ZenKit Todo - an alternative for Wunderlist
NOTE: I’m not related to Axonic Informationssysteme GmbH, the company behind Zenkit To Do, this is just my personal review.
Wunderlist
As you maybe know, Wunderlist, the awesome todo app will disappear on May 6, 2020 after Microsoft bought 6Wunderkinder, the company behind Wunderlist, back in June 2015. The team behind Wunderlist created the new Microsoft Todo app, which look very familiar to Wunderlist, but lack many features and the stability is not the best until today. I came to the conclusion that I have to look for an alternative todo app after trying out Microsoft Todo for couple of weeks and the experience with the app was really frustrating. It seems the Microsoft internal politics leads to a new app, which have less features and lack of fine tuning (f.e. look how bad the web app is) and I would really like to know if the original Wunderlist team is really happy about the app as it is right now. I thank them for Wunderlist, a near to perfect to do app, which I really liked.
Looking for an alternative
I searched on twitter for @Wunderlist and @MicrosoftToDo and saw how many people are shocked about Microsoft Todo app and searching for an alternative. There where many alternatives, but I wanted an app which has an good web interface, which I always used with Wunderlist and some other features like comments. So, the only option I found appealing was Zenkit To Do.
Zenkit To Do
Wunderlist import
They have a Wunderlist import which is really easy. It works great on the browser and also on a mobile device. If you have a large list of tasks the import can take quite some time, but Zenkit To Do will show you a progress bar per list. Overall super straight forward to import Tasks from Wunderlist.
Use experience
The UX is great. The web app works pretty well on a desktop. There is not much what I miss from Wunderlist and sharing lists with other people is really easy. There are some bugs here and there, but overall it is a great UX and the performance is great on my older MacBook Pro. The app is very young, so most of the bugs will go away.
The mobile experience on Android is also good, but there are some noticeable performance problems. F.e. the app needs quite some time to start (approximately 5 seconds, but this depends on the speed of your device). On my device, a Samsung Galaxy Note 9, the click on the back button also lack in performance, but on a Huawei P30 Pro this is only minimal noticeable.
The experience on the iPad is great (6th generation iPad, so it is not the fastest one). It works fast and smooth and because of the device, there is no back button, so there is no noticeable performance lack like on Android.
I assume that the mobile apps are based on web technology, which is a good idea for startups to save costs and have a faster development cycle but typically have a startup time problem. In the mid to long term they should switch to a more native app both on iOS and on Android, and I think flutter would be a really good option for them. At the moment I assume that there could be performance troubles with low and mid spec devices especially on Android.
Missing features
There are some missing features like hashtag support which is really good if you have an grocery list and want to mark different grocery stores with a hashtag, so can easily see which things you need from one store with just one click.
What I also miss it the ability to select multiple tasks and move them to another list.
You can see what they have planed for the near future in the Switch from Wunderlist page , and hashtag support is one of them 🎉🎉. The only thing I miss on that page is that it is not clear in which plan the features will be available.
Login
You can create an account with normal email address and password, but you have many Sign up with ... options, so you don’t have to remember a new password again.
Enterprises
They are also enterprise ready, so f.e. they support SSO via SAML token, User roles and calendar support. For more details checkout their pricing site. And you can also combine it with their first product Zenkit, but I never used it. So Zenkit To Do is a viable option for companies at any size and the extra fee for a higher plan is good investment which will save more costs over time.
Pricing
The pricing seems to be absolutely fair. The free version has many nice feature in it (almost every feature as Wunderlist had in the free version) and f.e. the task-count limit, which is 2400 in the free version, is enough for most family users. When you reach the limit of your plan, you have 14 days to upgrade, or archive/delete some of your tasks/lists to be within your plans limit. If you need more, you can upgrade your plan at any time 😉.
Checkout the details about limits and features on the pricing site
Data Privacy
There are good news for companies and also for private individuals, Zenkit To Do is fully GDPR. And you have a dedicated button in the app to get your data and information of the data usage, which is super convenient if you care about your privacy. Checkout their GDPR page for more information.
Bugs
As in every software product there where some bugs. The only really bad bug I hit was based on the multi-language support. I use german as my main language, so my inbox list is called Posteingang. After the Wunderlist import there was my old inbox list called inbox, and so I want to move my task from this List to the Posteingang list. So I moved a task to my Zenkit To Do Posteingang and the element disappear in the original inbox list but it never appear in the Posteingang. I tried it with another task and the same thing happen again. It was really easy to find the problem. The internal name for Posteingang is inbox, which is the same name as my imported list from Wunderlist. I just renamed the old Wunderlist inbox to something else and now I move to the correct inbox. So Zenkit To Do seems to don’t like list which are named the same which is blocked in normal cases, but with multi-language support that can get tricky for builtin list.
Conclusion
Zenkit To Do is a really good alternative for Wunderlist/Microsoft To Do. If you search for an app which works very similar to Wunderlist Zenkit To Do is a viable option for you. For me Zenkit To Do is close to the point where Wunderlist where 5 years ago as a product and hopefully they get enough customers to make the app more stable and feature rich but following the minimalistic approach which Wunderlist was known for. I think this app could have a bright future and I wish them the best to make that happen.