Depending on your point of view, Org mode has the advantage of being plain text and free software. It is a system you could still be using in 10-15 years time. Todoist might be have bought by Microsoft (or similar) by then and discontinued. This is probably a good reason why Org mode is appealing to academics who may be on a research project for many years - you need to be using something that is going to stay the course.
Org mode does a lot more than Todoist (literate programming, spreadsheet features which I personally use in project proposals for calculating costings, exporting complex documents, logging time, ...) However all that power might be a distraction depending on what you need the tool for :)
I used to use org-mode as a task manager/calendar. As you can see from the manual[1], it has features that overlap with Evernote more than Todoist.
Todoist works well as a way to capture things that need future processing during the busy times of your day, and for getting notifications, but it is limited beyond that. {Disclosure: I'm a current Todoist Premium user and use it heavily.}
