Best Reminder App for Android in 2026: 10 Ranked, With Real Prices
The Short Answer
The best free reminder app for Android is Google Tasks, the best paid one is Todoist or TickTick depending on whether you want structure or everything in one app, and the best reminder is the one that arrives somewhere you already look. That last point is why this list is ordered the way it is. Android itself is the main reason reminders fail: since Android 13 an app needs permission to post notifications at all, since Android 14 it needs a separate permission to fire at an exact minute, and most manufacturers suspend background apps to save battery. Grant all three and a good app works well. One change to know before you pick: Google Keep's reminders have moved into Google Tasks, and location reminders did not survive the move. If you would rather skip the settings entirely, a reminder delivered as a WhatsApp message needs no permissions and no install, and it follows you when you change phone brands.
The Best Reminder Apps for Android, Ranked
There are hundreds of reminder apps on Google Play. Most "best of" lists pick ten at random. This one starts from what Android users actually install: every entry carries its Play Store install band, rating and review count as of August 2026 from the store listing, and a price we re-checked in September 2026 on the company's own site. The ranking weighs one thing above features: does the reminder reach you and get you to act?
| # | App | Play Store (Aug 2026) | Price (Sep 2026) | Best for | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | NagMeLater | No app, runs in WhatsApp | 7 days free, then $4.99/mo or $99 once | Reminders you actually see, on any Android, no install | Needs WhatsApp (you have it); not free forever |
| 2 | Google Keep | 1B+ installs, 4.7★ (2.5M reviews) | Free with a Google account | Free notes on every Android, now wired to Tasks | Its reminders moved to Google Tasks; location reminders are gone |
| 3 | Google Tasks | 10M+, 4.6★ (597K) | Free with a Google account | Free, minimal, lives inside Gmail and Calendar | Basic notifications, no nag, no natural language |
| 4 | Microsoft To Do | 10M+, 4.6★ (479K) | Free with a Microsoft account | Outlook and Microsoft 365 users | Reminders stay inside the Microsoft world |
| 5 | Todoist | 10M+, 4.6★ (303K) | Free tier; Pro $7/mo or $60/yr | Power users: projects, labels, natural-language dates | Reminders are a Pro feature |
| 6 | TickTick | 10M+, 4.6★ (163K) | Free tier; Premium $49.99/yr | Tasks, habits, Pomodoro and calendar in one app | Free tier caps you at 2 reminders per task and 5 habits |
| 7 | Any.do | 10M+, 4.4★ (505K) | Free tier; Premium $7.99/mo, $4.99/mo billed yearly | Polished lists, and WhatsApp reminders that now come back to you | The WhatsApp integration needs Premium |
| 8 | To Do List (SplenDO) | 10M+, 4.6★ (948K) | Free with ads; one-off purchase removes them | Simple lists, voice input, two-way Google Tasks sync | Ads in the free tier, dated design |
| 9 | Tasks (Pocket Brilliance) | 5M+, 4.8★ (137K) | Free and ad-free; Premium monthly, yearly or lifetime | Ad-free, private, clean recurring reminders | Sync, sharing and the web app are Premium |
| 10 | Loop Habit Tracker | 5M+, 4.7★ (63K) | Free, open source, no ads, no purchases | Habit streaks with no account and no tracking | Habits only, no cloud sync, notifications need a battery exemption |
Prices re-checked in September 2026 on each company's own site or documentation. Where a company does not publish a figure we could read, this table says so rather than repeating one from another roundup. Play Store install bands and ratings are from the en_US store listings in August 2026.
Two Android-specific notes before the details. Samsung Reminder, preinstalled on every Galaxy, is not on this list because it is not on Google Play at all: it ships through the Galaxy Store and does not survive a move to a Pixel or a OnePlus (see our Samsung Reminder alternative page). And ColorNote (100M+ installs, 4.9★ from 3.96M reviews) is the most-installed third-party app that can set reminders, but it is a sticky-notes app first, so it sits with Google Keep in spirit rather than as a separate pick.
How We Ranked Them
Three questions, in order. Does the reminder get seen? A notification from an app you open weekly is easy to swipe; a message from a contact is not. Does it survive Android? The platform itself is the biggest reason reminders fail on Android (next section). How much friction to set one? Typing "remind me tomorrow at 9 to call the bank" beats five taps through a date picker every time.
Install counts and ratings decide ties, and they are the honest signal of what people keep on their phones. Every price was re-checked for this update and two of our own figures turned out to be wrong: Todoist's Pro plan is $7 a month or $60 a year, not $6.99, and Any.do's WhatsApp integration is no longer capture-only, which we had said it was. Where a competitor does something better than NagMeLater, the table says so, and four of the ten are free forever while we are not.
Why Reminders Fail on Android (and What to Do About It)
This is the section other roundups skip. Three platform behaviours quietly break reminder apps on Android:
- Battery optimisation. Several manufacturers suspend background apps aggressively to extend battery life. A local reminder that depends on the app being alive is delayed or dropped unless you exempt the app in settings, and the exemption sometimes resets after an update. The community project Don't Kill My App ranks brands by how badly they do this; it is the first place to look if a reminder "never fired".
- Notification permission. Since Android 13, apps must ask for permission before they can post notifications at all (Android developer documentation). Tap "Don't allow" once during onboarding and every reminder from that app is silently discarded.
- Exact alarms. From Android 14, the permission apps use to fire at an exact minute is denied by default for most newly installed apps (Android 14 behaviour changes). Well-built apps ask for it; many do not, and their "9:00" reminder becomes "sometime around nine".
Every app in the table that fires local notifications, which is all of them except NagMeLater, is exposed to some of this. The workaround is the same for each: allow notifications, grant exact alarms if asked, and add the app to the battery-optimisation exemption list. Or use a reminder that arrives as a WhatsApp message, because WhatsApp is the one app nobody's phone is allowed to kill.
Google Keep and Google Tasks: Free, and Now the Same Thing
The biggest change on this list since our last update is that Google Keep no longer has its own reminders. Google migrated them into Google Tasks: the help page Learn about Google Keep reminders in Google Tasks is the primary source, the rollout started in the second half of 2025, and 9to5Google and Android Police reported it reaching most accounts by January 2026. What that means in practice:
- A reminder you set on a Keep note is saved as a task, and it shows up in the Google Tasks app and on the Google Calendar grid labelled as coming from Keep.
- Keep itself stopped posting the reminder notification. Tasks and Calendar do that now, so if you had Keep's notifications allowed and Tasks' denied, your reminders went quiet.
- Location reminders are gone. "Remind me when I get home" is no longer supported, and the place you had set was moved into the task's description as text. If that was why you used Keep, it is worth knowing before you reinstall it.
- Old reminders were collected into a list called "Old Google Keep reminders".
Google Keep (1B+ installs, 4.7★) is still the most-installed reminder-capable app on Android, because it is on almost every phone out of the box, and it is still an excellent free note app that syncs everywhere with a Google account. It is just no longer the reminder half of that sentence. Full comparison: Google Keep alternative.
Google Tasks (10M+, 4.6★) is therefore the default free answer on Android now, and it earns it: free with a Google account, a plain list in the Gmail and Calendar side panels, a date and time on any task turns up on your calendar. It has no natural-language input, no nag, and its notifications are as easy to swipe away as anyone's. Details: Google Tasks alternative.
Microsoft To Do, Todoist, TickTick, Any.do: The Full Task Managers
These four are the mainstream cross-platform task apps, all in the 10M+ band on Play with 4.4 to 4.6 stars. Prices below were read off each company's own pages in September 2026.
Microsoft To Do is genuinely free with a personal Microsoft account, clean, and the natural choice if your work lives in Outlook; My Day, shared lists, one-off and recurring reminders, and 25 MB file attachments are all in the free app. Its reminders do not travel well outside Microsoft's world (details).
Todoist has the best natural-language date parsing of the app-store crowd and the deepest project structure. Pro is $7 a month, or $60 a year (about $5 a month billed yearly) after a pricing update that took effect from December 2025, and reminders are one of the features it unlocks, which is the thing to know if reminders are the reason you are installing a task app (details).
TickTick bundles tasks, habits, a Pomodoro timer and a calendar into one app. Premium is $49.99 a year; the free tier is usable but capped, and the caps hit reminders directly: 9 lists, 99 tasks per list, 2 reminders per task, 5 habits, and list view only in the calendar. If you want one app to do everything and will pay for it, this is still the one (details).
Any.do is the most polished to look at, and we owe it a correction. Its WhatsApp integration is no longer capture-only: Any.do's own help centre says you can add tasks through WhatsApp and receive reminders there without opening the app. That makes it the closest thing on this list to what we do, so credit where it is due. The differences are that it needs Premium ($7.99 a month, or $4.99 a month billed yearly, on Any.do's pricing page in September 2026), the app remains the system of record, and there is no nag-until-done loop (details).
The pattern across the four: excellent at organising, ordinary at reminding. Three of them fire a single push notification from an app you have to remember to open.
SplenDO, Tasks and Loop: The Android-Native Favourites
Three apps that rarely appear on cross-platform lists because they are Android-first, yet Android users have voted for them in volume. These are the honest "not us" picks: if one of them fits, take it.
To Do List by SplenDO (10M+, 4.6★ from 948K reviews, the most-reviewed third-party to-do app on Play) is the classic simple list: voice input, home-screen widgets, two-way Google Tasks sync, and notifications that can read the task out loud with the built-in speech synthesiser. It is free with ads, and a one-off in-app purchase removes them and adds the dark theme. The design has had a Material Design 3 pass but it is still an old-school list app, and that is the point of it.
Tasks by Pocket Brilliance (5M+, 4.8★) is the ad-free, privacy-first pick: lists, sublists, tasks, subtasks, widgets, reminders and alarms are all in the free tier with no advertising at all, which is rare. Premium, sold monthly, yearly or as a one-time lifetime purchase, is what adds device sync, list sharing, the web app and cloud backups. Its pricing is shown inside the app rather than on a page we could read, so we are not quoting a figure.
Loop Habit Tracker (5M+, 4.7★) is the cleanest deal on this page: open source, free, no ads, no in-app purchases, no account, no limit on how many habits you track, and available on F-Droid as well as Play. Its habit-strength score handles complex schedules like three times a week, and you can export to CSV or a SQLite file. It is habits only, it keeps everything on the device with no cloud sync, and its reminders are exactly the kind that battery optimisers kill (Loop alternative).
The One That Needs No App: NagMeLater
NagMeLater is not on the Play Store because it does not need to be. It is a WhatsApp contact: message it "remind me tomorrow at 9am to call the bank" and at 9am tomorrow a WhatsApp message arrives saying exactly that. Recurring reminders ("every Monday at 8am"), habits with streaks ("habit: run at 7am daily"), to-dos, notes, and a nag mode that re-sends every 30 minutes until you reply done all work the same way, in English, Hindi, Hinglish or thirty-odd other languages.
On Android specifically, this sidesteps every failure mode above. There is no notification permission to grant, no exact-alarm setting, and no battery exemption, because WhatsApp already has all three on every phone. It also follows you across brands: switch from a Galaxy to a Pixel and every reminder is still there, with nothing to export. The honest catch is that it needs WhatsApp and it is not free forever: 7 days unlimited, then $4.99/month or $99 lifetime. Four apps above are free and stay free, and if a free push notification is enough for you, take one of them.
No app, no account. Save the number, send a message, done.
Which One Should You Pick?
- You want free and already-installed: Google Tasks. Keep is still the better note app, but its reminders are Tasks reminders now, so start where they live.
- You want free and cross-platform with a work account: Microsoft To Do.
- You want a real task manager and will pay: Todoist for structure at $7/month, TickTick for everything-in-one at $49.99/year.
- You want simple, Android-native, no ads: Tasks by Pocket Brilliance, whose free tier is ad-free; SplenDO if you want voice input and Google Tasks sync and do not mind ads.
- You want habit streaks with no account and no tracking: Loop. It is free, open source, and nothing on this list beats it at that one job.
- You want reminders in WhatsApp and already pay for a task app: check Any.do Premium first, since its WhatsApp integration now sends reminders back to you.
- You want the reminder to reach you on any phone, with nothing to install and nothing to configure: NagMeLater.
For the cross-platform view, see the best reminder apps overall; for iPhone, the iPhone ranking.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best reminder app for Android?
For most people, Google Tasks, because it is free with the Google account you already have, a time on a task turns up on your Google Calendar, and it is where Google moved Keep's reminders. If you want more structure, Todoist at $7 a month has the best natural-language dates and TickTick at $49.99 a year bundles habits and a calendar. If the problem is that you swipe notifications away and forget anyway, a reminder delivered as a WhatsApp message, like NagMeLater's, is a different shape of answer: it arrives in a chat you already read and it can keep nagging until you reply done.
What is the best free reminder app for Android?
Google Tasks for a plain list tied to Gmail and Google Calendar, Microsoft To Do if your work lives in Outlook, Tasks by Pocket Brilliance for a dedicated reminder app whose free tier has no ads at all, and Loop Habit Tracker for habit streaks with no account and no in-app purchases. All four are genuinely free. NagMeLater is free for 7 days, then $4.99 a month or $99 once.
What happened to Google Keep reminders?
They moved into Google Tasks. Google began the migration in the second half of 2025 and it reached most accounts by January 2026: a reminder set on a Keep note is now saved as a task, it appears in the Google Tasks app and on the Google Calendar grid labelled as coming from Keep, Keep itself no longer posts the notification, and older reminders were gathered into a list called 'Old Google Keep reminders'. Location reminders were not carried over, and the place you had set was moved into the task description as text.
Why do my Android reminders not go off?
Three usual causes: the app was denied notification permission (required since Android 13), the app was not granted exact-alarm permission (denied by default for most apps since Android 14), or the phone's battery optimisation suspended the app. Fix all three in Settings, or use a reminder that arrives as a WhatsApp message, which is never throttled.
Is there a reminder app for Android that works without installing anything?
Yes. NagMeLater runs entirely inside WhatsApp: save the number, send a message like 'remind me at 5pm to call mom', and the reminder arrives as a WhatsApp message. No Play Store install, no account.
What is the most downloaded reminder app on Android?
Google Keep, at over one billion installs, because it is preinstalled on most Android phones. Among dedicated to-do apps, To Do List by SplenDO has the most Play Store reviews (about 948K), with Google Tasks, Any.do and Microsoft To Do close behind, all in the 10M+ install band (Play Store, August 2026).
Is there an Android reminder app that sends reminders to WhatsApp?
Two, working in opposite directions. NagMeLater is a WhatsApp contact with no app at all: you text it a sentence and the reminder comes back as a WhatsApp message you can reply done to. Any.do is a normal Android app whose Premium plan adds a WhatsApp integration that both captures tasks and sends reminders back to WhatsApp, so if you already want Any.do's lists it is worth comparing directly.
Does Samsung Reminder work on non-Samsung phones?
No. It is distributed through the Galaxy Store only and syncs via a Samsung account. If you switch to a Pixel or iPhone, Samsung's supported route is syncing to Microsoft To Do; a WhatsApp reminder bot like NagMeLater works on both the old and the new phone with nothing to migrate.
Which Android reminder app nags you until you do the task?
Very few app-store reminders re-nag. NagMeLater has a nag mode ('nag mode on', or add 'and nag me until done' to a reminder) that re-sends the WhatsApp message every 30 minutes, up to three times, until you reply done or snooze.