Does Things 3 Support Collaboration?

TL;DR: Things 3 has no team features: no shared projects, no assignees, no team accounts, no web app. That’s deliberate, not a missing update. If you want the Things workflow and you need to share projects, you need a GTD app built for collaboration. That’s the gap Done Bear fills.

Search for “Things 3 for teams” or “Things 3 shared projects” and you get a decade of forum threads asking the same question. The answer hasn’t changed.

Does Things 3 support collaboration?

No. Things 3 is single-player by design. No shared areas or projects, no way to assign a to-do to someone else, no comments, no team billing. Things Cloud syncs your devices to your account, and that’s the whole model.

Cultured Code has been consistent about this for years: Things is a personal task manager, and the calm comes partly from that constraint. Every collaboration feature is also a notification, a status field, and a sync conflict waiting to happen. Staying single-player keeps it quiet.

That’s a fair trade. It’s the wrong one once the work stops being entirely yours.

The workarounds people try

Most people try to bolt collaboration on before they switch tools. A shared Apple ID for Things Cloud does sync two people into one database, with no permissions, no identity on tasks, and constant risk of stepping on each other. Cultured Code advises against it, and it breaks the moment a third person joins.

Copy-pasting tasks into a work tool splits your system in two, the calm personal one and the team one you resent. Every task needs a decision about where it lives, which is the overhead GTD is meant to remove.

Email and screenshots take the task out of the system entirely, and nothing tracks it after that. The trusted system now has a hole in it.

Turns out the workaround always costs more attention than the collaboration is worth. GTD works because capture is frictionless and the system is trusted, and all three break both.

What a team-ready GTD app needs

The bar isn’t “has sharing.” It’s keeping what made Things good while adding what it refuses to do.

The five GTD views stay personal: Inbox, Today, Upcoming, Anytime, Someday. Your day view stays yours even when projects are shared, because collaboration shouldn’t turn Today into a team dashboard. Sharing a project takes no ceremony either. You invite someone to a workspace or project, changes appear in real time, and there are no sync buttons and no per-task permissions homework.

Offline still works, because a team app that stops working on a plane is a downgrade from Things. Local-first sync keeps tasks on your device and reconciles them in the background, so the app still feels instant. And a migration path exists, so years of projects and someday lists don’t get retyped by hand.

Where Done Bear fits

We built Done Bear for people who’ve outgrown single-player task managers and don’t want project-management software.

It keeps the Things-style GTD structure (Inbox, Today, Upcoming, Anytime, Someday, and a Logbook) and adds what Things won’t: a full web app, Windows and Linux support, real-time shared workspaces, and a CLI, GraphQL API, and MCP server so your tools and AI assistants can work with your tasks.

Migration is one command: donebear import things brings your areas, projects, and tasks across. The Things 3 import guide walks through it.

It’s free to start with no credit card (see pricing), and it runs alongside a personal Things setup if you only want to move the shared projects first.

The honest recommendation

If your work is solo and Apple-only, keep Things 3. It’s a beautiful app, and switching costs attention.

But if you keep wishing a team task manager felt like Things, stop forcing workarounds through a tool that’s proudly single-player. Move the shared work to a system built for it, and let your task manager be trusted again.

The other walls people hit with Things 3: no Windows version, no web app, no Linux build, and no MCP server for AI assistants.