How to choose a menu bar todo app for macOS

There is no shortage of menu bar todo apps for macOS. There are at least two dozen on the Mac App Store, plus several outside it. They differ in surprisingly meaningful ways once you start using them daily, and most of those differences are not visible from a screenshot.

This post is not a ranked list. Ranked lists for productivity tools are mostly fiction, because the right tool depends on how you actually work. Instead, here are six questions to ask before you commit to any menu bar todo app, and three rough categories the available apps fall into.

The six questions

The difference is not subtle. A real menu bar app puts a small icon at the top of your screen, and clicking that icon opens a popover where the entire app lives. There is no separate window. There is no Dock icon. The app exists in your peripheral vision and disappears when you click away.

A window app with a menu bar shortcut is a normal app that happens to have a quick-add hotkey or a menu bar status icon for opening the main window. The main UI still wants to be a window in your Dock, taking up space and demanding attention.

Both can be useful. They are just different products. Some people want their tasks in a focused full window with kanban boards and search filters. Some people want their tasks to disappear except when called.

If you find yourself thinking “I would use this if it stayed out of my way,” you want a true menu bar app. If you find yourself thinking “I want a real workspace for my projects,” you want the window app and you should probably skip this list entirely.

2. Does it support a global hotkey for quick add?

This is the single most important feature in any capture-focused tool. Without a global hotkey, the friction of writing down a task is high enough that you will stop doing it within a week. With one, the friction drops to about three seconds and you start capturing everything.

The good apps in this category all support global hotkeys. The bad ones either do not support them at all or require a paid tier to enable them. If a hotkey costs extra, the developer has fundamentally misunderstood why people want this kind of tool.

We wrote about why hotkeys matter in a separate post on capturing tasks from any app.

3. Can you type the date as part of the sentence?

If you have to choose a date from a calendar widget every time you add a task with a due date, you will stop adding due dates. The app needs to understand “tomorrow at 9am” and “in 30 minutes” and “next Friday” as inline phrases.

This is now table stakes for new apps. Older apps may not have it. If natural-language date parsing is missing or broken, the app will feel ten years older than its release date no matter how nice the icons are.

4. How does sync work?

There are roughly three options:

iCloud sync. The app uses your private iCloud account to sync between your own Macs. There is no third party. The data stays inside Apple’s infrastructure, which you are already using and trusting. iCloud sync requires no account creation, no password, and no separate billing.
Account-based sync. The app uses its own backend. You create an account with the developer, they store your tasks on their servers, and they handle sync between devices. This is how subscription todo apps work. It enables features like sharing lists with other people, but it also means your tasks live on someone else’s hardware.
No sync. The app is single-device only. This sounds primitive, but for someone who only uses one Mac, it is also the simplest, most private option.

iCloud sync is usually the right answer for a single user with multiple Macs. Account-based sync is necessary if you want to collaborate. No sync is honest for a focused personal tool.

5. What does it cost over five years?

Most people compare the price tag at the moment of purchase. The more useful comparison is the total cost over the period you will actually use the app, which for a productivity tool is usually three to five years.

A free app costs nothing. A one-time $9.99 app costs $9.99 forever. A $5/month subscription costs $300 over five years. A $48/year subscription costs $240 over five years.

The five-year number is the one that should drive your decision, because productivity tools tend to be sticky. You pick one and you live with it for years. Multiplying out the recurring cost makes the actual stakes visible.

6. What happens if the developer disappears?

Apps from solo developers, especially indie utilities, sometimes get abandoned. The developer takes a job. The app stops getting updates. Eventually it breaks on a future macOS version.

The right question to ask is: if this app stops working, do I get my data out? An app that exports to Markdown or JSON gives you a clean exit. An app that locks your data in a proprietary format with no export is a future headache.

For TodoBar specifically, the export options are Markdown and JSON, both available from the menu and from the Settings page. Worst case, you can take your tasks to any other app or just keep them as a text file.

Three categories

Once you have answered the six questions, the available apps fall into roughly three buckets.

The full-featured project tool

This category includes apps that started as menu bar utilities and grew into full project managers. They have lists, projects, tags, filters, recurring tasks, attachments, and often shared lists.

These apps are usually subscription, account-based, and fairly heavy. They are the right answer if you run actual projects with multiple stakeholders and need a real database underneath. They are the wrong answer if you wanted a place to write down “buy milk” and you ended up with a Gantt chart.

If you are evaluating one of these and your daily use is “twelve open tasks, all personal,” you are paying for capacity you will never use.

Apps like Things 3 fall into this category. The main UI is a beautiful, considered Mac window. It has projects, areas, scheduled tasks, and a today view. It also has a global quick-add window that pops up from anywhere with a hotkey.

These apps are excellent if you are willing to commit to a paid Mac product as your primary task home. They are not menu bar apps in the strict sense, but they have the menu bar capture pattern as a feature. The cost is one-time, usually in the $40 to $80 range per platform.

The trade-off is you also get a real app demanding a place in your Dock and your attention. Some people love that. Some find it heavier than they need.

This is the category TodoBar lives in. The entire app is a popover that lives in the menu bar. There is no Dock icon. There is no separate window. There is a global hotkey. There is natural-language date parsing. There is iCloud sync. The app does one thing, the way you do not have to think about.

These apps tend to be one-time purchase or freemium with a single optional unlock. They tend to be made by one or two people. They tend to stay focused because the surface area is small enough that adding features is a real decision, not a quarterly default.

If “I want to write down todos and have them quietly remind me without ever feeling like a third app I have to check” describes you, this is your category. Within it, the differences are mostly about polish, design taste, and whether the developer’s pricing model matches your appetite.

How to actually decide

Set aside an hour. Pick two or three candidates from the same category. Install all of them. For one workday, capture every task into all of them in parallel. At the end of the day, ask yourself which one you reached for without thinking.

That app is the one. The one you reached for unconsciously is the one your hands trusted. Everything else is theory.

If you want to add TodoBar to your hour, the home page has the App Store link and there is a free tier of up to 10 active tasks before any paid unlock, so you can spend a full day capturing tasks before deciding. The hotkey, the natural-language parsing, the iCloud sync, and the export are all in the free tier. The unlock is only the cap on simultaneous active tasks.

The right tool is the one that disappears into your day. Pick the one whose absence you would notice first.