For researchers
Milestones is built for academics, PhD candidates, and independent researchers. A project per paper or grant, milestones for submission and revision rounds, tasks for experiments and reviewer comments.
What's not working today
How Milestones fixes that
Each paper, grant proposal, or independent project gets its own project. Milestones are the round-trip — Lit review, Methodology, Drafting, Submission, R&R round 1, Camera-ready. Tasks are experiments, sections, reviewer responses.
Milestones doesn't reset every sprint. A PhD chapter or a four-year grant is a first-class entity here. The active-milestone view always tells you what's next without losing the long arc.
Tag tasks `coauthor`, `data`, `revisions`, by funder, or by reviewer. Pull up every reviewer comment across every paper before a writing day.
Your iCloud, not the lab Slack or the institutional Sharepoint. The plan goes with you across postdocs, jobs, and institutions.
FAQ
No — keep your reference manager. Milestones is for the planning around the paper: drafts, deadlines, submission, R&R, the things references don't track.
Yes. Make a 'Grants' project; milestones are funders or quarters. Each grant call is a task with a due-date. Tag by funder. The today view across projects surfaces what's due soonest.
Single-user — most academics keep their own copy and use email or Slack to coordinate co-authors. Many use it specifically because it's *not* shared: their honest sense of where a paper is, without performing it for collaborators.
It's designed for it. Each chapter or experiment is a milestone; the project archive (Pro) keeps everything from prelim to defense. Local-first means no service outage during a deadline crunch.
Private iCloud. No team admin, no analytics on your task content. Researchers in sensitive areas often pick Milestones specifically because there's no shared cloud workspace.
Free for personal use. An optional Pro upgrade unlocks the project archive (perfect for past papers and grants you want to reference) and custom icons.
Side-by-side with the apps you might already be using.
A focused native Apple project planner vs the everything-app document and database tool. They aim at very different problems — here's how to choose.
A milestone-driven project planner vs the most polished GTD task manager on Apple platforms. Both are native, both respect you — they're just for different jobs.
A native Apple project planner vs the most-used cross-platform to-do app. They overlap on tasks but diverge on structure, privacy, and where they live.
Free to download. Native and offline. Private iCloud — your plan, not the institution's. For researchers who'd rather think than configure.
Download on the App StoreFree · No account required · Private iCloud sync
