TickTick gives you a task list, a calendar view, habits and a Pomodoro timer for roughly $36 a year, and asks you to type every task in. Pidgy asks for nothing typed. It reads your Outlook and Gmail, writes the to-dos itself, and then plans, drafts and chases.
TickTick is the better buy if you want one inexpensive app for all of personal productivity and most of your tasks start in your own head. Pidgy is the better buy if most of your tasks start in someone else's email. TickTick's free tier is generous, Premium is about $36 a year, and it runs offline on every platform, with smart date parsing, an Eisenhower matrix, habits and an achievement score. What it cannot do is read your inbox. You type the task or forward the email. Pidgy starts there, pulling the action out of every message in Outlook and Gmail (including things you promised in your own replies), ranking it, grouping it into projects, dropping it into calendar blocks, drafting the reply and chasing whoever goes quiet. A lot of people end up running both.
Feature lists do not decide this one. Your answers to three questions do.
Count last week's tasks. If more than half arrived as an email, a request from a client, a colleague asking for a file, a supplier chasing a signature, then capture is your real bottleneck and TickTick leaves that bottleneck in place. If most of them came from meetings, your own plans or household life, TickTick's quick add is faster than anything.
TickTick lists. It will remind you, show the task against your calendar and let you tick it off. Pidgy acts on the email behind the task. It drafts the reply in your voice, queues a chase when the other side stalls, and rolls all the mail about one piece of work into a project with a progress percentage.
If yes, that is a point for TickTick and it is not a small one. Habit tracking, the Pomodoro timer and the Eisenhower matrix are built in, on every platform, offline. Pidgy has none of those and is web-first for now.
Ten moments from a normal week, and what each tool does at that moment.
| The moment | Pidgy | TickTick |
|---|---|---|
| Monday 8am, 60 unread emails | To-dos already extracted and ranked |
Nothing until you type or forward |
| A task pops into your head in the shower | Add it via Ask Pidgy or by email |
Quick add with smart date parsing |
| A client emails asking for a document | Becomes a to-do on its own |
Forward the email, it splits lines into tasks |
| You reply "I'll send it Thursday" | Your promise is captured as a task |
Not detected |
| Planning the afternoon | Plan mode, drag into calendar blocks |
Calendar view, Google Calendar sync on Premium |
| Checking how a client project is going | Project view built from the inbox, with % |
Lists, folders and tags you maintain |
| Someone has not replied in a week | Chase drafted and queued |
A reminder, if you set one |
| 25 minutes of deep focus | No timer |
Pomodoro built in |
| Logging a daily habit | Not offered |
Habit tracker built in |
| Working on a plane | Web-first for now |
Offline apps on every platform |
| Friday, how did the week go? | Inbox Health score, daily |
Achievement score and levels |
| The bill | 7-day free trial |
Free tier, Premium about $36 a year |
TickTick can turn a forwarded email into tasks, one per line, and it connects to Gmail and Outlook for capture. It does not read any email you have not forwarded.
Forwarding is a fine mechanism for the two or three emails a day you remember to forward. The tasks that hurt are the ones you did not forward, because the request was in paragraph three, or because you answered it with "sure, next week" and moved on. Nothing in TickTick ever sees that message again.
Pidgy reads the mail as it lands, in both Outlook and Gmail, and writes the action into a ranked list before you have opened the thread. The promise you typed in your own reply becomes a to-do with a date. If you prefer to add something yourself, you can, through Ask Pidgy or by email, and TickTick's smart date parsing is honestly nicer for that. With Pidgy, typing is optional rather than the only way in.
From an email landing to a block on your calendar, without a forward or a keystroke.
TickTick is free to start and about $36 a year for Premium. Pidgy has a 7-day free trial with no credit card needed. The larger cost in TickTick is the ten minutes a day you spend retyping your inbox.
On price alone TickTick wins and it is not close. $36 a year buys the calendar view, Google Calendar sync and the full suite of habits, timer and matrix. If your budget is the deciding factor, stop reading and download it.
The other cost is harder to see on a pricing page. Every task that arrives by email has to be read by you, understood by you, and then typed or forwarded by you. Multiply that by forty emails a day and you have the reason task lists go stale by Wednesday. Pidgy charges for taking that work away, and the value depends entirely on how much of it you currently do. Someone with five work emails a day will not notice. Someone with a hundred will.
Four cases where we would tell a friend to use TickTick and not bother with Pidgy.
Plenty of people keep TickTick for personal life and let Pidgy handle work email. The split is clean because the two tools rarely touch the same task.
A typical setup looks like this. TickTick holds the gym habit, the dentist, the Pomodoro sessions and the weekend list. Pidgy holds every to-do that came from a client, a colleague or a supplier, plus the drafted replies and the chases. The calendar sits between them, with TickTick's calendar view showing personal tasks and Plan mode laying work blocks into the same week.
Avoid copying tasks from one to the other by hand. If a work email must live in TickTick, forward it and let TickTick split it. Otherwise leave it in Pidgy, where the reply and the follow-up sit next to the task.
Your inbox already contains the list. Pidgy just writes it down.
Try Pidgy for freeComparisons and roundups that cover the same ground.
Pidgy reads Outlook and Gmail, writes the tasks, lays them into your week and chases what stalls. Start your free trial below.