Hive vs Todoist 2026
Short answer: Hive if you run a cross-functional team with parallel projects; Todoist if you need the fastest personal task capture system available. They score nearly the same overall (3.7 vs 3.9 out of 5) but solve genuinely different problems.
The thing no comparison page mentions: these are not equivalent alternatives. Hive is a team project management platform with Kanban, Gantt, timelines, approvals, and time tracking. Todoist is a personal productivity tool built around Quick Add and Ramble AI. Knowing which category fits your work decides this before you read a single feature spec.
Team PM with 11+ views, time tracking, proofing, and Buzz AI.
Try Hive for free →Read the full Hive review →Personal task capture best-in-class, Ramble AI, but light on team PM.
Try Todoist for free →Read the full Todoist review →Who wins for you
Todoist Quick Add captures a full task in 8 seconds. Ramble AI turns a voice brain dump into a prioritized list. Nothing else is faster.
Try Todoist for free →Hive puts Kanban, Gantt, and timeline off the same data. Built-in chat, proofing, and live support make it the team PM pick.
Try Hive for free →Todoist Business at $8/month per user covers the team, no add-ons. Hive stacks extra fees for proofing, timesheets, and automations.
Try Todoist for free →Hive Gantt plus timeline plus resource planning gives ops teams the view spread no personal task tool can match.
Try Hive for free →Hive vs Todoist at a glance
Every cell below is grounded in official pricing and product docs checked June 2026. Read the add-on row before comparing any headline price.
| Hive | Todoist | Edge | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary categoryThe most important row on this page | Team project management platform | Personal and small-team task manager | — |
| Free tier | Up to 10 members, unlimited tasks, 200 MB storage, no time limit | 5 projects, 3 filter views, 1-week history (was 80 projects before 2021) | Hive |
| Entry paid price (annual) | $5/user/month (Starter) | $5/user/month (Pro) | — |
| Entry paid price (monthly)Todoist slightly cheaper monthly after Dec 2025 hike | ~$7.50/user/month | $7/user/month | Todoist |
| Add-on modelHive add-ons can nearly double the real monthly bill | Yes: proofing, timesheets, resourcing, dashboards, automations each $5/user/month extra | No add-ons, all features included in plan | Todoist |
| Task views | 11+ (Kanban, Gantt, calendar, timeline, table, portfolio, list, summary) | 3 (List, Board, Calendar - Calendar paywalled on Pro+) | Hive |
| Task dependenciesShared gap vs Asana and ClickUp on both tools | No | No | — |
| AI features | Buzz AI: project scaffolding, email, meeting booking, analytics (from Starter) | Ramble: voice/text-to-task, unlimited on Pro+ (Dec 2025 hike did not affect this) | — |
| Native integrations | ~15 confirmed: Google Drive, Dropbox, QuickBooks, Zoom, Slack, Teams, GitHub, Jira | Google Calendar, Outlook, Slack, Teams, Jira, Trello + REST API + Claude (Anthropic) | — |
| Support channels | Live chat (~10 min avg), email, Hive University, Enterprise CSM | Email only, no live chat, no phone, no documented SLA on any plan | Hive |
| Team collaboration | Built-in chat, @mentions, proofing and approval workflows, time tracking | Shared projects, task assignment, comments, no team chat | Hive |
| SOC2 Type IIRelevant for regulated-industry teams | Not confirmed on any plan | Business plan | Todoist |
Prices checked June 2026 on hive.com/pricing and morgen.so/blog-posts/todoist-pricing (updated March 2026). Todoist December 2025 price increase confirmed via todoist.com help article.
Criterion by criterion, head to head
The same five criteria scored on each tool's review page. Tied scores still get a clear directional pick.
01 Round 1: first five minutes and the real ceiling.
Todoist takes this one clearly, 4.5 to 3.2, and the gap is real. Hit Q on the Mac app, type "Submit proposal Thursday 2pm weekly #Work p1", date, time, recurrence, project and priority are set in one keystroke. We timed it at 8 seconds from thought to organized task. No menus, no dropdowns. New users are autonomous in under 30 minutes and a complete workspace is set up in an afternoon. Occasional parser misfires on words like "week" in a title break the flow, but they are edge cases, not the daily experience.
Hive is genuinely fast for simple projects: drop in action cards, assign owners, switch view from list to Kanban in a click, and the Buzz AI assistant turns a plain prompt into structured project phases with dates and owners. The honest problem is what happens next. Eleven-plus views, custom fields, statuses, labels, automations, and the depth turns into overload. One verified G2 reviewer needed close to a year to feel proficient on complex setups. Notifications vanish after 3-4 seconds, lag shows on larger projects, and features are buried in sub-menus. For light project tracking, Hive is approachable. For granular multi-team work, budget real onboarding hours.
Choose Hive if your team is willing to invest onboarding time and needs the view depth for cross-functional work.
Choose Todoist if individual speed and daily task capture with near-zero learning curve is the metric.
02 Round 2: headline price vs real bill.
Both score 3.4 for opposite reasons, which makes this the most useful tie of the five. Hive looks cheap: free for 10 members, $5 Starter with Buzz AI included, $12 Teams with time tracking and portfolios. The catch is structural. Proofing and Approvals, Timesheets, Team Resourcing, Advanced Dashboards, and Automations are all a-la-carte at $5 per user per month each. A 5-person team on Teams adding just Proofing and Timesheets goes from $60/month to $110/month. That is not a rounding error, it nearly doubles the headline price before any niche add-on comes in.
Todoist's problem is a different kind of trust damage. The December 2025 Pro monthly price hike of roughly 40% arrived with no flagship feature launch (confirmed: todoist.com help article, December 10, 2025). On annual billing, Pro at $5 and Business at $8 per user per month remain defensible for daily users who use the full feature set. On monthly billing, TickTick Pro at $2.99 with habits and Pomodoro bundled is now a real competitive threat at roughly half the price. Free plan: 5 projects is a hard cap that hits most real-world users in week one. The mitigation for Hive is a 14-day full-feature trial, no credit card. The mitigation for Todoist is legacy rates for pre-June 2022 subscribers worth checking.
Choose Hive if you only need the base Teams plan features, no add-ons. At $12 flat it beats Asana at $10.99 with more view flexibility.
Choose Todoist on annual billing if Ramble AI and 300 projects are daily tools. Test TickTick first if evaluating fresh in 2026.
03 Round 3: feature breadth in different directions.
A clean 4.2 each, but the depth is in different dimensions. Hive's calling card is the view system: 11+ layouts (Kanban, Gantt, calendar, timeline, table, portfolio, summary) all running off the same underlying data. Build the project once, operations reads Kanban, leadership reads timeline. Real-time Hive Notes add collaborative documents in the same workspace, built-in time tracking handles billable hours with a QuickBooks invoicing path, and Buzz AI scaffolds an entire project from a plain-text prompt. The hard gaps: no task dependencies (cannot link or sequence tasks), no date-shift propagation (move a timeline and every action updates manually). Multiple reviewers flag this as a real operational bottleneck on complex projects.
Todoist delivers personal productivity depth the team PM tools miss. Four-level task hierarchy, P1-P4 flags, 150 custom filter views on paid plans, and Ramble AI as the flagship 2026 differentiator. Dictate a disorganized brain dump, get a structured dated prioritized task list. Multiple G2 and Capterra reviewers in 2026 call it a genuine game-changer for offloading mental load, and unlimited on Pro+. The Karma system has kept users engaged for 8-10 years. The ceiling is the same missing piece: no task dependencies, no Gantt, no timeline, no resource planning. For team project management, Todoist deliberately stops short.
Choose Hive for team PM feature breadth: multi-view, collaboration, time tracking, proofing.
Choose Todoist for personal productivity depth: fast capture, Ramble AI, advanced recurring tasks.
04 Round 4: when things break mid-project.
Hive wins this 4.0 to 3.2, and the margin is earned. Live chat at roughly 10-minute average response time is a real differentiator in this category, where most PM tools default to an email queue. Capterra reviewers consistently describe Hive support as helpful and effective, and the self-serve layer is solid: Hive University covers guided onboarding, the help center has step-by-step PDFs and YouTube tutorials, and Enterprise customers get unlimited onboarding plus a dedicated CSM. The honest gap is the absence of confirmed phone support on any plan, and smaller teams do not get the white-glove tier.
Todoist's support is email-only across all plans, no live chat, no phone, no documented SLA even on Business. The developer API docs at developer.todoist.com are clear for technical users, and the SOC2 Type II certification on Business signals operational maturity, but that is a compliance signal, not a support quality one. What makes it particularly visible post-hike: a roughly 40% monthly price increase on Pro in December 2025 arrived with no support upgrade alongside it. Self-sufficient individual users who solve issues via the help center and community forums will not feel the gap. Teams that need a human in under an hour when something breaks will.
Choose Hive for teams that need responsive human support during live project work.
Choose Todoist if self-sufficient on async email and docs, especially for individual use.
05 Round 5: native connectors vs business operations tooling.
Todoist edges this 4.0 to 3.6, with a narrower gap than the numbers suggest. Todoist nails the core workplace stack natively: Google Calendar (bidirectional sync, tasks with due dates appear as events), Outlook, Slack, Teams, Jira, and Trello are confirmed first-party connectors. The Claude (Anthropic) integration as a featured connector is notable for AI-assisted workflows. REST API at developer.todoist.com is well-documented, browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox) and email forwarding close the last capture friction points. The honest gap: the "thousands of apps" claim leans on Zapier and Make for niche tools, not native connectors.
Hive covers roughly 15 confirmed native connectors: Google Drive, Google Calendar, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, Bynder, QuickBooks, Zoom, Teams, Outlook Calendar, Slack, GitHub, Jira, and Jira Data Center. For business operations tooling (cloud storage, accounting, DevOps), that spread is broader than Todoist's. Project import from Trello, Asana, Basecamp, Smartsheet plus CSV and JSON removes migration friction. The Zapier ecosystem adds HubSpot, Pipedrive, ActiveCampaign, Harvest, and Marketo. The catch reviewers flag consistently: some of the more useful connectors sit behind higher-tier plans, not available on the free or entry accounts that need them most.
Choose Hive for business operations integrations: cloud storage, QuickBooks, GitHub, Jira.
Choose Todoist for the standard tech-worker stack: Google Calendar sync, Slack, Teams, Jira, and Claude.
The real cost, plan by plan
Headline prices on both sides look competitive. The add-on model on Hive and the December 2025 hike on Todoist change the math. Run both examples before budgeting.
| Hive | Todoist | Edge | |
|---|---|---|---|
| FreeHive's free plan is more useful for real team work | $0: up to 10 members, unlimited tasks, 200 MB storage, work views, native chat | $0: 5 projects, 3 filter views, 1-week history, limited Ramble | Hive |
| Starter / Pro (annual) | $5/user/month: Gantt, Buzz AI, calendar, Zoom, Slack | $5/user/month: 300 projects, unlimited Ramble, 150 filters, custom reminders | — |
| Teams / Business (annual)Todoist Business is $4 cheaper per user per month at this tier | $12/user/month: custom fields, forms, time tracking, portfolios, unlimited members | $8/user/month: team workspace, SOC2 Type II, up to 1,000 members, activity logs | Todoist |
| Monthly billing | ~$7.50/user (Starter estimate) | $7/user (Pro), $10/user (Business) after Dec 2025 hike | — |
| 5 users, Teams + Proofing + Timesheets (annual)Two Hive add-ons more than double the bill vs Todoist Business for same team | $110/month: $60 base + $25 proofing + $25 timesheets | $40/month: 5 x $8 Business, all features included | Todoist |
| Enterprise | Custom: security controls, unlimited onboarding, dedicated CSM, enterprise API | No explicit enterprise tier, Business scales to 1,000 members | Hive |
Prices checked June 2026. Todoist December 2025 Business monthly increase: $8 to $10 (+25%). Pro monthly: approximately +40%. No new flagship features launched at that time (source: todoist.com help article). Hive add-on costs: each $5/user/month, stacks on top of any plan.
Pick by scenario
Choose Hive if...
- You manage a cross-functional team (agency, PMO, marketing dept) where operations wants Kanban, leadership wants Gantt, both off the same project data
- Proofing, approvals, or client deliverables review is core to your workflow, the Proofing and Approvals add-on handles this natively
- Built-in time tracking with billable time and a QuickBooks invoicing path matters, without adding a third tool
- Your team needs a responsive human on live chat (~10 min avg) rather than waiting on an email queue for support
- Buzz AI value is relevant: scaffolding a full project from a text prompt, handling email, and booking meetings in one workspace
Choose Todoist if...
- Speed of personal task capture is the metric: Quick Add with Q shortcut captures a full dated prioritized task in about 8 seconds
- Ramble AI is the use case: dictate a voice brain dump and get a structured dated task list, unlimited on Pro+
- Predictable billing matters: Todoist Pro and Business include all features in-plan, no surprise add-ons stacking month after month
- The team runs in a Microsoft 365 or Outlook environment and needs SOC2 Type II compliance for a regulated-industry context (Business plan)
- Personal productivity across years matters: the Karma system and daily habit rhythm keep users engaged for 8-10 year stretches per verified reviews
Frequently asked questions
Is Hive better than Todoist for project management?
They solve different problems, and that distinction matters more than any feature comparison. Hive is a full team project management platform with Kanban, Gantt, timelines, approvals, time tracking, chat, and resource planning, built for 5 to 100+ person teams running parallel projects. Todoist is a personal and small-team task manager optimized for individual productivity, quick task capture, and daily habit management. If the work involves scheduling multi-phase team projects with shared deliverables, Hive wins. If the work is capturing and tracking personal to-dos and lightweight team task lists, Todoist wins. Most comparison pages miss this category gap entirely.Is Hive free?
Yes. The Hive free plan covers up to 10 workspace members, unlimited tasks, collaborative notes, work views, email integration, and native chat with no time limit. The ceiling is 200 MB storage and the absence of Gantt, custom fields, forms, time tracking, and Buzz AI, those start at Starter ($5/user/month). There is also a 14-day full-feature trial with no credit card required. Compare: Todoist's free plan caps at 5 projects, which forces upsell quickly for most real-world users managing multiple areas.Is Todoist free?
Todoist has a permanently free plan with no trial expiry and no credit card. In 2026, the free tier allows 5 personal projects, 3 saved filter views, 1 week of activity history, 5 MB uploads, and limited Ramble AI sessions. For very light personal use, a grocery list and one project area, it works. For anyone managing multiple life or work areas, the 5-project cap forces an upgrade, often with persistent in-app upsell prompts. Microsoft To Do (completely free, no project cap) is the strongest free alternative for Todoist's target use case.Hive vs Todoist vs Asana: which wins for a 10-person team?
Three different categories. Asana is the most mature team PM tool, with task dependencies, goal tracking, and broad enterprise adoption, and it fills the gap both Hive and Todoist share (neither has task dependencies). Hive is more affordable than Asana at base ($12 vs $10.99, though Hive add-ons stack), has more AI-native features with Buzz, and better live chat support. Todoist does not scale to team PM the way Asana or Hive do: no Gantt, no timeline, no resource planning. For 10 people doing collaborative project work, Asana or Hive over Todoist. For 10 people sharing parallel task lists without complex dependencies, Todoist Business at $8/user/month (annual).How much does Hive cost for a team of 5?
On Teams plan ($12/user/month annual): $60/month. Adding the commonly needed extras: Proofing and Approvals ($5 x 5 = $25/month) plus Timesheets ($5 x 5 = $25/month) brings the real total to $110/month, nearly double the headline price. If the base Teams plan features cover the workflow with no add-ons, $60/month is real. The important step is pricing the specific add-ons the team will actually use before budgeting against any alternative. Enterprise is a custom quote.Is Todoist worth it after the December 2025 price increase?
Todoist raised Business monthly from $8 to $10/user/month (+25%) and Pro monthly approximately 40%, effective December 10, 2025, citing investment in team features. No flagship feature launched alongside the increase. On annual billing ($5/month for Pro, $8/month for Business), the value case holds for committed daily users: unlimited Ramble AI, 300 projects, full history. On monthly billing, TickTick Pro at $2.99/month offers habit tracking, Pomodoro, and a better calendar at roughly half the price. The practical verdict: stay on annual if Todoist is already the trusted system. Test TickTick first if starting fresh in 2026.Can you migrate from Todoist to Hive?
Yes, with limitations. Hive imports from Trello, Asana, Basecamp, and Smartsheet natively, plus CSV and JSON files. There is no direct one-click Todoist-to-Hive migration. The practical route: export Todoist projects to CSV (available in Todoist settings), then import that CSV into Hive. Task metadata including projects, due dates, and priorities will carry over. Subtask nesting and custom filter views will need manual reconstruction. Allow 1 to 2 hours for a thorough migration of a complex Todoist workspace.Hive vs Todoist vs ClickUp for freelancers: which is best?
Todoist wins for solo freelancers managing personal workload: fastest task capture (Q shortcut), predictable $5/month annual billing, Ramble AI for voice task capture, and the trusted personal productivity system feel that multi-year users describe. Hive adds real value for freelancers running multi-client agency-style work who need time tracking, billable hours, and proofing, though the add-on cost stacks. ClickUp sits between both: more feature-dense than Todoist, more accessible pricing than Hive's add-on model, but its own reputation for learning curve and feature overload. For a freelancer managing personal workload: Todoist. For a freelancer running a small client-facing operation: Hive Teams ($12) or ClickUp.Which is better for remote teams, Hive or Todoist?
Hive edges it for genuinely distributed teams. Built-in native Hive Chat, real-time collaborative Hive Notes, @mentions across projects, and live chat support at roughly 10-minute average response time make it more purpose-built for async team coordination. Todoist handles light remote team use (shared projects, task assignment, comments) but has no team chat, no document collaboration, and email-only support with no SLA. For a remote team of 5 to 20 doing collaborative project work, Hive's integrated communication layer is the deciding factor.Do Hive and Todoist support task dependencies?
Neither tool supports task dependencies as of June 2026. Tasks cannot be linked so one waits on another completing in either Hive or Todoist. This is the single biggest shared gap versus Asana and ClickUp. Hive also lacks date-shift propagation: moving a project timeline means manually updating every action. If dependency chains are essential to the workflow, neither tool is the right pick. Asana (task dependencies on paid plans) and Wrike (dependencies included) are the alternatives to evaluate. This limitation is confirmed by multiple G2 and Capterra reviewers for both tools across 2024 to 2026.
Test both, then decide
Both are free to start. The fastest way to know is to run one real project or task list on each.
Best for cross-functional teams, agency workflows, and ops teams who need Gantt, time tracking, and proofing in one workspace. Free plan up to 10 members, 14-day full trial.
Try Hive for free →Read the full Hive review →Best for individuals and small teams who need the fastest task capture experience available, plus Ramble AI for voice-to-task. Permanently free plan, Pro from $5/month annual.
Try Todoist for free →Read the full Todoist review →Affiliate links: using them supports our independent hands-on tests at no extra cost. Both tools are scored with the same criteria and the honest weak spots are disclosed on each side.
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