The best to-do apps must meet many needs. Some people use them for tracking their personal to-do list, others for work-related projects, and many people do a bit of both. Depending on how you use a to-do app, you might also need to share task lists with others and access them from a variety of devices. Nozbe covers all these needs and use cases. It's a collaborate, cross-platform to-do app that lets you add plenty of detail to tasks, such as a category and how long it will take to complete. While Nozbe is an adequate to-do app, there is no free version and the prices for an account are high compared with other, similar apps.

Among to-do list apps, the PCMag Editors' Choices are Todoist and Asana. Todoist is slightly better for personal to-do lists and small group teamwork, while Asana is the better pick for teams that need a lot of flexibility in how they track and manage work.

Nozbe Plans and Pricing

Nozbe offers three tiers of service for its app: Solo/Duo ($10-$14 per month), Small Business ($23-$49 per month), and Business ($99-$999 per month). The exact cost depends on how many people join the plan. It's not a per-person-style calculation. Rather, you pay a flat fee for up to so many people. For all these accounts, you have an option to get a discount by paying annually.

Solo/Duo accounts are for one or two people. With this plan, you can make as many projects as you want, and you get basic productivity reports and customer support via email only. Small Business plans are meant for four to eight people. You get everything that comes in the Solo/Duo plan, plus priority support.

The Business plan is for a minimum of 10 people, with no maximum. You get everything in the Small Business account, plus advanced productivity reports, advanced project sharing, training by Nozbe via video conference, online training for account admins, and VIP support with a dedicated account manager.

How do Nozbe's prices compare with other collaborative to-do apps? Quite frankly, they're high. Todoist charges only $36 per year for its Premium account for individuals, which is about a third as much as Nozbe's lowest tier plan. The same can be said for TickTick at $27.99 per year. Asana charges $119.88 per person per year for Premium, which is similar to Nozbe's price for Solo/Duo, although what you get from Asana is more akin to Nozbe Business. Plus, Todoist, TickTick, and Asana offer free plans while Nozbe does not.

Getting Started With Nozbe

You can start a 14-day trial account with Nozbe by authenticating with Google or entering an email address and creating a password. Once you're in the app, you see a few projects and tasks. These are interactive tutorials designed to help you learn your way around. Nozbe also has video tutorials where you can learn more about the app's uses and features.

Nozbe has apps for all major platforms: Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, web, and Windows. On desktop and web apps, you see a three-paneled interface, with menus or projects on the left, your primary workspace in the center, and additional detail about your current selection to the right.

To get started, you create projects that can represent actual projects or merely themes of tasks you need to get done, such as Work, Household, and Personal. Each project can have a custom color dot next to it, which is about as much customization in the visual themes as you'll find in Nozbe's otherwise drab, gray interface. Unlike many other to-do apps, you can't change the look of the app by picking a new color scheme or adding a custom background.

Within projects, you create tasks. Tasks can hold a good amount of additional detail, including a due date and time, time estimate, assignee, comments, and categories, which are not unlike tags, but those exist, too. You can add a checklist to a task, but not subtasks that have additional detail, the way you can in Asana.

You can set tasks to recur, but you have to find and select an option from a drop-down menu. The list of options is long, every day, week, month, year, weekday, every two days, every two weeks, every week on such and such day, and so forth, but you have to hunt down the right option. Todoist reads natural language input instead, making it much easier. When you type in Todoist "ev 1st Mon," the app understands to make the recurrence every first Monday of the month. Nozbe doesn't have this feature, although it does allow you type a # symbol followed by a category, due date (such as "Saturday"), or other field and have it apply.

Nozbe gives you an Inbox, which is a default place to collect tasks that come to mind so that you can sort them and add appropriate detail later. Having an Inbox is a facet of the Getting Things Done (GTD) method of productivity, a phrase used (and legally registered) by David Allen who described it in a book of the same name.

The categories I mentioned earlier play into GTD, too. As you create categories, which you can then assign to tasks, Nozbe gives you an option in the menu to view all tasks with that assigned category. Followers of GTD might have categories expressing where the task must be done (@computer, @home, @work), as well as categories for how much energy they require (low energy, high energy). Then, you can use these categories to filter your tasks and see the ones that are relevant to you at any moment.

Nozbe's Additional Features

To collaborate in Nozbe, you invite other people by email to join specific projects. When you share a project, you can assign tasks to others and keep an eye on what gets done and when.

For frequent or recurring tasks, especially those with a long checklist attached, you can create templates. Templates are independent of projects. Each template can have an associated color and icon of your choosing.

Nozbe offers basic integration with a few of the most common business apps: Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. It also has email forwarding, meaning you can forward an email to a special address and have the message appear as a task in your Nozbe app.

You can estimate how long different tasks will take in the app, though there is no in-app timer for tracking time on task as you work. There are a few time-tracking apps, such as Toggl and TimeCamp, that let you send time tracked to Nozbe automatically, so as long as you don't mind adding another tool to your toolkit, you can add actual time worked to your tasks.

The mobile apps work well, and you can customize the swipe gestures for what happens when you swipe left or right on a task, though there is no distinction between a long swipe and short swipe. The Android and iOS apps also have a dark mode.

Collaborative, But Pricey

In the landscape of to-do apps, Nozbe earns praise for offering cross-platform support, which makes it more versatile than the handful of similar apps that are for Mac and iOS only, namely Things and OmniFocus. It also appeals to people who follow GTD because of its Inbox, categories, and other features that let you see only the tasks you need to tackle based on your current context.

Nobze's subscription fees are quite high, however, considering that for nearly the same price you can get a Premium Asana account, which is more than just a collaborative to-do app; it's a complete work-management system. Nozbe also doesn't nose out Todoist, an Editors' Choice app alongside Asana, which supports natural language input and offers customizable themes, in addition to other features that give it an edge.

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