Amazing Marvin is a deeply customizable task manager and daily planner for Mac, designed for people who have tried every productivity system and still feel like their workflow is fighting them.
What is Amazing Marvin?
Amazing Marvin is a personal task and project manager built around the idea that no two people work the same way — so your productivity tool shouldn't force you into one rigid structure. Unlike Things 3, which locks you into a beautifully opinionated GTD flow, or OmniFocus, which demands you learn its entire ecosystem upfront, Amazing Marvin ships with a strategy system: you activate only the features you need, and the app reshapes itself around your brain rather than the other way around.
The Mac app is the desktop counterpart to its web and iOS siblings, syncing in real time so your task list follows you wherever you work. It feels at home on macOS — keyboard shortcuts, dark mode, and a layout that respects screen real estate without becoming a cluttered dashboard.
What does Amazing Marvin do best?
Amazing Marvin earns its reputation through flexibility that borders on the absurd — in the best possible way. The strategy library alone covers more than 50 toggleable features: time-boxing, habit tracking, gamification, daily emotional check-ins, Pomodoro timers, backburner lists, and a built-in time-tracker that produces actual useful data about where your hours go.
What I keep returning to is the Daily Planning workflow. Every morning you pull tasks into a focused day list, estimate how long each will take, and the app surfaces a running tally against the hours you actually have available. It sounds simple, but seeing "you have 6 hours of tasks and 3 hours of real time left today" cuts through the optimism bias that ruins most productivity systems.
- Smart lists and custom filters that rival the power of Todoist's filter language
- Sub-tasks, recurring tasks, and project nesting without artificial depth limits
- Gamification layer (stars, points, streaks) that feels optional rather than infantile
- Calendar integration so scheduled blocks are visible alongside your task list
- Full keyboard navigation once you learn the shortcuts
How much does Amazing Marvin cost?
Amazing Marvin is free to try with a generous trial period that gives you access to the full feature set. After the trial, it moves to a paid plan — either a monthly subscription or a one-time lifetime purchase option, which is rare and worth considering if you commit to the app long-term. Pricing is competitive with the OmniFocus tier without requiring you to buy separate iOS and Mac editions.
There is no free tier once the trial ends, which is the right call: a freemium Amazing Marvin with crippled strategies would undercut the entire value proposition. Pay for it or use something simpler.
Who should use Amazing Marvin?
Amazing Marvin is built for people who have a complicated relationship with productivity — ADHD-diagnosed or not — and who have bounced off simpler tools because those tools imposed the wrong structure. If Things 3 feels too rigid, Todoist feels too corporate, and OmniFocus feels like a second job, Amazing Marvin is the next logical experiment.
It rewards people who are willing to spend an afternoon configuring their workspace. If you want to open an app and have it tell you exactly what to do with zero setup, look at Things 3 instead — it makes wonderful defaults. But if you want a system that genuinely adapts to how you think, Marvin is worth the learning curve.
What are the best Amazing Marvin alternatives?
The closest Mac-native competitor is Things 3 — polished, fast, opinionated, and beautifully integrated with macOS Focus modes, but structurally inflexible. OmniFocus 4 offers comparable depth and a native Mac app that feels premium, though its price is higher and the learning curve is steeper. Todoist wins on cross-platform reach and collaboration but trades depth for simplicity. For pure keyboard-driven task capture, Reminders (free, system-integrated) handles low-complexity lists without cognitive overhead.
If you need team-facing project management rather than personal task handling, none of these — including Marvin — replace Notion, Linear, or Basecamp.
