Fluidwave vs Todoist: which should you use in 2026?

Todoist’s quick add is the best in class: type a sentence and it parses the date, project, label and priority as you go. Projects, sections, sub-tasks, labels, filters and a Kanban board cover most personal workflows, and recurring tasks are flexible. The limits are structural: sub-tasks only, so one task cannot block another; four manual priority levels and no automatic ordering; and the free plan caps you at five personal projects.

Fluidwave’s input bar parses a full sentence too, including duration, recurrence and reminders, with an explicit Use AI toggle. Beyond capture, it ranks the list for you. Auto-prioritization uses 12 criteria you can reorder, such as overdue, due dates, quick wins, importance, complexity and goals, and the Active filter hides anything you cannot work on yet: future start dates, tasks outside their schedule and anything waiting on someone else. Statuses include a typed Waiting status for a waiting-for list, which in Todoist you rebuild with a label and a filter.

Views go further as well: Table, Card, Kanban and a Gantt chart with dependencies and circular-dependency detection. Fluidwave also tracks habits with streaks, goals and intentions, where Todoist relies on recurring tasks and its Karma score. If your needs are a clean list, Todoist is lighter; if you want structure and automatic ordering, Fluidwave has more.

Todoist gets email in by forwarding or through its Gmail and Outlook add-ons, and Pro’s Email Assist can turn a forwarded message into a task. That is enough to capture a to-do from a thread, but you still read, reply and triage in your mail client, and nothing summarizes or scores your inbox.

Fluidwave includes a full Gmail client: inbox, starred, newsletters, sent, drafts and labels synced two-way, compose and reply with attachments, and any number of Gmail accounts. AI triage takes you through the inbox one thread at a time with a summary, a priority score and a suggested action, and you confirm with one key: reply, task, archive, trash, unsubscribe or skip. A task made from an email stays linked to the thread, with chips on both sides. The Newsletters view supports bulk one-click unsubscribe with RFC 8058 links, and Teach Triage turns a plain-English note about how you sorted a message into a draft automation rule.

The trade-off is provider support. Todoist’s add-ons cover Gmail and Outlook; Fluidwave’s email is Gmail only. If your inbox is in Microsoft 365, Todoist’s forwarding path is the one you can actually use.

Todoist syncs two-way with Google Calendar and, on Pro, adds a calendar layout with task durations so you can drag tasks into time slots. On the free plan, Upcoming is a list grouped by day. Nothing places tasks into free time for you.

Fluidwave includes a calendar with day, week and month views and an Unscheduled tasks panel beside it. Drag a task onto the grid to plan it, resize it, or split it into several sessions with the remaining minutes tracked. AI scheduling runs in two modes: an instant one that packs the visible tasks into free time in their prioritized order, and a Claude-powered one that weighs task names and context when ordering and splitting sessions. Both respect working hours and leave breaks around events, and suggestions render as dashed blocks until you confirm them one by one or all at once.

Fluidwave reads your Google Calendar only to find free time and writes back only the sessions you choose to sync, per session or in bulk, across multiple accounts with per-calendar visibility toggles. It supports Google Calendar only. The practical difference is that all of this is included at no cost, where Todoist’s calendar layout and durations are Pro features.

Todoist Assist suggests sub-tasks and breaks down work, and Ramble turns dictation into tasks, with 10 sessions a month on the free plan; most of it is Pro only, and it is not a chat assistant that manages your list. Automations run through Zapier, Make or IFTTT rather than inside the app. Todoist does ship an official MCP server, so Claude and other agents can read and write your tasks.

Fluidwave’s chat assistant has roughly 110 tools, covering task creation and bulk updates, scheduling and session confirmation, email actions, automations and view switching, and it works by voice. Every change it makes can be undone. The visual automation builder is a node canvas: a trigger (an email arrives, a task changes), a condition with Matches and Otherwise branches, and actions on both email and tasks such as archive, label, set priority, convert to task, update status or set a due date. An AI reply step drafts or sends a response from plain-English instructions, live preview shows what a rule would match before you save, and the builder flags rules that contradict or overlap.

Both apps connect to Claude. Fluidwave’s Claude MCP connector exposes 23 task and list tools and sits beside a public REST API with OAuth.

Todoist’s free plan is usable but capped at five personal projects, and the calendar layout, task durations, custom reminders and unlimited Ramble need Pro at $5 per month billed annually or $7 month to month. Fluidwave is free forever, with no subscription, no credit card and no AI add-on.

Platforms are Todoist’s strongest suit: web, macOS, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android, Apple Watch and Wear OS, all working offline. Fluidwave runs on the web, as a macOS app and on iOS and Android, with Windows and Linux desktop apps still coming, and is available in 16 languages. Both are offline-first; Fluidwave keeps tasks and synced email in a local cache and syncs when you reconnect.

Both also integrate with Slack, though differently: Todoist adds tasks with /todoist and a message action, while Fluidwave adds tasks by slash command and can sync a list to a native Slack List with a board layout.

On privacy, Fluidwave states that nobody at the company reads your email, that full message bodies and attachments are never stored and are fetched from Gmail only when you open them, that Google tokens are encrypted with AES, and that email is never used to train AI models, sold or used for advertising. Claude is the only model provider.