The Best Checklist Apps of 2024 and Why Your Business Needs Them

woman-working-and-holding-a-phone-while-using-checklist-app

Why use SafetyCulture?

SafetyCulture is an award-winning and intuitive checklist application that allows users to create or customize their own checklists, generate comprehensive reports, and perform regular inspections using a tablet or mobile device. Aside from digitizing paper forms and effectively managing daily on-site tasks, the SafetyCulture app is also a versatile checklist software that various large industries across the globe can use. SafetyCulture enforces teams across the globe to establish a culture of raising safety and quality together.  

This checklist app for safety provides users with a great audit experience to record the essential information used to achieve desired outcomes as well as identify the trends and issues in a business process. All of this data can be stored and accessed in a cloud. Users can also perform audits even when offline, and export and submit reports in different digital formats such as PDF, XML, CSV, and DOCX. SafetyCulture is available on iOS, Android, and Windows mobile devices, and interfaces with the larger SafetyCulture suite.

Features:

  • Access a public library with thousands of checklists and templates
  • Collect data in real-time
  • Create and customize your own checklist with a smart checklist maker
  • Generate detailed reports instantly
  • Analyze trends with Analytics
  • Integrate third-party applications
  • Connect to sensors
  • Access to online dashboards for better visibility
  • Get assistance from global customer support 24/5
  • Report incidents immediately
  • Draw and annotate on images

Why use Todoist?

Todoist is a top of the line productivity app that can be used by both individuals and businesses to keep track of tasks, plans, goals, and projects in one glance. This checklist app enforces its users to spend more time fulfilling tasks rather than focusing on managing them. 

Todoist promotes clarity, calmness, and balance as they encourage all their users to organize all daily tasks in a more fulfilling way. This tool has proven its effectiveness throughout the globe with over 1.5 billion tasks completed in more than 150 million projects. Todoist has been providing its service for 13 years already as their team is dedicated to keeping supporting its users passionately.

Features:

  • Create your daily tasks in seconds 
  • Tag your tasks accordingly as favorites, subtasks, and priorities
  • Delegate tasks to different collaborators
  • Get access to productivity visualizations
  • Integrate existing apps
  • One place for everything
  • Accessible anytime and anywhere
  • Offers free trial for 30 days

Why use Asana?

Asana is a collaboration and productivity app used in managing projects, teams, and workflows. This tool helps users to systematize work and convert all goals into achievable plans. 

Asana is known for bringing remote teams together and staying coordinated in delivering the work to be done. Asana can be used to establish a work structure or process that would suit the business needs. It helps users to monitor the progress of the projects and tasks step by step and keeping all involved people aligned and synchronized. All of the works can be seen through a visual dashboard where all project plans are mapped out clearly, including their milestones, owners, roadblocks, changes, and timelines. With this insight, all members of the team can have a better understanding of what each of them is working on and where they are with their performance and current pacing. 

Features:

  • Mapping out project plans and setting timelines and milestones
  • Online dashboard for better visibility
  • Automate workflows
  • Create custom fields
  • Turn common processes into templates
  • Spot schedule overlaps with a calendar
  • Share information to teams and key persons
  • Gain insights to how people use Asana
  • Over 100 integrations

Why use Things?

Now on its version 3, Things is a task manager champion that helps users get their things done. This app is only available for Mac, iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad users. It is best known for its ease of use and aesthetic UI that users enjoy when organizing their checklists, calendar views, multiple windows, and reminders.

As its name suggests, Things is one of the best task managers for organizing a bunch of things. It’s a great tool that helps users to get all tasks, insights, reminders in a system smoothly. Entering tasks to this app can also be customized by creating shortcuts.  It is able to handle small and simple tasks up to larger and bigger projects. Things allow users to arrange its view that would best suit their needs. Users love how this tool does not only serve them in a functional manner but also how pleasing it is to the eyes with its buttery effects and animations. It also has a tagging feature to organize tasks more efficiently and space for resources and commentary as an essential way to document things better. 

Features:

  • Pleasing and great design
  • Effortless input
  • Supported by other 3rd party apps
  • Structures your tasks, projects, and checklists according to your role
  •  Assign due dates and timelines
  • Use tags 
  • 15 days trial 

Why Use To Do?

To Do became the successor of Wunderlist as Microsoft morphed it upon acquiring its parent company 6Wunderkinder. To Do is a highly advanced type of a todo list app that is used to meet project goals and timelines and helps organize and complete tasks efficiently.

Microsoft’s To Do can be used by almost anyone who wants to basically organize daily activities and increase productivity. It is a free application that can serve as a personal tool or a partner tool with your main project management software you used in business. One of the best things about To Do is its simplicity and convenience. It will not turn your reports into complex charts and invoices. In addition, To Do can share your lists with others and attach them as tasks. This can be applied to manage and organize your team, monitor daily progress, setting schedules for meetings, and improve reporting.

Features:

  • 100% Free
  • User-friendly app
  • Easily create main tasks and subtasks
  • Ability to upload a task and attach documents, images and other files
  • Share tasks created to other users

Why use Zenkit To Do?

Zenkit To Do is a simple task management tool designed for individuals and teams. This checklist app can be used to complete projects and encourage strong team collaboration. 

Zenkit To Do wants to make their users feel at home by encouraging them to organize their tasks so that they can focus on living their lives to the fullest. This tool features smart checklists that can help users to provide an overview of the things you need to prioritize. Users can add deadlines for the tasks you frequently do every day. Tasks can be shared and assigned to workmates, friends, and family. Comments and replies can be inserted to keep everyone updated. This tool can be easily synchronized across different platforms even when offline. 

Features:

  • Easy add tasks 
  • Add due dates and reminders
  • Attach files to tasks
  • Create smart lists
  • Get your tasks into your inbox
  • Share your tasks to colleagues, friends, and families
  • Add comments and reply
  • Break down tasks into smaller chunks
  • Sort and search your tasks easily
  • Offline access
  • Enterprise-ready

Why Do You Need a Checklist App?

According to a survey conducted in 2017, there’s about 75 percent of employers say that there are more than two hours of efficient work lost every day. Another research states that 57 percent of employees say that work-related stress makes them feel disengaged and unproductive. Explore digital solutions that will help improve workflows and processes to boost team productivity and performance.

The Real Problem: Team productivity and performance decrease because of inefficient workflows and processes

There are a lot of factors that may contribute to workplace stress such as heavy workload, organization and duties changes, lack of autonomy, and the like. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, poor and inefficient management is the biggest problem that affects productivity at work. This could mean that workflows, processes, and tasks are inefficiently structured, managed, and implemented in the workplace.

The Solution: Using online checklists to improve workflows and processes in different industries

In a recent study on healthcare processes, implementation of online checklists into their daily workflows helps them to replace paper-based systems to a digital workflow that brings about healthcare improvement opportunities. This includes streamlining reporting and tracking processes and even analyzing trends and issues.

Based on a case study conducted for a manufacturing plant in 2016, using a single online checklist helped them save $125,000 annually. The factors that contributed to this were the increased compliance by 80% in 2 months, reduced both loading and waiting times by 25% and 43% respectively, and reduced backorders by 44% in the operations. The study has also shown that using online checklists allowed plant and production managers to identify trends and issues that they never thought of existing. Also, this platform greatly helped them fix problems areas. 

In the construction industry, using online checklists helps accelerate processes and reduces costs by automating methods of tracing losses and inaccuracies. It helps allow more effective communication over records and distribution of tasks. More so, it became a vital part of ensuring the success of a project.

For retailers, using a digital platform mainly helps the staff with store opening and closing, housekeeping, inventory and product checks, and monitoring. On a higher level, technology helps a retail business to improve its visibility of the daily store operations, reduce time in generating reports, and prevent duplicative work that affects employee productivity.

These are only a few studies on the effectiveness of using online checklists in various industries. As businesses aim to continuously improve and so do these online checklists. Businesses like hotels, logistics, cleaning services, repair and maintenance, and field services are now implementing this into their processes making their business more systematic and organized.

The Checklist App: Creator of Online Checklists

What is a Checklist App?

Basically, a checklist app is a software you can use to convert your paper forms into online checklists. Thus, making it the creator of online checklists. As technology advances, checklist apps become interactive and structured so that they not only function as a to-do list app but a powerful tool that businesses can use to manage tasks more efficiently and increase productivity across an organization. Beyond streamlining workflows and processes, a checklist app can now be used to gain insights on improving an organization’s quality, safety, and security through regular workplace inspections and reporting.

Here are some needs-analysis questions that can help you determine the value of using checklist apps:

  1. Do you often forget things?
  2. Do you feel that you are mismanaging your time?
  3. Do you end the day with still so much on your plate?
  4. Do you need a single place to put and see all of your tasks easily?
  5. Do you find it hard to prioritize things?
  6. Do you have routine work to be done?
  7. Do you want to see where you currently are with your goals?
  8. Do you want to gain insights into some issues you are facing and to what is performing and not?

What Checklist App Should I Choose?

There are two types of checklist apps that people can use to make their jobs easier, the simple and straightforward to-do list app and the more advanced and structured checklist app. Choosing between these two types heavily depends on what kind of job and outcome you want to achieve in the end. If you want to just rush to the grocery store and not to use a paper to list the items you want to buy, a to-do list app can be the best option for that. Another best example of using a to-do list app is when you organize your tasks through an online dashboard where you can track the tasks that were completed. Having a checklist in your mobile would make things a lot easier and more efficient. 

On the other hand, if you want to use checklists to perform inspections, quality checks, and performance monitoring, you should be using the more advanced checklist apps and software. These checklist apps can be used in your operations from the time your employees start working to the time they need to send reports and progress of the work done and finish their jobs. These tools can also be used in documenting issues, risks, and even hazards that may harm employees at work and then report them immediately to the higher management for solutions. Also, if you want to analyze trends in your workplace using insightful visuals and dashboards to further understand where your business sits, these checklist apps are highly recommended for you.   

What Makes a Good Checklist App?

Manages tasks effectivelyThe main purpose of utilizing a checklist app is to organize the user’s regular tasks and manage them easily. This includes the ability to schedule tasks based on priority, and assign actions or reminders to teams or key persons involved. Also, it should be able to do time tracking to measure productivity more efficiently.

Easy to use – tools that are user-friendly are highly likely to be chosen above the very complex ones. They should be flexible and easy to understand and navigate. Remember that users are switching to digital solutions because they eventually want to escape from the hassle and stress that they get from their existing process. Also, it should easily capture information to let the users spend more time in doing the job instead of spending their time configuring how to enter this information.

Provides a good task visualization – as users want to organize their tasks and prevent getting lost in the sea of information, leading them always to the bigger picture helps them see whether they are winning or losing. Providing good visuals and dashboards can also help them identify risks, issues, and problems that they can act on immediately.

Improves communication across teams – a checklist app is not only used to improve workflow but should be used to communicate and report relevant information to other teams as well. This helps the people within the organization to be aligned with the goals and desired outcomes of a project.

Securely stored and fully accessible – aside from accessing your checklists on a mobile, desktop, or tablet device, all data and information that you put into these apps should be stored and secured in a safe cloud. This greatly reduces the chance of losing your data and effort and most importantly, saving the relevant information for documentation and reporting purposes.

Jona Tarlengco
Article by
Jona Tarlengco
Jona Tarlengco is a content writer and researcher for SafetyCulture since 2018. She usually writes about safety and quality topics, contributing to the creation of well-researched articles. Her 5-year experience in one of the world’s leading business news organisations helps enrich the quality of the information in her work.