Things 3 Review 2026: Best-Designed Task Manager, Apple-Only Sting

Things 3 shipped in May 2017. Nine years later, it is still the best-designed task manager I have used. Cultured Code have not meaningfully changed the interface since launch — they have tuned it, added the occasional new capability (Slim Mode, Tags 2.0, Quick Entry with Autofill), and resisted the urge to add forty new features per year. This is a product philosophy. It works.

What Things is

A task manager organized around three levels: Inbox, Today, and Anytime. You capture into the Inbox. You pull tasks into Today. You work on Today. You review weekly. The hierarchy of Areas (permanent categories) and Projects (time-bounded) structures your work. That is nearly all of it.

Things is what a task manager looks like when the designers have said "no" more often than they have said "yes."

What Things does well

Design. Typography, spacing, animation, micro-interactions — everything is considered. Completing a task produces a tactile satisfaction that no other task manager I have used replicates. The Today view is ordered the way your brain actually wants to think about a day: scheduled items in order, followed by other items.

Quick Entry. Command-space-space from anywhere on the Mac pops up a Quick Entry panel. This is frictionless to the point of being invisible. Autofill on Quick Entry adds URL context automatically from the frontmost app.

Restraint. Things does not have Kanban boards, Gantt charts, dependencies, subtask hierarchies six levels deep, or Jira-style custom fields. This is a feature. The absence is the product.

Reliability. Things Cloud sync is the most reliable sync in any task manager I have used. I have never lost a task. I have never had sync corruption. This is the baseline I measure other task managers against.

One-time purchase. $49.99 for Mac, $9.99 for iPhone, $19.99 for iPad. Once. No subscription. You buy each platform app once, you own it forever (modulo future major version upgrades, which Things has done once in a decade).

Where Things falls short

Apple-only. No Windows, no Android, no Linux, no web. For cross-platform users, Things is not an option. This is the single biggest limitation and Cultured Code have been explicit that it is not going to change.

No collaboration. Things is a strictly personal task manager. There is no sharing, no shared projects, no "assign to Mariano." For team work, use something else.

No meaningful automation. Things has x-callback-url support for developer-leaning workflows but nothing like Todoist's integrations or OmniFocus's Omni Automation. Power users who want their task manager to talk to the rest of their stack will hit walls.

Weak web / calendar presence. Things is a native app on each Apple device; there is no web interface. Calendar integration is read-only. For some workflows, this matters.

Who should use Things

• Apple users with solo task loads
• Users who value design and want their tools to feel considered
• Users burned by subscription creep who want a one-time purchase
• GTD-adjacent practitioners who want a cleaner implementation than OmniFocus

Who should not use Things

• Cross-platform users (Todoist or TickTick)
• Teams (Asana, Linear, etc.)
• Power users who need deep automation (OmniFocus)
• Users who want a task manager bundled with calendar / time tracking (TickTick, Amie)

Pricing

Mac $49.99, iPhone $9.99, iPad $19.99 — each purchased separately, one-time. The total of ~$80 for the full cross-device experience is steep on day one and cheap over any time horizon longer than two years.

Things is not on the Setapp subscription. Cultured Code have resisted the subscription transition that most of this category has made, which is to their credit and to the customer's benefit.

Bottom line

Things 3 is a product that has not had to apologize for itself in nearly a decade. The Apple-only limit is real. The absence of collaboration is real. For the specific profile it serves, nothing else is close — and the one-time purchase pricing is a meaningful counterweight to the subscription-fatigued productivity market.