We review products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use. How you manage your tasks, meaning the method you use to write down what you need to do and then refer to that list to do it, greatly affects which to-do app will be best for you. If you manage your tasks from a Mac and iOS device, follow the Getting Things Done method, and never assign tasks to other people, then OmniFocus might appeal to you. It's a powerful app with a lot of features for organizing and prioritizing your tasks. You can open new tabs that show only tasks that meet particular requirements or view everything with an upcoming due date. OmniFocus isn't cross-platform, however, and it doesn't support collaboration. It also costs more than similar apps. If you fit the somewhat narrow profile of an OmniFocus user, by all means give the app a go. If not, Editors' Choices Todoist and Asana have more general appeal and are top of class when it comes to task-management apps. OmniFocus Pricing You have a few options for purchasing OmniFocus, and they're a little confusing. One option is to buy the apps individually, sold for a one-time fee. The other is to purchase a subscription. There is no free version of OmniFocus. You can, however, get a two-week free trial of the app that gives you access to all the features. One-Time Fee If you choose to pay once to own the apps with a license, you can get: a standard OmniFocus Mac app ($49.99) OmniFocus for Mac Pro ($99.99) a standard iOS app that's good for iPhone, iPad, and watchOS ($49.99) OmniFocus for iOS Pro ($74.99) To get a started or Pro set, you're looking at $99.98 or $174.98, respectively. All these apps are essentially good until the next point release of the software, which is now in version 3. Previously, when a new point release of the app has come out, OmniFocus offered a discount to upgrade rather than charge existing users the new price in full. The Pro version gives you custom perspectives, focus mode, a custom sidebar, and the ability to customize the app using AppleScript. OmniFocus Subscription The other way to get OmniFocus is to pay a recurring subscription fee. It costs $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. The subscription gives you the Pro version of OmniFocus for macOS and iOS, as well as access to a new web app. According to OmniFocus' website, people who already own downloaded versions of the apps can tack on a subscription to only the web app for $4.99 per month. OmniFocus' Prices vs. the Competition's How do OmniFocus' prices compare to other to-do apps' prices? It's pretty high. Things 3, one of OmniFocus' closest competitors, charges $49.99 for the Mac app, $9.99 for the iPhone app, and $19.99 for the iPad app. The whole set will run you about $80. The majority of to-do apps are free and offer a paid subscription. You can find plenty that charge around $3 per month for individual use, and you'll pay more like $10 per person per month for more business-oriented apps. So, if OmniFocus offered more collaboration and business features, then the price might be right. The company that makes OmniFocus already has another product for that purpose, however, called OmniPlan, so it's unlikely OmniFocus will ever swing in that direction. Getting Started With OmniFocus When you first download OmniFocus and set up an account, you must choose where you want to save your data, either to the cloud for easy syncing or locally on your device. From there, you go right into the app, which contains tips and help for getting started. The interface will look familiar to anyone who uses popular cloud-based business software, such as Slack or Asana. You see a three-paneled window, with core navigation on the left, primary information in the center, and additional details about whatever you're currently viewing on the right. The right panel appears and disappears as needed, and you can collapse the left navigation pane if you want, too. OmniFocus encourages you to create projects, which are groups of related tasks. Projects can be parallel, sequential, or single action. Parallel projects contain tasks that can be done in parallel while all leading to a final result. Sequential projects require that you do tasks in a specified order, again, in pursuit of some final outcome. Single action projects are completely free-form and can be anything from an assortment of unrelated tasks to a grocery shopping list. Folders let you nest similar projects together. You might have a folder that contains all your work-related projects, for example, and another one for personal to-dos. The interface is tidy, and navigating it is simple. I find the look to also be a little lackluster, however. You can't customize the colors or add a background image the way you can with many other to-do apps. The desktop app looks more organized than the iPhone app, where space feels more cramped. Both work perfectly well, however, with drag-and-drop supported on both platforms and swiping action in the iOS apps. One thing I don't love about the interface is that you can add so much detail to a task that it's never all within view. For example, the Notes section of a task appears at the very end of the task detail list, and you have to scroll to see it. If I add notes explaining why a task must be done by a certain date or how it should get done, I want to see that information as soon as I look at the task itself. You can't rearrange the elements in the task detail panel, however, so a certain amount of detail will always be out of view. OmniFocus Features OmniFocus was designed to be compatible with the Getting Things Done method of productivity. Getting Things Done, also called GTD, is a method for staying organized and productive created by David Allen who wrote about it in a book of the same name. One of the fundamental aspects of GTD is to always write down tasks as soon as they come to mind and worry about sorting them and organizing them later. For this reason, OmniFocus contains an Inbox. It's a natural place to put new tasks when they pop into your mind until you have an appropriate time to manage them. Tags let you add context (in GTD parlance) or another way to filter and sort tasks. For example, you could tag all tasks that require you to make phone calls, so that the next time an opportunity to make phone calls presents itself, you'll be able to find those tasks quickly even if they're in different projects. You can also tag tasks as "low energy" so that you have menial chores at the ready the next time you're feeling burned out but want to be productive. Other details that you can add to tasks include a due date, defer date for when you need to push off the task, estimated duration, notes, and notifications. There is no timer for clocking how long tasks actually take to get done, however, only a field for estimating how long they will take. Tasks can be recurring, and OmniFocus gives you decent tools for choosing the recurring time frame, but they aren't exhaustive. You can set it up by the minute, hour, day, week, month, or year and select which days of the week it should apply. You cannot choose, say, every other week or every first Friday, however, so there are limits. Todoist has more options if OmniFocus doesn't meet your needs here. Custom Perspectives are another great feature for GTD. You can create and save a custom view of tasks that meet certain criteria. For example, you could create a view showing only tasks that you could get done in 15 minutes or less at the office. That way, when it's nearly the end of the day and you don't have time to tackle some major task, you can quickly see if there's anything easy and quick you can knock off your to-do list. When it comes to creating quick entries, I found OmniFocus wasn't as intuitive to use as other to-do apps, namely Todoist. Command+n starts a new blank task, fine, but when it comes to adding detail, you must tab or mouse over to the appropriate fields rather than type right in the task field and let the app figure it out for you. That's what Todoist does. If you type "tod" or "tom" right in the task name, Todoist understands what you mean and assigns a due date of "today" or "tomorrow." It can pick up on more complex natural language, too, such as "ev Fri" and "ev 1st." You can quickly assign a project by using a # or assign a person using +. OmniFocus isn't quite as convenient. OmniFocus has a few more neat features suited to GTD. You can create Focus Tabs, for example, which are views of only the tasks you want to see that appear as separate tabs in the app window. Say you're at work and you know that today you should really focus on Project X and Project Y. You can create a tab that shows only tasks in those two projects. Unlike Custom Perspectives, Focus Tabs are temporary. You can create them on the spot, and they disappear when you close the tab. A Forecast tab helps you narrow in on tasks that are due soon or overdue. You can also review dates with upcoming deadlines, and you can see a count of how many tasks are due on a mini calendar. You can further customize this view by adding tasks that have a certain tag. Collaboration As of this writing, OmniFocus doesn't offer collaboration features, but the company has noted that such a feature is in the works. When it does launch, it's unlikely to work similarly to collaboration in other to-do apps. In most to-do apps, you can share a list with someone or fully collaborate by inviting them to join a project. Once the person has accepted the invitation, they can receive assignments, create new tasks in the project, and assign tasks to anyone else in the project. It works well for small collaborative projects as well as spreading around household chores. OmniFocus' plan is to allow people to "link" rather than sync tasks. Here's what the app's blog said in 2018 about the planned collaboration feature in OmniFocus: For OmniFocus 3, we're adding support for linking tasks between unrelated databases. The idea is that I can send you a task (with its notes and attachments and due date) and propose that our tasks be linked, and you can choose whether to accept the link or not. While our tasks are linked, we can each see updates to the status of that specific task. But in each of our databases, that task can live wherever we want... If this link-not-sync approach sounds right for you, maybe it'll be worth the wait. My guess is that many people will be disappointed if this feature gets advertised as "collaboration," because it clearly won't meet expectations associated with that word. Asana is perhaps the best choice for a to-do app if you need to collaborate with other people. It's super flexible in that regard, and many small groups will get far with the free version of the tool. Powerful, but Pricey OmniFocus certainly has features that will delight people who follow GTD. The ability to create focus tabs and custom views goes a long way to making an effective to-do list. Compared with other apps, OmniFocus' price is on the high side, and the fact that it doesn't support collaboration is a real bummer. If you work solo, use Apple products, and follow GTD, then it might be a good choice for you. It's similar in many ways to Things 3. If either OmniFocus or Things sounds appealing, I recommend putting them head-to-head against your needs to see which one will be better for you. If OmniFocus doesn't sound like the right fit, have a look at Editors' Choices Todoist and Asana. Todoist is better, in my opinion, for personal task management, though you can use it for small collaborative projects and sharing task lists, as well. Asana is the more flexible of the two when it comes to group work, whether you're coordinating with a handful of people or a large organization. Bottom Line: Now in version 3, OmniFocus is a powerful, albeit pricey, to-do app for Mac and iOS, and a good option as long as you're working solo. It's well suited for people who follow GTD, too.

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