Todoist rolls out Kanban-style Boards as an optional view, similar to Trello
Todoist today officially introduced a feature that could significantly change how people use the popular task-management app: Boards. It basically works a lot like Trello, but built right into Todoist.
Context & Ripple Effects
Boards caps a steady build-out of Doist's task app: after rebuilding the Android app in 2015 and adding sections inside projects across mobile, desktop, and web last year, Todoist is now adopting the Kanban view that made Trello famous — but as an optional layer on existing projects rather than a separate product. The move targets the overlap between list users who occasionally want columns and Trello's card-based workflow.
It also lands in a market where Atlassian has been actively investing in Trello, from personalized activity feeds and notifications to native Mac and Windows apps.
First-order effects
- Todoist users can flip any project between list and board views without migrating data or paying for a second tool — directly attacking the use case where people run Trello alongside a to-do app.
- Trello's differentiation narrows: its core board metaphor is no longer unique among mainstream task managers.
Second-order effects
- Atlassian's answer comes through continued investment in Trello itself — the visual overhaul, card customization, and new board views it shipped months later push competition toward richer cards and multiple view types rather than boards alone.
- Rivals like Asana, which redesigned around list-and-spreadsheet metaphors in its Track Anything update, face the same pressure to converge on Kanban as a table-stakes view.
Third-order effects
- If every task manager absorbs the board view, competition shifts from layout to workflow depth — scheduling intelligence, integrations, cross-platform sync — favoring apps like Todoist that own the underlying task data and treat views as interchangeable lenses.
The trend: Task management apps are converging on multi-view architectures where lists, boards, and calendars are optional lenses on one dataset, eroding standalone kanban tools' reason to exist.