If you just need a place to jot down site tasks without leaving wp-admin, a lightweight dashboard widget plugin is enough. If you’re coordinating a content team or an agency with deadlines, assignees, and multiple projects, you need something closer to a real Kanban board. This post compares four real plugins across that range: Dashboard To-Do List for a single person’s running list, PublishPress Planner for editorial teams who think in terms of posts and publish dates, and FluentBoards and WP Project Manager for teams that need task assignment, due dates, and a proper board view. The short version: start with Dashboard To-Do List if you work alone, move to PublishPress Planner if your tasks are tied to specific posts, and pick FluentBoards or WP Project Manager if you’re managing a team and need Kanban-style visibility.
| Plugin | Best for | Price | Last updated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dashboard To-Do List | A solo admin tracking site tasks in one widget | Free | August 21, 2026 |
| PublishPress Planner | Editorial teams managing tasks tied to specific posts | Free, Pro bundle from $129/year | September 28, 2026 |
| FluentBoards | Small teams who want a general-purpose Kanban board | Free, Pro from $119/year | September 17, 2026 |
| WP Project Manager | Agencies running multiple projects with milestones and AI task generation | Free, Pro from $316/year | September 25, 2026 |
Dashboard To-Do List
- Price: Free
- Requires: WordPress 4.0+, PHP 5.6+
- Last updated: August 21, 2026
Dashboard To-Do List does exactly one thing: it adds a widget to your wp-admin Dashboard where you can type, edit, and check off a running list of items, right next to “At a Glance” and your other dashboard widgets. There’s a Bulk Edit mode for pasting or reorganizing several items at once instead of adding them one by one, and you can mark an item complete without deleting it, so finished items stay visible with a strikethrough instead of disappearing. It also has a feature most plugins in this space skip: an optional floating panel that shows the same list on the public-facing side of your site, with a choice of left or right position and a custom accent color.
Setup is as plain as the plugin itself. Go to Plugins > Add New, search for “Dashboard To-Do List,” install and activate it, then open the WordPress Dashboard screen and the widget is already there waiting for input. From the widget’s settings you can control which user roles see it on the Dashboard and, separately, which roles (including logged-out visitors) can see the frontend floating panel if you turn that on.
The honest limitation: there’s no per-item assignment to a specific person, no due dates, no priority levels, and no notifications. Everyone with access sees the same shared list and relies on role-based visibility rather than ownership. That’s fine for a freelancer or a one-person WordPress shop keeping a running list of “things to fix on this site,” but it breaks down the moment two people need to know who owes what by when.
PublishPress Planner
- Price: Free, Pro only as part of the PublishPress bundle from $129/year
- Requires: WordPress 5.5+, PHP 7.2.5+
- Last updated: September 28, 2026
PublishPress Planner takes a different approach: instead of a standalone to-do list, it turns your existing posts and pages into the tasks. After activating it, a new PublishPress menu appears with three screens. The Content Calendar shows everything you have scheduled or drafted, and you can drag a post to a new date to reschedule it, or filter the view by status, category, user, or post type. Content Overview is the same data organized as a sortable, printable table instead of a calendar, useful for a quick status report. The Content Board is a Kanban view with one column per post status (Draft, Pending Review, Scheduled, Published, and so on), so moving a post from “Pending Review” to “Published” is a drag-and-drop action.
To get it running, activate the plugin, open PublishPress > Calendar to confirm your existing content shows up correctly, then check PublishPress > Notifications to subscribe specific users or roles to status changes on categories or post types they’re responsible for. That subscription system is effectively how Planner handles “assignment” in the free version: instead of assigning a discrete task, you make sure the right person gets notified the moment a post needs their attention.
The limitation is built into the design. If a task is genuinely tied to a post, like “review this draft” or “schedule this for Tuesday,” Planner handles it well. If the task has nothing to do with a specific piece of content, like “renew the SSL certificate” or “update the footer copyright year,” there’s no real place to put it. Slack notifications and scheduled reminder emails before or after publication are Pro-only, bundled with ten other PublishPress plugins rather than sold as a standalone Planner Pro license.
FluentBoards
- Price: Free, Pro from $119/year
- Requires: WordPress 5.0+, PHP 7.4+
- Last updated: September 17, 2026
FluentBoards is a general-purpose Kanban board that has nothing to do with WordPress posts specifically, which makes it a better fit when your tasks are a mix of content work and everything else a site needs. You create a board, define the stages you want (the default setup gives you a basic To Do, Doing, Done flow that you can rename and reorder), then add tasks as cards inside those stages. Each card can carry an assignee, a due date, a priority level (Low, Medium, or High), and colored labels, and you can switch between the Kanban view and a flat table view when you want to scan everything at once instead of scrolling columns.
Installation is standard: install from the WordPress.org repository or upload the plugin, activate it, then find the new FluentBoards item in the admin menu. The first action is creating a board and adding team members as its members, which is also where you grant access, since FluentBoards treats board membership separately from WordPress user roles. From there, adding a task, setting its due date and priority, and assigning it to a member all happen on the same card.
The free version covers unlimited boards and tasks, assignees, due dates, priorities, and labels, which is a genuinely generous free tier for this category. The honest caveat is that FluentBoards is from the same team as Fluent Forms and Fluent CRM (WPManageNinja), and it shows: the feature set leans toward a dedicated project tool rather than something that understands your WordPress content the way PublishPress Planner does. If you want a task board tied to your posts and publishing schedule specifically, this isn’t that.
WP Project Manager
- Price: Free, Pro from $316/year
- Requires: WordPress 6.2+, PHP 7.4+
- Last updated: September 25, 2026
WP Project Manager by weDevs is the heaviest option here, built for agencies managing several projects and clients rather than a single site’s task list. The free version includes unlimited task lists with titles and descriptions, task assignment to team members, due dates, progress indicators, comments on tasks, milestone tracking with upcoming/completed/overdue states, threaded team messaging, and file sharing inside those messages. It also has an AI-powered project creation feature: describe a project in plain language and it generates a starting task list for you to edit, rather than you building every task line by line.
Setup is a manual zip install if you’re not pulling it from the WordPress.org directory: extract the zip, drop the folder into wp-content/plugins/, then activate it from the Plugins screen. Once active, you create a project first, then add task lists inside that project, then add individual tasks inside each list, assigning them to specific team members and setting a due date as you go. Milestones sit a level above task lists, letting you group several lists under one deadline for reporting.
The tradeoff is scope. This plugin wants to be a full project management system, not a quick dashboard widget, and the free version already asks you to think in projects, task lists, and milestones before you’ve typed your first task. For a one-person site or a small blog, that structure is overhead you don’t need. Frontend project access for clients, time tracking, Gantt charts, and Google Workspace integration are Pro-only, with the Pro plan priced per site rather than per user.
How to Pick the Right WordPress To-Do List Plugin
- If you’re the only person managing the site and just need a running list of things to fix, use Dashboard To-Do List. Nothing here is faster to set up or lighter on your site.
- If your tasks are almost always “review this post” or “schedule this page,” use PublishPress Planner so the task lives on the content itself instead of in a separate list you have to keep in sync.
- If you manage a small team with a mix of WordPress and non-WordPress tasks and want due dates, priorities, and a Kanban board without a steep learning curve, use FluentBoards.
- If you’re an agency running multiple client projects with milestones, reporting, and enough task volume that typing them all manually is a chore, use WP Project Manager and let the AI task generation take the first pass.
FAQ
Can I assign a specific to-do item to one team member in WordPress?
Not with Dashboard To-Do List, which only controls who can see the shared list by role. FluentBoards and WP Project Manager both support assigning a task to a specific person in their free versions. PublishPress Planner handles it indirectly through notification subscriptions tied to a post rather than a direct task assignment.
Is there a free WordPress plugin for a simple to-do list that isn’t a full project management system?
Yes. Dashboard To-Do List is free with no paid tier at all, and it’s built specifically to avoid the overhead of boards, projects, and milestones that the heavier plugins require.
What’s the difference between an editorial calendar plugin and a task management plugin?
An editorial calendar plugin like PublishPress Planner organizes tasks around your actual posts and their publish dates. A task management plugin like FluentBoards or WP Project Manager creates independent tasks that may or may not relate to a piece of content, which matters if you need to track site maintenance, design work, or anything that isn’t a post.
Can PublishPress Planner handle tasks that aren’t tied to a post, like a server migration?
Not well. Its Calendar, Overview, and Content Board screens are all built around WordPress content objects, so a task with no underlying post or page doesn’t have a natural home in the free version.
Do any of these plugins work for an agency managing multiple client sites?
WP Project Manager is the closest fit, with projects, milestones, and reporting aimed at that scale. FluentBoards can work too if you’re comfortable running a separate board per client, but it isn’t purpose-built for multi-client agency reporting the way WP Project Manager is.
None of these four needed a workaround or a hook to get working, but if what you actually need is a task list wired into a custom workflow, like auto-creating a task when a WooCommerce order hits a certain status, that’s past what any of these plugins do out of the box. Our Plugin Development team builds that kind of custom logic directly, the same way we did for Booxos Go’s custom plugin. For general WordPress development work beyond plugins, or more comparisons like this one, check the rest of our Plugins category.
