Haven vs. the task app you're using right now

The one real difference

Almost everything else on this page is a feature checklist, and feature checklists mostly even out — every mainstream task app has due dates, priorities, and a decent mobile app by now. The actual difference is this: Todoist, TickTick, Notion, and Microsoft To Do all store your tasks on their servers in a form the company can read. None of them advertise end-to-end encryption, because none of them are built around it — that's not a knock on them, it's just not the product they're building. Haven encrypts every task on your device before it's ever saved, so the servers involved — including the one we run — only ever see scrambled bytes. We built it and we still can't read what you write.

If that distinction doesn't matter for your grocery list, it genuinely might not need to. If you're a therapist, lawyer, journalist, or anyone else whose task list could contain something you have a duty to keep confidential, it's the whole point.

Side by side

Pricing, platform, and feature details for other products change over time and are accurate to the best of our knowledge as of writing — check each product's own site for current specifics. "Not advertised" means exactly that: these products don't market end-to-end encryption as a feature, which is the normal, standard way cloud task managers work, not a claim about anyone's internal security practices.

What that encryption actually buys you

"Encrypted" gets used loosely enough in software marketing that it's worth being specific. Most apps that say "your data is encrypted" mean encrypted in transit (the connection to their server is HTTPS — table stakes, every app on this list has that) and at rest on their servers (the disk is encrypted, but the company holds the key, so they can still read it whenever they want or need to). That protects you from someone breaking into the data center. It does not protect you from the company itself, an employee with access, a subpoena compelling them to hand over readable data, or a future acquisition that changes what happens to your data.

Haven's encryption happens before a task ever leaves your browser, using a key derived from your passphrase — a key that never gets sent anywhere. The server (ours, if you turn on sync) only ever receives and stores the already-scrambled result. There's no version of "the company reads your tasks" available to us, because there's no key on our end to read them with. You can verify this yourself: open the app, use the built-in "How your data is protected" panel, and watch it happen in real time — or read the source, since the whole thing is open on GitHub.

Where Haven wins

• No account, ever. Open the app, set a passphrase, start typing. There's no signup form, no email verification, no OAuth consent screen.
• Actually free. Not a free tier with a task limit that nudges you toward upgrading — the whole thing, including sync across your own devices.
• Nothing to leak, even in a worst case. If our sync server were ever breached, an attacker would get ciphertext. That's a materially different incident than "a task app got breached" usually means.
• You can read the code. Not "trust our privacy policy" — the actual encryption implementation is public, and we've published our own threat model and self-attack test results rather than just asserting the app is secure.
• Real export, no lock-in. Your tasks leave as plain JSON whenever you want, and come back in the same format.

Where Haven isn't the right fit

• No native mobile app yet. Haven runs great as a mobile web page (add it to your home screen and it behaves like an app), but there's no App Store/Play Store listing today. If you specifically want a native app icon and offline-first mobile polish, Things or TickTick are further along here.
• No calendar integration. If your workflow depends on due dates showing up in Google Calendar or Outlook automatically, none of the apps here do that as well as a dedicated calendar app, and Haven doesn't do it at all yet.
• No team collaboration at scale. Haven is built for one person's tasks first. Notion and Todoist are meaningfully further along for teams sharing boards across many people.
• Lose your passphrase and your recovery code, and it's gone. This is the direct cost of real encryption — there's no "forgot password" support ticket that gets you back in, because there's no one on the other end who can unlock it for you. We've built real recovery options (a one-time recovery code, and now splitting that code among people you trust), but the honest floor is: lose both, and the data is unrecoverable by anyone, including us.
• Younger project, smaller track record. Todoist and Things have years of production hardening behind them. Haven is newer — we've tried to be transparent about that by publishing our own security testing rather than asking you to just trust it, but "newer" is still true.

Who each app actually makes sense for

Pick Todoist or TickTick if you want the most mature, feature-dense task manager with natural-language input, and privacy from the app's own operator isn't a priority for what you're tracking.

Pick Things if you're all-in on Apple hardware, want a beautifully designed native app, and are happy paying once instead of monthly.

Pick Notion if tasks are one piece of a bigger notes-and-docs workspace you need, not a standalone list.

Pick Microsoft To Do if you're already living in Outlook and Microsoft 365 and want something that just shows up there.

Pick Haven if you want a genuinely capable task manager — boards, lists, tags, subtasks, recurring tasks, smart views — and the fact that nobody but you can read it isn't a nice-to-have, it's the reason you're looking in the first place.

Product names, features, and pricing mentioned above belong to their respective companies and are described here for comparison purposes only, based on publicly available information at the time of writing. Haven isn't affiliated with Todoist, TickTick, Cultured Code (Things), Notion, or Microsoft.