Task Tracking App, And What Happens After You Tick

One week. That's how long Todoist's free plan keeps your activity history, and after a morning of reading pricing pages it's very nearly the only retention number published anywhere in this category.

Which is a strange thing to discover about software people choose specifically to track things. A task tracking app is bought on the promise that you'll be able to look back, and almost every vendor documents the capture side in enormous detail while saying nothing whatsoever about what happens to a task once it's done.

So the short answer, before the tables. For pure capture, any free plan will do and you should not pay. For tracking in the sense of reviewing what you actually finished, check the history window before you commit, since Todoist's free tier gives you seven days and most competitors give you a number they haven't published. Everything below came off each vendor's own pages on 28 July 2026, blanks included.

The Column Nobody Fills In

Here's what I could confirm about the afterlife of a finished task, per product, from the vendor's own site rather than from a review.

Nine rows and one number. I want to be careful about what I'm claiming, because a blank cell means the vendor didn't publish it on the pages I read, not that the feature is missing. Several of these apps almost certainly keep completed tasks forever and simply never thought to say so.

But that's the point I'd make to somebody choosing. The thing you can verify before signing up is capture. The thing you can't verify is retention, and retention is the entire difference between a list and a record.

Super Productivity is the outlier and the reason is structural rather than generous. The data sits on your machine as files you can export to JSON or CSV, so the retention policy is whatever your backup habits are. Nobody can shorten it in a pricing update.

Tracking And Capturing Are Different Products

I think the word tracking is doing a lot of quiet work in this search, and it's worth separating.

Capturing is getting the thing out of your head and into a box. Every app on earth does this well now, it's a solved problem, and it's what the marketing pages show. Tracking is the other half, which is looking at a week and seeing what moved. That needs history, some notion of when a thing was done rather than just whether, and ideally a view that isn't your current list.

Todoist charges for that split explicitly. The free plan gives you one week of activity history and three custom filters. Pro gives full reporting history and 150 filters. So the free tier is a capture product and the paid tier is a tracking product, which is an honest way to draw the line even if the page never says so in those words.

Nobody else in the list draws the line at all, and I'd guess that's because most of these products don't really have a tracking mode. They have a completed section, which is not the same thing, since a completed section answers "did I do it" and tracking answers "what has this month looked like".

Recurrence Is The Feature That Actually Matters

If a task genuinely repeats, the app's handling of that decides whether you trust it, and this one is documented reasonably well.

The Apple row has a feature nobody else on this page publishes, which is location. Reminders lets you attach a place rather than a time, and the guide names it plainly. For a certain kind of task, the ones that only make sense somewhere specific, that's more useful than any amount of history.

Google Tasks is the one I'd point most people to if they're already in Gmail, because tasks with due dates land in Google Calendar and recurrence is explicit on the product page. The catch is the thin end of the documentation. Their page publishes no limits at all, which I read as there being no meaningful ones, and won't claim as fact.

Alone You Pay Double

This one made me laugh when I worked it out.

Any.do Premium is $4.99 a month billed annually for one person. Any.do Family is $8.33 a month billed annually and covers up to four people. So four people pay $2.08 each per month, and one person pays $4.99.

Being alone costs 2.4 times per head what being a household of four costs, on the same software. And the Teams tier charges each member exactly what a solo user pays, so the only discount in the whole structure goes to families.

That's not unusual and it isn't a scandal, family plans exist across the whole software industry for good commercial reasons. It's just worth knowing that if there are two or three of you and you're each paying for your own thing, the cheaper move is usually one shared plan, and nobody's incentivised to tell you.

Monthly billing on Any.do Premium is $7.99 against $4.99 annually, which is a 60% premium for paying in twelfths. That's steeper than the 20 to 25% I found across the task management applications I priced the same morning.

Time Tracking Is Not This

Quick disambiguation, because the search terms sit right next to each other and the products don't.

A task tracker records what you intend to do and whether it happened. A time tracker records how long it took, usually so somebody can be billed. Clockify's free plan handles unlimited tracking for up to 5 users, Toggl Track's Starter is $9 per licence a month, and neither of those is trying to be your to-do list.

They overlap in exactly one product on this page. Super Productivity does both, task management and time tracking in the same free app, which is genuinely unusual and is probably why it exists as an open-source project rather than a business. The full comparison of the clock side is in the apps for time management piece.

What I Stopped Tracking

I built a privacy-first desktop app for organising your life, and one of the decisions I had to make early was what happens to an item when you finish it. Delete it, hide it, or keep it somewhere you can look at later.

I kept it. Not because I had data saying that was right, but because deleting felt wrong in a way I couldn't argue myself out of, and because a finished item is the only evidence you were ever working. That decision cost more than I expected. Keeping things means deciding where they go, how long they stay, and what the view looks like when there are four thousand of them, and I understand now why so many products just quietly never mention it.

What I've since stopped doing is tracking tasks at the granularity I used to. I found that counting completed items told me almost nothing about whether the month had gone well, and there were stretches where the count was highest during the weeks least worth repeating. Busy tracks beautifully. I'd rather look at what shipped.

That's a judgment rather than a finding, and somebody with a genuinely spiky workload might get a lot more out of the history than I do. I'd just say be honest about whether you'll ever open the review screen, because the answer determines whether the paid tier is worth anything to you at all.

Questions That Come Up

Do completed tasks get deleted? On the pages I read, nobody says. Todoist publishes a one-week activity history on free and full reporting history on Pro, which is the closest thing to an answer in the category. If this matters to you, test it with a throwaway account before you migrate anything.

Is a task tracker worth paying for solo? Rarely, and the honest test is whether you look back. If you only ever work from today's list, every paid feature in this category is aimed at somebody else.

What's the best free task tracking app? Depends what else you use. Google Tasks if you live in Gmail, Microsoft To Do if you live in Outlook, Apple Reminders if you're on Apple hardware and want location triggers, Super Productivity if you want the data on your own disk. None of those cost anything.

Can one app do tasks, notes and time? Some try, and the results are mixed enough that it deserves its own answer. I've worked through how much a single tool can absorb in the productivity application piece.

What about the wider software category? The free and open-source options across every job, with licences and prices, are in the productivity software overview.

How I'd Set It Up

Use whatever's already on your phone for a fortnight, without configuring anything beyond adding tasks.

At the end of it, try to answer one question, which is what you finished in week one. If the app can tell you, that's your tracker and you're done. If it can't, you've now got a real reason to pay for something, and it's a specific reason rather than a vague feeling that a better system exists.

That's the whole method. There's a wider cost picture in the productivity apps breakdown if you're assembling several of these at once, and it's worth reading before the third subscription rather than after.