You run your own life in Todoist and it works. So the obvious move was a project called Home, shared with your partner, run the same way.

Six weeks on, Home has forty-one open tasks, most of them older than a month, and your partner has stopped opening it.

The instinct is to blame the setup. Wrong labels, wrong filters, no weekly review. So you rebuild it, and eight weeks later you are here, typing todoist for family organisation into a search box.

Almost nobody makes this work for long, and the reason has nothing to do with your filters.

Why people try Todoist for family organisation

Two reasons, and both of them are good ones, which is why this keeps happening to sensible people.

The first is that you already have it. The app is on your phone, you know the syntax, and adding a second project costs nothing. Every alternative starts from a worse position: an install, an invitation, an evening of setup and a conversation about why the last system did not work.

The second is that household admin sounds like tasks. Pay the bill. Book the car in. Renew the passport. Sign the school form. Every one of those is a verb with an object, which is exactly the shape Todoist is built for, so of course it looks like the right tool.

Look at the diagram again. Eight things came up in one ordinary week and two of them really are tasks. The shopping list is a task list. The shed door is a task. The other six are not tasks that Todoist happens to handle badly. They are a different kind of object altogether, wearing a verb.

A household is mostly records, not tasks

Here is the difference, in one example. The electricity bill is not “pay electricity bill”. It is $142, due on the 1st, up from $118 last February, and it will be here again next month whatever you do today.

Flatten that into a task and four things go missing: the amount, the history, the category it belongs to, and the fact that it repeats. Then somebody ticks it, and the flattened version goes too. Next month there is nothing to compare against, so the question “is the electricity getting worse?” has no answer anywhere in the house.

A task is a reminder that deletes itself. A household needs records that stay.

The alternative, and the whole argument of this page. In Chirpy the electricity bill is a bill. It carries $142, the 1st, its category and last February beside it, and it comes back on its own every month without anyone re-creating it. The dentist is an appointment at 4:30 on Tuesday, on the one household calendar everyone in the house is already on, with the reminder set for both of you. The passport is a document with March on it, and the warnings start in December while there is still time to do something.

Nothing has to be ticked for any of that to be true, and nothing vanishes when it is. Chirpy Basic is free for the whole household, up to six people, with no card.

The two rows that genuinely were tasks still work exactly as they should. Chirpy has shared lists too, and the shed door goes on one.

What Todoist’s free plan actually gives a household

Most pages ranking for this query are vague about the free tier, and a decision made on vague facts wastes an evening. Everything below is from Todoist’s own pricing page and its own billing FAQ, both checked on 21 September 2026.

Sharing itself is free, which is more than several comparison pages admit, and five collaborators is plenty for a house. The line to read twice is the fourth one.

Seven days of activity history. That is the record of who did what, and on the free plan it is gone after a week. If the reason you set this up was an argument about who actually does things around here, the evidence expires before the next argument. It is the same trap we went through in the guide to the family chore chart app, where the chart that survives is always the one that keeps its own history.

The 5 MB upload cap matters too, quietly. A photographed insurance document is usually bigger than that, so the free plan cannot hold the one attachment a household most wants to keep.

Priced per person, or priced per household

Todoist’s prices are its own, from its pricing page and its billing FAQ on 21 September 2026. Ours are checked the same day. Free against free, top against top.

Two adults on Todoist Pro is $120 a year paid annually, and it buys two very good task managers. Chirpy Pro is $89 a year for everyone in the house, and it buys the calendar, the shared ledger, the documents, the car, the meals and the lists on one bill. That is what the difference buys, and it is the only comparison worth making, because per head and per household are different products however close the numbers land.

One thing Todoist genuinely does better than we do: recurring due dates. “Every other Tuesday” typed onto a task is parsed and repeated better by Todoist than by anyone, and our list items take a due date rather than a repeat. In Chirpy the bins go on the household calendar as a fortnightly repeat instead, which puts them on the week both of you already look at rather than in a projects sidebar only one of you opens.

We both have an assistant. They make different things

This is the part where most comparison pages get lazy and claim the rival has no AI. Todoist does, it is called Todoist Assist, and on Todoist’s own pages on 21 September 2026 it covers Ramble, which turns speech into a structured task, Email Assist, which turns a forwarded email into a task with the details pulled out, Task Assist, which breaks big work into sub-tasks, and Filter Assist. Filter Assist is on every plan. Task Assist and Email Assist need Pro or Business.

Read that list again and notice what every item on it produces. A task. Not because the work was done badly, but because a task is the only object Todoist has to make.

What the same forwarded email does here

Forward the airline confirmation to Todoist and you get a task that says check in for the flights. Forward it to Chirpy and the trip appears, with its dates and its confirmation number, grouped by kind on one screen that everyone in the house can open. Photograph the supermarket receipt and it files itself as a spend in the right category, so the month adds up without anyone typing it. Say “dentist Tuesday half four” and it is on the calendar you both see.

Those three are paid features and we would rather say so here than let you find out at a paywall. Photographing a document into the Vault is Chirpy Plus, $7.99 a month or $59 a year. The receipt scan and the spoken calendar entry are Chirpy Pro, $12.99 a month or $89 a year. Both prices are for the whole household rather than per person. Everything manual is free on Basic, which is the argument we make in full in the guide to add tasks by typing naturally.

What to keep in Todoist, and what to move

The mistake is treating this as a migration. You are not replacing Todoist. You are taking the six rows out of it that were never tasks.

1. Leave your own work alone. Your projects, your filters, your Karma streak. None of it is the problem and none of it is moving.
2. Take the money out first. Every task with a number hiding inside it. The bills, the subscriptions, the thing you keep meaning to cancel. They want amounts and dates, which is the whole point of the guide to how to keep track of bills.
3. Take the dates out second. Anything with a time attached belongs on a week both of you can see, not in a list one of you reviews on Sundays.
4. Take the documents out third. The passport, the registration, the warranty. They need an expiry date and somewhere to live, and 5 MB was never going to hold them anyway.
5. Leave the actual tasks where they are for a month. Do not announce a new system. Let the shared Home project go quiet on its own, or discover that it does not, which is useful either way.

Step five is the one that decides it. Households change when the new thing is easier twice in a row, never on the day somebody declares a reorganisation, which is the argument in mental load household split.

So which one

Stay on Todoist if what you actually wanted was a shared shopping list and a place to put the shed door, and the bills, dates and documents are already handled somewhere you are happy with. Free Beginner does that and you will never need to pay.

Pay for Todoist Pro if the person who needs it is you, for your own work. It is the best task manager there is and $60 a year is fair for it. Just count it as one subscription for one person, because that is how it is priced.

Move to Chirpy if the forty-one open tasks were mostly the house, and what you want is for the bill to be a bill, the appointment to be an appointment and the passport to have a date on it, in one app everyone is already in. Free for up to six people, $89 a year for the version that does the most typing. If you built the same thing out of databases instead, the same argument in a different shape is in our guide to the notion family organisation template.

Common questions