UPDATE: As of August 27, 2015, IQTell reversed course on shutting down and has secured committed financing to keep it going for two years.
I’ve always been hesitant to use a tool that groups everything into one place like IQTell. I feel an all-in-one solution is not ideal for me as I often want the flexibility and a higher degree of speciality that apps that do one or two things very well gives me. I have never spent a ton of time in IQTell, but I did find its initial interface a bit unwieldy to navigate.
If you are currently using IQTell (or were considering it), here are three of the best alternatives I’ve found. None of them will have everything that IQTell offers – and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but these options have the ability to scale as well as IQTell does and also have a large and passionate user base. Each option also gives users simplicity, which is always important.
1. Asana
Asana has been around for years and scales incredibly well. While IQTell allows for direct email integration in its service, Asana does all it can to eliminate email from the equation (even though you can have tasks emailed to you and you can email tasks to Asana Workspaces). With collaborative features, tagging, project dashboards, and plenty of other features to offer, Asana is a great option to consider. If you’re looking to move to something that can handle a lot of tasks and projects – look no further. Best of all, it’s free for 15 users or less.
I’ve co-authored a book with Jeremy Roberts called Do Better With Asana that can help you take your Asana experience to greater heights. Click here to learn more about Do Better With Asana.
2. Todoist
If you’re looking for clean and simple task management with enough power to scale both personally and collaboratively, then you’ll want to check out Todoist. It has an Outlook extension (something IQTell also offers), allows for emailing directly into Projects, and has exceptional filtering with Boolean queries and more. It is available for more platforms than any other options out there and has a large user base that offers help within the forums and a vibrant Google+ community. It’s not all that expensive either, costing only $29/year for the feature-rich premium version.
Productivityist has an extensive archive of posts on Todoist. You can view these archives and start learning more about it by clicking here.
3. Nozbe
Nozbe is a fantastic task management solution that works for teams and individuals alike. It integrates strongly with Evernote – much like IQTell – and has a clean interface to boot. It’s used by a myriad of people, and can count Michael Hyatt (a popular thought leader and writer) among its users. After all these years, Nozbe is still his favourite task management system. The founder of Nozbe is well-respected in the productivity space and has been committed to building it into a reliable and versatile productivity tool. While Nozbe doesn’t offer all that IQTell does, it offers a clean and powerful user experience that is definitely worth exploring.
Still not sure what is the right fit for you? I suggest you watch this free webinar I did with Steve Dotto called Choosing The Perfect Task Manager. In the webinar, I go over how I score four options – the aforementioned Asana and Todoist along with Trello and Wunderlist – in terms of simplicity and scalability. You can check out the webinar by clicking here.
