nozbe gives 100) so I wouldn’t fit and would neet to go the more expensive route.
[...] more information about Nozbe, I recommend you check out our Nozbe vs. Toodledo post. Share and [...]
[...] looking around again for an alternative to Nozbe. The two that came the closest were Vitalist and Toodledo, but they couldn’t measure up to Nozbe even with some of the broken features. Nirvana HQ [...]
[...] for me. I came really close to choosing ToodleDo, but Nozbe just worked better for me. I wrote up a comparison of the two earlier in the year. While both products have matured a bit since then, the basic comparison of [...]
can I humbly suggest people check out our new online task and project manager
We created this in response to the shortcomings of apps we truied like toodledo, basecamp and cemtral desktop.
Nozbe wasn’t around when we started out (like 2 years ago !) but I think dooster measures up very well to it
We’d appreciate any feedback
thanks ed
Anybody using getitdoneapp from getitdoneapp.com. Both getitdoneapp and toodledo are not as GTD complaint as Nozbe but both have very good calender and reminder integration which to me is an essential part of any work management system.
Pankaj — GetItDoneApp is pretty solid, but I really hate the way their sharing system works. Otherwise, it’s not too bad.
I love Toodledo, but not the app. Can’t sort by tags or use your online searches. This might be no big deal for many, but it’s my desktop method.
My 30 day project to bring ToodleDo and GTD ‘online’: http://30daysnewlife.blogspot.com/p/aprils-30-day-project-using-toodledocom.html
Just wanted to thank you for the referral to dooster. I checked it out and it does everything I wanted but didnt get from Basecamp, Central desktop and even Manymoon which I checked out more recently and is cool but didnt quite satisfy.
This dooster app has definitely got what it takes. Fantastic
dooster.net
Hi…how does one handle sequential and parallel tasks in any of the tools mentioned in the comments (nozbe, toodledo, dooster)? For example, if task a gets delayed…will the effect show on following dependent tasks? Can I assign tasks to other team members?
Is there a recommended tool for GTD based group project management?
Thanks
I don’t think either of them handle sequential/parallel tasks very well.
Nozbe handles group-based project management much better than the others. However, it may be TOO simple if you’re a large team. For me and a handful of other freelancers it works great!