Remember The Milk vs Pokobot
Five ways to be reminded, or one that gets read.
Remember The Milk has been running since 2005, which makes it older than most of the products it is compared against and older than several that have since shut down. It is still shipping. Smart Lists give it a genuine query language for your own tasks, and there is nothing on this comparison list, this product very much included, that comes close to it for slicing a long list into the four things that matter this afternoon.
It also took the delivery question seriously long before anyone else did. While every other app was deciding what shade of push notification to send, Remember The Milk was sending reminders by email, by text message and by instant messenger. That makes it the closest thing here to what Poko does, and it makes this the one comparison where the argument is not about whether the other side thought about getting your attention.
The short answer
Remember The Milk and Pokobot are the two products on this list that treat delivery as the point, and they answer it in opposite ways. Remember The Milk sends reminders down as many routes as it can, email, text message, instant messenger and mobile push, and includes all of them on a free account. Pokobot sends one thing, a WhatsApp message, and has no second channel to fall back on. The case for breadth weakens where the routes actually land: email and push are the two inboxes people have trained themselves hardest to skim, the IM and Twitter channels have aged out from under it, and its text-message reminders depend on carriers' free email-to-SMS gateways, so they reach a fixed list of networks that does not include India. If you want the best task query language on this page with reminders included free, use Remember The Milk. If what you want is for the reminder to be read, one channel that you actually open beats four that you do not.
Head to head
| Remember The Milk | Pokobot | |
|---|---|---|
| Routes a reminder can take to youRemember The Milk | Email, text message, instant messenger and mobile push, all on a free account | One. A WhatsApp message, with nothing behind it if you ignore it |
| Whether that route gets readPokobot | Email and push are the two most skimmed inboxes anyone owns, and the IM era has ended | A chat thread opened dozens of times a day and read every time it is |
| Text reminders to an Indian numberPokobot | No. SMS runs on carriers' free email-to-SMS gateways, on a supported list India is not on | Works on any number WhatsApp works on, which in India is very nearly all of them |
| Repeating faster than once a dayPokobot | Repeats start at daily: “every day”, “every 2 weeks”, “every month on the 3rd Tuesday” | Down inside the day, with the hours it is allowed to speak in attached to it |
| Finding things in a long listRemember The Milk | Smart Lists and a proper search language. The best on this page by a distance | Send “list” and read what comes back. That is the entire feature |
| Getting to your first reminderPokobot | Make an account, install the app, then verify each channel you want separately | Open a link and send one message. Nothing to verify, nothing to choose |
| Free foreverRemember The Milk | Yes, and reminders are part of it. Free accounts have been in the promise since 2005 | No. 7 days free, then a small subscription (from ₹59/month in India) |
| Being here in ten yearsRemember The Milk | Twenty years of shipping. It has outlived most of the products on this comparison list | A young product with no such record. That is a real difference and it favours them |
| Getting somebody else nudgedPokobot | Share a list, two people on the free plan. They see it once they have an account | Poko messages their WhatsApp at the time, once they have agreed to it |
When Remember The Milk is the right answer
This is the most generous table on this site and it should be. Remember The Milk gives away free what several products here charge for, and it does one thing better than anything else in the comparison.
Any of these and you should stay, or go back.
- Smart Lists. A saved query over your own tasks is a power tool, and a chat thread cannot be one.
- Reminders on a free account, on four channels, with no trial clock running.
- Twenty years of continuous shipping, which is the only honest answer to “will this still exist when the reminder is due”.
- The entry points it has collected: Gmail, Google Calendar, Evernote, Alexa, Siri, email-in.
- Working offline, and on Pro, subtasks, attachments from Drive and Dropbox, and scripting.
- If you already have it set up and it works, none of what follows is a reason to move.
One channel, and it is ours
Breadth looks like the safer design and this comparison is the best argument that it is not. Four routes to you is four dependencies, and a channel you do not own can be taken away without asking. Remember The Milk's own upgrade page still lists Twitter reminders, which stopped being a thing a while ago. Its text messages ride on free email-to-SMS gateways that carriers provide out of goodwill and have been quietly retiring for a decade. Neither is bad engineering. Both are what renting a delivery channel eventually costs.
The whole of Poko is one channel used properly. Messages go out over WhatsApp's own business platform, which is a thing with a contract behind it rather than a courtesy, and if it stops working there is no product left to speak of. That concentrates the mind in a way a fallback list does not.
It also buys a shape no multi-channel design here reaches. More than a third of the reminders set on Pokobot (35.8%) repeat more than once a day, and each carries the hours it may run in, so the every-two-hours one stops at seven in the evening and starts again in the morning. Email and SMS are the wrong bill for that, which is presumably why Remember The Milk sensibly stops at daily.
remind me to stretch every 90 minutes between 10am and 6pmbins out every Tuesday at 7pmpoke Priya about the rent on the 3rd every monthThe channel list, gone through honestly
Remember The Milk will remind you by email, by text message, by instant messenger and by mobile push, and its site lists Twitter alongside them. Worth taking each in turn, because the list is more impressive as a list than as a set of places a message can still reach you.
Email is real and it works, and it is also where every receipt, newsletter and notification in your life already goes. Mobile push is real and it works, and it is the tray people clear without reading. Instant messenger meant something specific when it was built, and that era of chat protocols is over. Twitter reminders were genuinely clever and the service behind them no longer exists.
That leaves the text message, which is the one channel on the list that a person still reliably reads, and it is the one with the hardest constraint on it. Which is the next section.
Why the SMS detail decides this page
Remember The Milk's text reminders are not sent through a messaging provider. They go through carriers' free email-to-SMS gateways, which is the elegant, cheap way to do this and was close to the only way when the feature was built. Their help pages are open about the consequence: they support the networks that offer such a gateway, they list them, and if yours is not there they cannot help. The list runs to around eighteen countries and India is not among them.
So for an Indian reader the comparison narrows sharply. The channel that would actually have competed with a WhatsApp message is not available to you, and what remains is email and a push notification, which is the same offer every other app on this list makes.
There is a general lesson in it worth stating plainly, because it applies to us too. A delivery channel you do not own is one somebody else can withdraw, and they do not have to tell you first. Free carrier gateways have been closing for years. Twitter's went. The reason Poko is a single channel is not confidence that WhatsApp is eternal, it is that one channel with a contract under it is easier to be honest about than four held together by goodwill.
Smart Lists have no answer here
The other direction, and it is not close. Remember The Milk lets you write a query against your own tasks, save it, and open it as a list: due this week, tagged errand, not in a shared list, high priority. People who use them properly run their week out of four or five saved views.
Poko has nothing of the kind and there is no version of a chat thread that grows one. You can ask it what is coming up. That is the whole retrieval story, and it is deliberately thin, because everything it knows is meant to arrive on its own rather than be looked up.
If you organise by searching, this comparison ends here and Remember The Milk wins it. The overlap is only for people whose problem is the four things that need to interrupt them, not the two hundred that need filing.
The sensible arrangement
Keep the list where the query language is, and let the handful that must not be missed arrive somewhere you cannot skim past.
In practice that means Remember The Milk stays your system of record, with its Smart Lists and its tags and its twenty years of not going anywhere, and Poko carries the medication, the follow-up, the thing every two hours, and anything aimed at another person's phone.
Nothing connects the two, and given how this page ends up being about what happens when connections break, that is probably the right note to finish on.
Questions, answered
- Does Remember The Milk send SMS reminders?
- Yes, and it has for a long time. They go out through mobile carriers' free email-to-SMS gateways rather than a messaging provider, so they work on the networks that still offer one. Remember The Milk publishes the supported list and says plainly it cannot support networks without a free gateway.
- Do Remember The Milk SMS reminders work in India?
- No. India is not on its list of supported networks, which covers around eighteen countries. Email and mobile push reminders still work normally on an Indian account, but the text-message channel, the one that would actually compete with a WhatsApp message, is not available.
- Are Remember The Milk reminders free?
- Yes. Email, text, instant messenger and mobile app reminders are all on the free account, along with sharing a list with up to two people. Pro is aimed elsewhere: subtasks, unlimited sharing, file attachments, offline web, scripting and integrations.
- Can Remember The Milk remind me every 2 hours?
- No. Its repeats begin at daily and build upwards from there, in formats like “every day”, “every 2 weeks”, “every month on the 3rd Tuesday” or “after 5 days”. Nothing repeats inside a single day, so there is also no notion of quiet hours. Poko takes “every 2 hours between 9am and 7pm” as one instruction.
- Can Remember The Milk send reminders to WhatsApp?
- Not by itself. Its Pro plan includes IFTTT and Zapier, so a determined person could bridge one across, and that route brings its own account, its own approved message templates and a new thing to maintain. It is the same trade covered on the Zapier and IFTTT comparisons here.
- Is Remember The Milk still being developed?
- Yes. It has been shipping since 2005 and still is, which is the strongest thing on its side of this page. Choosing a reminder tool is partly a bet that it will still be running when the reminder is due, and on that bet it has a record almost nothing else here can show.