Elysium vs Things 3: Great Task List. Wrong Shape for Your Day.

Let me say this first, because I mean it: Things 3 is one of the best-designed apps Apple has ever blessed. If you've used it for years, you already know. The typography. The animations. The way Today just feels right at 6:42 a.m. when you're trying to figure out what your day looks like. Cultured Code did the work. They earned the awards.

This post isn't about pretending otherwise.

It's about what happens after you've been using Things for a while and start to notice the edges — the places where you reach for the app and find the app isn't reaching back. That's where Elysium lives.

Things 3 is a beautiful task list

That sentence is doing more work than it looks like.

Things 3 is a task list. It is not a calendar. It is not a habit tracker. It is not a time-blocker. It is not a project workspace. It is not a writing tool, a knowledge base, or a daily planner. It is a list of things you'd like to do, organized by area and project, with dates if you want them.

That focus is the whole point. It's why the app feels so calm — because it doesn't try to do everything.

But for a lot of us, "a list of things to do" isn't the shape of a workday anymore. The workday is:

A 9–10 block for deep work
Three tasks that need to land before lunch
A habit I'm trying to keep (gym, journaling, whatever)
A reminder to call my dad
A meeting at 2
A project that's two weeks of all of the above

That's six different kinds of thing. Things 3 has one of them.

What you do today when Things doesn't fit

Most people I know who use Things cope by stacking apps:

Things for the task list
Fantastical or Apple Calendar for events
Streaks or Strides for habits
Reminders for the call-your-dad stuff
Notion or Obsidian for the project context

Five subscriptions. Five places to check. Five places your data sits in five different shapes, none of which talk to each other.

This is fine, technically. It's also how I lived for years. The problem isn't that it doesn't work — it's that you become the integration layer. Your brain holds the schema.

What Elysium does differently

Elysium starts from the opposite premise: all of those things are the same kind of thing.

A task is a time commitment. A habit is a recurring time commitment. An event is a time commitment with other people. A goal is a long-running time commitment with checkpoints. A reminder is a time commitment with a notification attached.

OpenTime — the file format Elysium is built on — defines six types that unify them:

type: task
title: Reply to Sarah
due: 2026-05-13
project: Acme Client
---
type: habit
title: Morning walk
schedule: every weekday at 07:00
streak: 14
---
type: event
title: Lunch with Mike
start: 2026-05-14T12:30
duration: 60m
location: Café Vita

That's three of the six. You write them in the same file, in the same format. They show up together in the same view. Recurring tasks can be completed early without breaking your streak — a known limitation in Things. Things you do in Obsidian show up in Elysium. Things you change in Elysium show up in Obsidian. Apple Shortcuts can read and write the whole thing.

It's the model Things doesn't have — because Things was designed for a different shape of life.

The thing about file formats

Here's the bigger gap, and it's the one that took me longest to articulate.

Your Things 3 data lives in Cultured Code's database. It's well-engineered, well-encrypted, and it's been working fine for 15 years. But it's their database. If they stop development tomorrow (they won't, but if), or if you decide you want to move, your options are: export to a text dump, lose most of the structure, start over.

Your Elysium data lives in .ot files. On your computer. In folders you control. Version-controllable with git. Editable in any text editor. Readable by any app that wants to support the format. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, you can open Elysium's data in vim and keep going.

That's not a small difference. That's "your schedule belongs to you" vs. "your schedule belongs to the app you're paying to access it."

Notes apps figured this out a decade ago — Markdown. Schedules are getting it now.

When Things 3 still wins

I'm not going to pretend Things 3 is wrong for anyone. It is exactly right when:

Your work is mostly a flat list of to-dos and you don't need calendar or habits in the same view
You bought Things years ago and the lifetime cost has long since paid off
You love the design and that design is a daily quality-of-life thing for you
You don't care about extensibility, integrations, or owning the file format

If that's you, keep using Things. Seriously. The best app is the one you actually use.

When Elysium fits better

Elysium is built for the person Things 3 used to fit but doesn't anymore:

You time-block, or you want to
Tasks + habits + events all need to live in one place
You use Obsidian (or want to) and want your schedule to be a citizen of that workflow
You care about owning your data in a format you can actually read
You want plugins, Shortcuts, API access, real extensibility
You miss the indie-developer accountability of buying from a small studio that actually ships

The voice we built Elysium in is the same voice Things 3 had ten years ago. Built by someone who uses it daily. Opinionated because the developer is opinionated. Not designed by committee.

The difference is we're still shipping.

Pricing, briefly

Things 3 is one-time: about $80 total for Mac + iPad + iPhone. That's a fair price and I respect it.

Elysium is free forever for the core. Cloud sync is $50/year. Teams are $200/year. The core local-first app costs nothing — because the model is yours, not ours, and we don't need to charge rent on it.

If you don't need cloud sync, Elysium costs you zero. If you do, it costs less than a Fantastical subscription and includes everything Things doesn't do.

Try the thing

Elysium is on the App Store for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS. Windows, Linux, and Android are coming.

If you've outgrown Things 3 — or you're starting to suspect you have — give it a few weeks. The first week is for migration. The second week is for noticing how often you used to context-switch between apps. The third is for realizing you stopped.

That's how it went for me, anyway. I built Elysium because Things 3 was the closest thing to the app I wanted, and it wasn't quite the thing.

Questions, gripes, or feedback? Drop into our Discord — I read everything.