Houseloop vs Todoist for Families: The Honest Comparison

If you run a household on Todoist, you may already know the quiet problem: the shared list slowly becomes your list. You are the one typing in tasks, checking who did what, and reminding everyone else. The app was supposed to spread the load, and instead it turned into one more thing you manage.

That is not a personal failing. A 2024 University of Bath and University of Melbourne study of 3,000 US parents, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, found mothers handle roughly 71% of the household's cognitive labor: the planning, scheduling, and remembering. A shared app only helps if it moves some of that invisible work off one person.

Where Todoist genuinely wins

Todoist is an excellent personal task manager. It has been built by Doist since 2007 and is used by tens of millions of people, and for good reason: fast natural-language capture, work and personal life in one place, deep integrations, and power-user filters and labels. If you are the solo driver of your own to-do list, it is hard to beat. This comparison is not about whether Todoist is good. It is about whether a general tool fits a shared home.

Why a shared Todoist list becomes one person's job

Todoist has no dedicated family plan. Its own help docs point families to standard shared projects, the same sharing you get on any tier. A shared project shows every task to everyone, but that is visibility, not ownership, and a few gaps add up fast.

• No roles or permissions. Everyone invited to a shared project gets full edit access, so a child or teen can complete or delete a shared list.
• No built-in rotation. A task takes a single assignee, which is fine, but nothing rotates a chore that switches hands week to week.
• Paid features follow each person. Inside a shared project, features depend on your own plan, not the inviter's, so custom reminders only work for members who are also paying.

The pricing math for a whole household

Todoist's free plan is genuinely useful for one person: 5 projects, up to 5 collaborators, basic reminders, one week of history, and no calendar view. The family-friendly extras (custom reminders, a calendar view, full history) live in Pro, and because features follow each person's own plan, everyone who wants them pays. Pro is $5 per month billed annually, or $60 a year, per person as of December 2025. Two parents who both want their own reminders is roughly $120 a year.

Houseloop is free to start too, and Plus is billed once per household: $7.99 a month or $69.99 a year, with a 3-day free trial. One person pays and everyone else in the home joins free. For a family of four or five, a flat household price is the honest difference, not a headline per-seat number.

What Houseloop does differently

Houseloop is built for the handoff, not just the list.

• Tasks carry an owner and a reminder that reaches the assignee, not the whole family.
• Routines handle the things that repeat, so the rhythm does not live in one person's head.
• A shared grocery list everyone can add to, which auto-adds a baby supply when it runs low.
• A baby tracker for feeds, diapers, sleep, and shared night duty.
• Invited members can view the whole shared workspace read-only, handy for a grandparent or sitter.

Voice capture and the AI Brain Dump are part of Plus. The iPhone app is live, it works in any web browser including on Android, and it syncs across phones; a native Android app is on the way to Google Play. You can read more about the team behind it on our company page.

Who it is not for

Houseloop is not the right pick if you want one app for work projects and home life together: keep Todoist for that. If you live alone, or you are a committed power user who loves filters, labels, and an API, a dedicated family app is overkill. And if your household already runs fine on a free shared list where nobody minds who owns what, there is no reason to switch. Houseloop earns its place when you are trying to move the mental load off one person and give each task a real owner.