Best Habit Trackers to Try
Updated on 19 Mar 2024 • 8 min read • posted by Tania
Have you decided to create a sertain habit and want to make sure you stick to it? While it is a great thing, following through can be challenging. That’s why tracking habits is the best way to visualize your progress and change course if need be. As a result, to reach your goals, you need to set new habits, ensure they fit into a consistent routine, and track them until they turn into automatic behaviors.
Are you wondering how to get started? To help you reach your goals and improve the quality of your life, we’ve highlighted below everything you need to know about habit tracking.
Best Habit Trackers
- For building habits through self-understanding: Fabulous
- For learning more about habits: Productive
- For fans of minimalism: (Not Boring) Habits
- For sharing habits with friends: HabitShare
- For colorful tracking: Everyday
- For motivation: Way of Life
- For habits and task management: HabitNow
- For organizing the day due to your habits: Habitify
- For turning building habits into a game: Habitica
- For building consistency: Streaks
What is a Habit Tracker
A habit tracker is a simple way to track whether you’re sticking to your daily, weekly, or monthly habits and to measure and quantify your progress over time. There are many different ways to track your habits, from using a bullet journal, a calendar, or a planner to downloading a specific habit tracking app. Which one is better? Depends on you.
In this blog post we’ll review the best habit trackers to try in 2024. If you want to learn more tips on forming a habit – read the blog post “ How to Form a Habit that Sticks”.
What Makes an Excellent Habit Tracking App
At first glance, it seems that all trackers are the same. Eventually, not all tools have core functions that you need to form a habit and make this process effective. So here are must-have features a good habit tracker should have:
- Easy-to-use interface. A great habit tracking app should have an intuitive interface with clearly visible data points and options. This will help you enter data easily and access the information you need without confusion.
- Visual reminders. They’ll help you stay on track with their goals. Also, such reminders can be customized to your habits.
- Goal tracking. Progress indicators, personalized feedback, and adaptive goal adjustment enhance the goal tracking process. This allows you to track your progress in a clear and motivated way.
- Gamification. To make habit tracking more engaging, habit trackers should incorporate game elements to encourage users to reach their goals.
- Flexibility. This will contribute to your well-being and help adapt the system to your unique needs. This approach will help you stay engaged and adaptable in your habit formation.
- Reports and analytics. Using advanced data analysis and visualization tools, the app can provide comprehensive insights into the habit formation process and trends. With detailed reports, interactive charts, and actionable recommendations, you can improve your experience.
Apps that we added to our collection of habit trackers have all these features. So you can just check out reviews and find the app you want to try.
Best Habit Tracker Apps
You might be wondering what the best habit tracker apps are. While there are a lot of habit tracking apps available, we’ve listed below the ones we’d recommend.
Fabulous
This habit app is a well-being app that helps create routines and break them down into small steps. Fabulous uses insights from behavioral science to help you develop healthy habits. A timer will help you visualize how long it takes to complete these steps. The tracker also lets you customize your routine and offers a library of meditation exercises you can select and set as a routine.
Fabulous features:
- Habit management
- Daily coaching series
- Short workouts and breathing exercises
- Meditation features
- Monitoring of mental well-being.
Pricing:
- Free basic plan with limited functionality
- Premium plan 7 days trial for free
- Premium plan for $39.99 per year
Productive
Productive is a routine building app designed to help you set new life-changing habits. The app helps you create a personal habit management plan and set reminders. The Productive habit tracker also features a powerful analytical tool to help you visualize and track your progress. You also can access personalized expert insights through the app's articles and grow awareness of your productivity.
Productive features:
- Habit management
- Reflection check-ins, and motivation prompts
- Challenges to improve daily routines
- Personalized expert insights through the app's articles
- Customization options, including unique icons and colors
- Statistics tracking habits
- Smart reminders and ADHD assistance
- Available for iPhones, Apple Watch and Android devices.
Pricing:
- Free basic plan with limited functionality
- Premium plan for:
- $3.99 per month
- $29.99 per year
(Not Boring) Habits
This habit tracker is for sure isn’t boring. The (Not Boring) Habits is based on the 60-day principle. It doesn't matter if you miss a day or interrupt the series. The key is to do it 60 times. The tracker is created in a minimalistic style with different skins. It offers home screen widgets and reminders to stay on track.
(Not Boring) Habits features:
- Mindful approach
- Habit management
- Customized interface and skins
- Do not collect data
- Widgets and reminders.
Pricing:
- Free basic plan with limited functionality
- Skins starting from $4.99
- Premium plan for:
- $5.99 per month
- $17.99 per year (only habits)
- $34.99 per year
HabitShare
HabitShare is a habit tracking app that allows you to track habits with friends. At the same time, by default all habits are private. Selected friends can see your progress and help you stay motivated. You can also send cool GIFs to your friends. It has an easy-to-use interface and is simple.
HabitShare features:
- Reminders
- Messaging with fun GIFs
- Charts
- Daily & weekly habit goals
- Flexible habit schedules
- Multiple devices
Pricing: free
Everyday
If you like the colored trackers – Everyday app is for you. The app is available on all devices and is fully synced across them. You can tailor your board with sorting, color coding, and a 'break habit' feature for negative habits. You can skip days for genuine reasons without breaking your streak. That makes Everyday flexible and friendly to your habit tracking.
Everyday features:
- Colorful progress visualization
- Fully synced across devices
- Flexible habit forming approach
- Available for Apple Watch and Android devices.
Pricing:
- Free basic plan with limited functionality
- Premium plan for:
- $7.49 per month
- $29.99 per year
- $99.99 per lifetime
Way of Life
Way of Life is an intuitive habit tracker that motivates you to build a better, stronger, and healthier you! This app helps with both building and breaking habits. It provides reminders with flexible scheduling and custom messages. Also enables quick notes so you won't forget anything. With Way of Life you can export data as CSV or Excel files for further analysis.
Way of Life features:
- Simple interface
- Taking notes
- Siri and shortcuts support
- Various themes (Dark Mode, Serenity, Retro C64, etc.)
- Color-blind mode.
Pricing:
- Free basic plan with limited functionality
- Premium plan for:
- $4.99 per month
- $29.99 per year
HabitNow
HabitNow is to-do list and habit tracker in one app. It available only for Android devices. You can easily keep track of your planned activities with the variou options of timers. It motivates you to stay on track by creating success streaks. You also can study your schedule in the app's calendar and document your journey with daily notes.
HabitNow features:
- To-do list feature
- Home screen widgets
- Activities tracker
- Events and tasks management.
Pricing:
- Free for up to 7 habits
- Premium plan for $9.99
Habitica
Habitica is the habit tracker that transforms your daily routines into a fun and rewarding role-playing game. The app features in-game levels reached by accomplishing certain tasks, rewards for your goals, and battling monsters with friends. With a strong community and interactive interface, Habitica makes it easy to stay accountable and on track.
Habitica features:
- Gamified approach
- Customizable task lists
- Reminders for tasks
- Leveling up your avatar by completing tasks
- Available group plan
Pricing:
- Free basic plan with limited functionality
- Premium plan for:
- $4.99 per month
- $14.99 per 3 months
- $29.99 per 6 months
- $47.99 per year (with a 20% discount)
Streaks
Streaks is probably the best habit tracking app for IOS users. It’s available on all possible Apple devices: phones, Macs, watches and even Vision Pro. Streaks is basically a to-do list app designed to help you form good habits. You can create up to twenty-four tasks. As the name suggests, the idea is to create streaks of consecutive days. The fact that if you break the chain, your streak will go back to zero can help hold you accountable.
Streaks features:
- Highly customizable habit tracker
- Tasks sync across all devices via iCloud
- Share tasks with others for accountability
- Automatic reminders for task completion
- Daily note-taking for tasks
- Negative task creation for breaking bad habits.
Pricing:
- A paid app that costs $4.99
Habitify
Habitify is a simple habit tracking tool that works by organizing habits and creating your system for success. You can create a reminder, input the task to complete, add the time and the day, and the number of reminders you want to set for this particular habit. It’s a handy app to use to turn habits into automatic behaviors.
Productive features:
- Habit management
- Customizable habit area display
- A system of smart reminders
- Statistics for each habit: completion, streaks and trend.
- Habit notes for reflection
- Available for iPhones, Apple Watch and Android devices.
Pricing:
- Free basic plan with limited functionality
- Premium plan for:
- $4.99 per month
- $27.99 per year
- $59.99 per lifetime
Benefits of Using a Habit Tracker
The daily habit tracker can assist you to stay on track with your goals. It might assist you in seeing your development and realizing how far you've come. Check out the key benefits of using habit trackers we've listed below.
Keeping Yourself Accountable
Like John C. Maxwell said, “you’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.’’ Although John C. Maxwell has a point, it might sometimes seem difficult to stick to habits. Indeed, you might be extremely busy, tired, or just not feel like accomplishing the new habits you set yourself anymore. While this can happen, you’re much more likely to push yourself if you’re using a habit app, as you’ll be able to visualize what you’re doing and what you’re not doing.
Habit trackers make you accountable for your actions as they reminds you of the promise you made to yourself and why you did so. Seeing you’re not honoring this promise might help you get back into your habits.
Keeping You Focused
If you live a fast-paced life and have a busy lifestyle, it’s easy to start adding too many things to your to-do list and lose track of your original intentions. You might quickly feel overwhelmed and end up giving up on your habits and goals.
Creating a habit list on your habit tracker app or bullet journal will help you get clarity on your goals, prioritize them, and break them down into achievable daily habits. As a result, you’ll be able to track and monitor your progress consistently, keeping your mind focused on the long run.
Keeping You Motivated
When you’re down, it’s easy to forget how far you’ve come, how hard you’ve worked, and how much you’ve accomplished so far. Being able to visualize your progress can act as a reminder of your commitment and hard work and help you stay motivated.
Besides, another reason a daily habit tracker can be beneficial is that after a few days of marking empty squares, you’ll most likely feel the urge to keep marking them every day. Indeed, manually marking boxes and feeling a sense of achievement in doing so can quickly become addictive and keep you motivated at all times.
Providing Instant Gratification
There’s something deeply satisfying about ticking off a box to say you’ve completed a habit. Sure, checking off a box on your habit tracker doesn’t mean you’ve reached your goal yet, but it sure means you’re well on your way! Marking an X on your habit tracker will provide you with immediate satisfaction knowing you’ve accomplished something. And this can feel very rewarding. After all, it always feels good to see your progress in real-time!
FAQ
How long does it take to form a habit?
If you’ve ever researched or read about how to be more productive, you might have come across the statement that it takes 21 days to form a new habit. However, to form a new habit isn’t a “one-size fits all’’ figure. Indeed, it strongly depends on the habit, methods and the person. Some people find it easier to adopt a consistent routine, while others might struggle and take longer to get used to it.
The bottom line is, that to forge a new habit, you need to be consistent and accept that there is no magic number, and forming a new habit will take time, hard work, and commitment.
How to form a habit by using a habit tracker?
You can benefit from a habit tracker if done correctly. Consistently tracking one habit is more beneficial than sporadically tracking multiple habits. So it's best to limit manual tracking to the most important habits
Keeping the habit tracker simple and focusing on three or four important habits is a good way to start. Also try tips for forming a habit that sticks. One of them is the “habit stacking” approach discussed in Chapter 5 of Atomic Habits. The basic formula for habit tracking is: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [TRACK MY HABIT].” For example, after finishing doing homework, I will go for a walk.
How to quickly recover from a habit breakdown?
Don't let one mistake discourage you from continuing with the habit. Remember that perfection is not always possible, and what matters most is finding a way to get back on track and start a new streak.
So, instead of giving up on a habit completely, focus on starting a new streak and doing better.
Track Your Progress
We hope this article will help you set new habits and will provide you with useful tools to reach your goals. Remember, "life is about the journey, not the destination." While reaching a goal is extremely rewarding, so is taking consistent steps towards it.