TickTick Review

TickTick is a task management application with a slick, high quality user interface and a strong selection of features. In this TickTick review, we’ll see how it compares to similar software and find out if it’s worth putting on your to-do list.

It gets the balance between ease of use and complexity right, doing more than some of its competitors without diluting its core functionality.

If you’re looking for a simple tool that lets you manage your tasks, TickTick does that. If you’re not sure what kind of tool you need, take a look at our task management vs. project management article.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Alternatives for TickTick

Features

TickTick allows you to create tasks, sort them into lists and give them deadlines and priorities. You can also add notes and checklists of subtasks to each one.

You can add tasks via email and, if you’re brave, with voice input. Read our best speech-to-text software article to learn how risky that can be.

You can create tags and color code them, which is useful for sorting your tasks the way you want. You can also set reminders to give yourself notifications before due dates. It’s easy to set up repeating tasks, too.

There are also smart lists that let you set up filters and apply them automatically. You can view tasks with specific tags or due dates within a certain period, for example.

TickTick Achievements

Stat fiends who need extra motivation will enjoy the achievement system. You’re assigned a level, which increases as you tick tasks off. Your score can go down if tasks are overdue, though, so be careful. 

That said, the system seems basic, and it isn’t as much fun as Asana’s celebrations. Read our Asana review to learn more about those. Our Asana beginner’s guide will help you get the most out of it, too.

Look in TickTick’s settings and it tells you what percentage of people you are more productive than. If you want to get a friendly office competition going, that stat could prove interesting.

You can also find the theme settings in the menu. In addition to a few color choices, there are options based on the seasons and cities of the world.

There’s an activity log that shows you what everyone has done, so if you want to keep people accountable, TickTick is a great choice. You can review what teammates have been up to.

Its Pomo timer is an interesting feature that uses the Pomodoro technique. That means dividing your work into 25-minute chunks, with breaks in between. It’s new to us, but it has to be worth a try.

You can import data from several applications. Among them are two rival task management applications that you can read about in our Wunderlist review and Todoist review. You can also quickly generate a .csv file to back your project up, which means you aren’t locked in to the platform.

There’s a menu at the bottom right of the task panel that lets you upload attachments. If you want a dedicated system for sharing files with teammates, take a look at our best online storage for teams article.

TickTick Platform Support

TickTick is available for many devices. There are desktop versions for Windows and macOS, mobile versions for Android and iOS, a web version, browser extensions and even an Apple Watch version. Linux users, sadly, are left in the cold.

If you’re not sure which browser extension to go for, read our Mozilla Firefox review and Google Chrome review to help make up your mind.

TickTick has a good selection of features and offers plenty to help you get organized. If you want something more feature-heavy, though, look through our project management guide.

Security and Privacy

TickTick runs on Amazon Web Services. Your data is stored in the U.S. Read our article on Edward Snowden and government surveillance to learn what that means for your privacy. Data is encrypted at rest. Backups are made daily,Daily backups are taken and TickTick promises to notify you of data breaches within 72 hours.

That’s not bad, but it’s not on the level of project management tools such as Wrike and monday.com, which you can read about in our Wrike review and monday.com review. TickTick doesn’t provide much detail about what it does to protect your information. With a tool as simple as this, though, you may not need that level of security.

TickTick Features Overview

User-Friendliness

TickTick is easy to sign up for and welcomes you with a quick tour of its core features. Once that’s out of the way, you can create tasks. That’s easy to do, too. You just type in a box and press Return. There are buttons to add deadlines and priorities.

The interface is clear, readable and easy to use. It’s the kind of tool you can understand by looking at it, and when playing around with its buttons, you’ll find everything does what you expect. Some controls are on the small side, but we didn’t encounter major bugs when using it.

It has more views than many task list apps. Like some of the best project management software, it has a calendar and activity log. The calendar can be hooked to Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar, too.

It’s focused, though, and most of the time, you’ll be using its main view, which is simply a list, or several lists of tasks.

There’s a useful selection of keyboard shortcuts, so if you’re in a hurry, learn a few of those and you’ll be able to work faster.

Overall, TickTick is easy and well-designed, making everything you do with it straightforward.

Cost

TickTick has a free plan and a paid version that gives you additional features. The paid version costs $27.99 per year, which isn’t going to break the bank, and it’ll be worth it if it helps you get things done. You can pay via credit card or PayPal. 

The free plan offers the basics, but it’s usable. The best features, such as TickTick’s broad selection of views, are limited to the Premium version.

Free 1 user	FREE
Premium 1 user	$ 2.33/ month

Service & Support

TickTick’s main support page includes a lot of articles to help you, as well as an FAQ page. There are guides to the specific apps, as well as pages that explain individual features and others that give general advice on getting things done.

There’s plenty of information. The language used can be clunky, but it’s understandable.

There’s also a busy forum, with lots of questions and answers. Almost every question there has a reply, but not all of the problems posted are solved. Still, it’s a good resource if you get stuck.

We found that trying to access support from the app sent us to the forum, with no clear link to the top page. The search function there is much better than the one on the forum, which shows almost a screen’s worth of ads before relevant results. If you find yourself there, hunt around to find the proper top page because it’s much better.

If you want to submit a support request directly, you’ll need to find the small contact email address link at the bottom of the forum page. We tested TickTick’s direct support with a question about two-factor authentication and got a response in just under a day.

If you want to try a tool with blistering support speeds, check out our Basecamp review. It responded to us in just three minutes.

TickTick gets a good score here because of its decent response times, but it’d score higher if its navigation links led to its top page.

Final Thoughts

TickTick has an excellent interface and it’s intuitive to use. It has many features on the free plan, but there’s plenty more to like on the Premium version. You’ll often see upgrade messages when attempting to use paid features on the free plan, but it’s still a useful, usable application.

TickTick gets the basics right, though, and is a great choice if you want to get more organized. Its Premium version goes further than most task management apps by including a selection of views more commonly found in project management tools. If you prefer to keep things simple, its free version does that.

If you’ve given TickTick a go, please let us know what you thought about it and whether it helped you become more productive in the comments below. Thanks for reading.