The fate of Wunderlist

[idpaterson]

Wunderlist is going away... not tomorrow, but soon.

Many of you may be aware that earlier this year Microsoft, which acquired 6Wunderkinder in 2015, announced that it was building a replacement for Wunderlist from the ground up called Microsoft To-Do. The team set a goal for To-Do to achieve feature parity with Wunderlist, at which point the service that many of us have used for years will be shut down.

To-Do is still quite incomplete so this is not something that will happen right away but I want to encourage you to think about how you use Wunderlist and begin looking for an alternative.

Future of this workflow

Following Microsoft's announcement I made the decision to cease active development of this workflow. I will be happy to make any critical bug fixes or merge pull requests from contributors like @bogdal's task notes that is now released in version 0.7.0.

Microsoft's To-Do app uses a completely different API. While this may be good (the Wunderlist API was very limited and extremely slow) it would require significant adaptations for the workflow to work with To-Do. Anyone interested should feel free to fork the project and get it working for To-Do, but it might just be easier to start from scratch.

My path

I used Wunderlist for keeping my personal and financial life in order alongside Asana for work. I love Asana but find it to be overkill for tracking chores and bookkeeping, it can also be beneficial to keep work and personal goals in separate systems.

I switched to Todoist and while I'm mostly happy with the way the app works I am thrilled with the flexibility of the API. I use Integromat and to a much lesser extent IFTTT to automate task entry from emails, to manage existing tasks, and to fix annoying Todoist quirks (e.g. subtasks of recurring tasks remain completed forever rather than resetting for each repetition). It also integrates well with Amazon Echo.

Import from Wunderlist to Todoist was easy though I did have to fix the scheduling on all recurring tasks. Todoist uses natural language dates and task entry was very familiar as a user of this workflow. The Quick Add feature in the Todoist macOS app can be extremely slow, but I've had great results with Martien Oranje's Alfred Todoist Workflow which is lightning fast.

I favored a todo app where I and most other users will pay the annual subscription fee in the hope of active development and longevity of the service. If you're looking for something rock solid, Remember the Milk offers similar features with a history spanning more than a decade. You may get what you need out of the free versions of RTM and Todoist but they are quite locked-down without a subscription.

Resources

There are dozens of good to-do services out there so I will not attempt to make a list; use this as an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness with which you were using Wunderlist and find something that will work even better for your needs.

The Cortex podcast by Relay FM discusses productivity tools like Wunderlist in many episodes and both hosts CGP Grey and Myke Hurley have used and switched away from Wunderlist for various reasons. The show is entertaining and encourages a new perspective from which to examine your work and personal life.

The To-Do Preview can be used today if you want to stick with Microsoft. It's getting decent reviews despite lacking features; once finished it will probably offer the smoothest transition for Wunderlist users.

I highly recommend trying Martien Oranje's Alfred Todoist Workflow if you find that Todoist is a good fit for you. It should feel familiar to users of the Wunderlist workflow.

---

Thanks for all the feedback and stars over the years, this workflow was a great experience and personally saved me a lot of time adding tasks to Wunderlist. Please fork and submit pull requests if there are any features you need before Wunderlist is no more!

[jamesschles]

Quite late seeing this post, but Wunderlist has officially shut down this year and I've been looking for replacements. Ms todo isn't really my thing. It's not bad, but it lacks many features. I'm also not keen on paying for task management softwares. . Apps like Trello and Asana are too expensive for me. Lately, I've been using Quire and so far its a good replacement for Wunderlist. They're free, has all the features Wunderlist has, has a mobile version...it's efficient enough Still open to recommendations though, so I'll be sure to check out Todoist. Cheers!