Todoist doesn't have a habit feature. That sounds like a criticism and isn't — it's a task manager, and one of the best ones made. But it means a Todoist habit tracker is always something you assemble yourself out of recurring tasks, and it's worth knowing exactly which parts of that workaround hold and which quietly don't.
The standard setup: create a task, give it a recurring due date — every day, every Mon, Wed, Fri — and tick it forever. Todoist's natural-language date parsing makes this genuinely pleasant to set up, better than most dedicated apps. Karma adds points and a daily streak on top, so there's even a sense of momentum.
Where it breaks is history. init.Habits is a terminal-style habit tracker for iPhone with GitHub-style heatmaps, earned streak freezes (shields), five tracking modes including a pomodoro timer, and 23 editor themes. This post is only about the habit-tracking job — if you want a Todoist alternative for tasks, this isn't it, because init.Habits has no tasks, projects or calendar at all. Honest comparison, as of July 2026.
At a glance
| init.Habits | Todoist | |
|---|---|---|
| Habit feature | the whole app | none — recurring tasks as a workaround |
| Per-habit history | full record + GitHub-style heatmap | none — completed tasks leave the list |
| Streaks | per habit, with earned protection | Karma streak for overall daily activity |
| Free tier | 10 habits, full stats | 5 personal projects, 3 filters, 1 week of history |
| Platforms | iPhone (synced web coming) | iPhone, Android, web, Mac, Windows, Linux, Watch |
| Tracking modes | checkbox, counter, number + unit, timer, Apple Health | done / not done |
| Tasks & projects | no | yes — the product |
| Natural-language input | no | best in class |
| Price | €3.99/mo, €24.99/yr, €34.99 lifetime | free tier; Pro and Business paid |
What a recurring task can't do
A task is designed to disappear. That's its job — you finish it, it leaves the list, the next occurrence appears. For a to-do list that's exactly right, and for a habit it's the core problem: the record of whether you did it doesn't persist in a form you can read. That matters more than it sounds, because habits are built by repetition in a stable context rather than by remembering to decide — the consistent finding across decades of habit research — and repetition is precisely the thing a vanishing task refuses to show you.
Three consequences, concretely:
- A postponed task looks identical to a completed one, later. Reschedule Tuesday's run to Wednesday and there's no trace that Tuesday was missed. A habit tracker records the miss, because the miss is the information.
- There's no per-habit view. You can't open "meditate" and see three months of it. The completions are scattered through a global activity log, and on the free plan that log only goes back a week.
- You can't track amounts. Recurring tasks are binary. "Read 20 pages" and "read 2 pages" both close the same task.
If you've ever wondered whether you're actually running more this year than last, Todoist can't answer it, and that's not a bug in how you've set it up.
Karma is real, but it measures something else
Worth being precise here, because "Todoist has no streaks" would be false. Karma gives you points for completing tasks, levels as points accumulate, and a daily streak for hitting your daily goal.
That streak tracks overall task-completion activity — not any particular habit. Clear ten work tasks and skip your run, and Karma is delighted. It's a productivity score, and a decent one; it just isn't a habit record. The streak in a habit tracker means "this specific behaviour, unbroken." The streak in Karma means "you were busy."
Reading a year instead of a week
The clearest difference is what you can see. Every habit in init.Habits gets a GitHub-style heatmap: one square per day, a year on one screen. Patterns turn up that no streak number exposes — that you always collapse in the third week of a month, or that your reading survived a holiday your gym habit didn't.
Todoist's equivalent is the productivity view and activity log, which is oriented around volume of tasks completed rather than continuity of one behaviour. On the free plan the history window is one week.
There's also more than one way to log a habit in init.Habits: a checkbox, a counter, a number with a unit, a timer for focus work, or a value pulled from Apple Health. Steps and workouts fill themselves in. Todoist has one mode, because a task is either done or not.
Where Todoist genuinely wins
- It runs everywhere. iPhone, Android, web, Mac, Windows, Linux and Watch, with mature sync. init.Habits is iPhone-first with a synced web app coming.
- Natural-language capture. Typing "run every Mon, Wed, Fri at 7am" and having it just work is better than any dedicated tracker's setup flow.
- One app instead of two. Real value. If your habits are already in Todoist and you check them reliably, adding a second app has a cost.
- The ecosystem. Integrations, extensions, an API, a long track record, and a browser extension that adds basic habit streaks if that's all you need.
- Genuinely good free tier for its actual job.
If your honest answer to "do I need to see months of history?" is no, stay in Todoist. A second app you open twice and forget is worse than a workaround you actually use.
A note on TickTick
If you're comparing task managers with habit features, TickTick is the closer call — unlike Todoist it has a built-in habit tracker, so the question there is depth rather than existence. That comparison is TickTick habit tracker alternative.
Running both, which is what most people should do
- Leave tasks in Todoist. Genuinely one-off things, deadlines, work — none of that belongs in a habit tracker.
- Move only the recurring items you care about over time: exercise, reading, practice, meditation. Usually four or five.
- Delete those recurring tasks from Todoist afterwards, or you'll tick everything twice and trust neither record.
- Match the tracking mode to the habit — counter for reps, timer for focus blocks, Apple Health for anything your phone already knows.
For the wider "which app for which job" question, self-improvement apps covers the stack approach.
FAQ
Does Todoist have a habit tracker?
No native one. You track habits with recurring due dates, and Karma adds points, levels and a daily streak for overall task completion. There's also a third-party Habit Tracker extension that adds per-task streaks. None of it gives you a per-habit history view.
Can I use recurring tasks as habits?
Yes, and for simple daily checks it works fine. The limits show up over time: a rescheduled task hides the miss, completions don't persist as a readable per-habit record, and you can't log amounts — only done or not done.
Does Karma count as a streak?
It's a real streak, but for your daily task goal rather than for any individual habit. You can hold a long Karma streak while skipping the one habit you cared about, because clearing other tasks keeps it alive.
Is init.Habits a replacement for Todoist?
No. It has no tasks, projects, calendar or collaboration, and it isn't trying to. Most people keep a task manager and add a tracker for the handful of behaviours they want to watch over months — the two answer different questions, much like habits vs goals.