Things 3 is one of the best apps ever made for iOS. That’s not an exaggeration. Cultured Code spent years refining every interaction until task management felt effortless. The animations are purposeful. The gesture system is intuitive. The scheduling engine - with Today, Upcoming, Anytime, and Someday views - maps perfectly to how most people think about what needs to happen and when.
If you just need to manage tasks, Things 3 is very hard to beat.
The question this article addresses is different: what if tasks are only part of what you need?
Understanding Things 3’s strengths helps clarify when and why you’d look beyond it:
Things 3 succeeds because it is purely a task manager. It doesn’t try to be a note-taking app or a project management suite. That focus is a feature.
Here’s the scenario that creates the gap: you’re working on a project and you have tasks - things that need to get done. But each task exists within a context. There are meeting notes explaining why the task matters. There’s a voice recording of the client describing what they want. There’s a web article with research relevant to the work. There are reference files.
In Things 3, a task can have a title and some notes text. That’s appropriate for pure task management - “Buy groceries” doesn’t need a research folder attached to it. But for knowledge work tasks - “Draft proposal for Henderson project” or “Research competitor pricing strategy” - the surrounding context matters as much as the checkbox.
When your tasks need context, you typically end up with a split workflow:
Everything relates to the same project, but it’s scattered across five apps. You mentally bridge the gaps, remembering that “the Henderson recording is in Voice Memos” and “the competitor research is in my Safari reading list.” This works until it doesn’t - until you forget where something is, or the connections between items become too complex to hold in your head.
If you’re feeling this gap, here’s what matters:
The core requirement: an app where to-do items and notes coexist naturally. Not as an afterthought - “we added checklists to our note app” - but as a genuine integration where tasks sit alongside the notes, files, and recordings that give them meaning.
A task about a project meeting should be able to sit next to the meeting notes, the voice recording of the discussion, the web article that prompted the meeting, and the reference PDF. All in one place. If the alternative only combines tasks with text notes, you’ve just reduced five apps to four.
Things 3 set a high standard for how an iOS app should feel. Anything you switch to should feel equally native - fast launches, smooth animations, intuitive gestures. If the alternative is a web app running in a wrapper, you’ll feel the difference every time you open it.
Things 3 organizes by areas, projects, and scheduling. Your alternative needs something equally capable. Look for nesting, grouping, tagging, or hierarchical structures that let you organize both tasks and their surrounding context.
Things 3 works perfectly without internet. Don’t trade this away. Mobile apps need to function everywhere - including places without connectivity.
Unit Notes takes a different approach than Things 3. Instead of being a task manager that can hold some notes, it’s a block-based canvas where tasks, notes, voice recordings, web pages, images, and files all live as equal citizens.
A project in Unit might look like this:
Every piece of content is a block. You can drag to-do items between sections, move the voice recording next to the relevant task, or nest entire sub-notes inside the project.
The honest tradeoff: Unit is not as refined a task manager as Things 3. It doesn’t have Things 3’s scheduling engine (Today/Upcoming/Anytime/Someday), deadline reminders, or area-based organization. If pure task management is your primary need, Things 3 remains the better tool.
But if your work involves tasks surrounded by notes, recordings, web research, and files - if the context around your tasks matters as much as the tasks themselves - Unit brings everything into one place.
Todoist is a powerful cross-platform task manager with more features than Things 3 in some areas (labels, filters, collaboration). But it has the same fundamental limitation: tasks are tasks, and notes about tasks live somewhere else.
Notion can combine tasks and notes in a single workspace. It’s incredibly flexible with databases, kanban views, and rich pages. The tradeoff on iPhone: it’s a web app, slower than native, and offline support is limited.
GoodNotes / Notability combine notes with task management for handwriting-oriented workflows. If you use Apple Pencil extensively, these might bridge the gap differently.
Apple Reminders + Apple Notes together give you a free, native, well-integrated solution. Reminders has improved significantly with smart lists and natural language input. The limitation: the two apps are still separate, and there’s no block-based structure connecting tasks to their context.
Stay with Things 3 if:
Consider Todoist if:
Consider Notion if:
Consider Unit Notes if:
Many people use Things 3 and a note-taking app together. That’s a perfectly valid approach. The question is whether the mental overhead of bridging two apps is worth it for your workflow, or whether you’d be better served by one app that does both.
For a related perspective, see Love Things 3? Here’s an App That Does Tasks and Notes Together.
