Things 3 Review: The Most Beautiful GTD App on Mac

What Makes Things 3 Feel Different the Moment You Open It?

I've tried most of the serious task managers on Mac. I've lived inside OmniFocus for a year, bounced around Todoist for another, dabbled with Notion-as-task-manager (don't do this to yourself), and spent a bewildering week in Obsidian Tasks. Every time I came back to Things 3, there was a moment — usually within the first ten minutes — where my shoulders actually relaxed. That sounds ridiculous to say about a to-do app, but Cultured Code has built something that feels genuinely calm to use. Not simplified to the point of uselessness. Not feature-sparse. Just considered.

Things 3 is a GTD-adjacent task manager for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It costs a flat $49.99 on Mac (plus $9.99 on iPhone and $19.99 on iPad — separate purchases, no subscription). For a premium app in a category where everyone else has pivoted to monthly fees, that pricing alone earns it a serious look.

How Does the GTD Workflow Actually Hold Up Day to Day?

David Allen's Getting Things Done system is built on a few core ideas: capture everything, clarify what it means, organize by context, and review regularly. Things 3 maps to this more naturally than any other app I've used. The structure clicks into place without forcing you to read a manual.

The Inbox is your capture bucket — frictionless by design. Toss everything in there and deal with it later. From Inbox, you route tasks into Areas (big life domains like Work, Health, or Personal Finance) or Projects (anything with multiple steps and a defined outcome). That two-level hierarchy is where Things diverges from the competition in a meaningful way.

OmniFocus gives you folders, projects, sub-projects, and action groups — a power structure that can model anything but requires you to think like a systems architect before you can make a to-do list. Things 3 says: you get Areas and Projects, and that's enough. For 95% of real work, it is. The constraint is a feature, not a limitation.

Each task supports tags, a scheduled date, a deadline, notes, and checklist sub-items. The When field is one of the cleverest design decisions in the app — you can set a start date (when a task becomes visible) separately from a hard deadline (when it's actually due). This maps perfectly to how work actually flows: I might create a task to prepare a client report three weeks before it's due, but I don't want it cluttering my Today view until next Monday.

Is Quick Entry as Fast as Everyone Claims?

Yes, and it's faster than you think. The global hotkey (customizable, but defaults to Control + Space) drops a focused capture panel onto whatever you're doing. Type the task name, hit Tab to add a note or tag, hit Return, and it's in your Inbox. The whole interaction takes under three seconds.

The Quick Entry with Autofill variant is even better: it pulls the current URL and page title from your browser, so when I'm on a webpage I need to revisit, one keystroke gives me a task that already contains the link. I use this constantly when I'm jumping between research tabs and need to bookmark intent, not just content.

Cultured Code also ships a Share Extension that works across the OS, and Things 3 supports URL schemes and Shortcuts for automation nerds who want to build capture flows from other apps. It's not as deep as OmniFocus's AppleScript empire, but it covers the cases most people actually have.

What Does the Today View Get Right That Other Apps Get Wrong?

The Today view is where you live in Things 3, and it's executed beautifully. Tasks are grouped by Area or Project with a subtle visual separator, so at a glance you can see whether your day is weighted too heavily toward one domain. There's an Evening section — an opt-in feature that lets you park tasks you intend to tackle after hours without having them stare at you during the workday. Small thing. Enormous psychological benefit.

The Upcoming view shows your scheduled tasks on a timeline that spans weeks. It's the closest Things gets to a calendar, and while it doesn't integrate directly with Calendar.app events (a real gap — more on that below), it gives you enough temporal context to plan without anxiety.

The Logbook collects everything you've completed, organized by day. I review mine every Friday. It's quietly one of the most motivating features in any productivity app — a permanent record of what you've actually done, not just what you planned.

How Does Things Sync Compare to the Competition?

Things Sync is Cultured Code's proprietary sync layer, and it is fast. We're talking push-based, near-instant sync across Mac, iPhone, and iPad. I've tested it by adding a task on my iPhone and watching it appear on my Mac before I set the phone down. Todoist's sync is similarly snappy; OmniFocus uses its own OmniPresence/OmniSync and can occasionally lag. Neither is a dealbreaker in practice, but Things 3 sync feels effortless in a way that matches the rest of the app.

Importantly, your data is encrypted end-to-end and syncs over Cultured Code's servers — there's no iCloud sync option and no way to self-host. If you have strict data residency requirements, that matters. For everyone else, it just works.

How Does Things 3 Stack Up Against OmniFocus and Todoist?

These three apps serve meaningfully different users, and I think it's worth being direct about who each one is for.

• OmniFocus 4 is for people who want to model complex, interconnected work systems — consultants managing multiple client streams, developers tracking feature backlogs across projects, people who genuinely need custom perspectives, forecast tags, and defer dates on individual action groups. It's also $9.99/month (or $99.99/year) and has a learning curve that resembles onboarding to a new job. If you've tried OmniFocus and felt productive, stay there. If you've tried it and felt overwhelmed, Things 3 is your answer.
• Todoist is cross-platform by design — it runs identically on Mac, Windows, Android, and the web. If you need your tasks accessible on a work PC and a personal Mac, Todoist is the pragmatic choice. It's also $4/month for the Pro tier, which makes Things 3's upfront cost feel steep until you do the three-year math. Todoist's interface, though, feels utilitarian in comparison — it's a capable tool that never quite feels native on macOS. Things 3 does.

Things 3 sits in the middle: more structure than a scratchpad, less power than OmniFocus, and more beautiful than either. That's a genuinely useful position to occupy.

Who Is Things 3 NOT For?

I want to be honest here, because no app is universal and Things 3 has real gaps.

• Collaboration is completely absent. You cannot share a project, assign a task to a colleague, or leave a comment thread. If your workflow involves any team task management, Things 3 is a personal companion at best — you'll still need Asana, Linear, or Notion for shared work.
• Calendar integration is shallow. Things 3 shows your calendar events in Today view (a recent addition), but it's read-only and purely visual. You can't create calendar events from tasks, and there's no two-way link. For people who live by time-blocking, this friction is real.
• No web client or Windows app. Things 3 is Apple-only, full stop. If you ever need to access your tasks from a browser or a non-Apple device, you're out of luck. Todoist and OmniFocus both offer web access.
• Repeating tasks with complex logic are limited. You can set tasks to repeat daily, weekly, monthly — but if you need "every third Tuesday of the month" or "14 days after completion," Things will frustrate you. OmniFocus handles this with far more granularity.

Is the $49.99 Price Tag Actually Worth It?

For the right person: unambiguously yes. Things 3 is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. At two years of use, you're paying about two dollars a month for an app that meaningfully improves how you think about your work. Cultured Code ships major updates (v3 was a ground-up redesign) without charging existing users, which is increasingly rare.

The verdict I keep coming back to is this: Things 3 is the best task manager for people who want a personal system that actually gets used. The design isn't aesthetic window dressing — it's the reason you open the app every morning instead of avoiding it. The Areas/Projects structure is opinionated enough to guide you without trapping you. The sync is invisible in the best way. And the Today view, with its Evening section and deadline-aware scheduling, reflects how humans actually experience time rather than how project management theory says we should.

If you've been meaning to get serious about task management but every app you've tried has eventually felt like homework, open the Things 3 trial. Give it one real week with your actual projects loaded. I'd be surprised if you come back to anything else.