The Streaks alternative for people who track more than habits
By Piyush Kadam ·
Streaks is the best $5.99 habit tracker on iOS and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Here is where it runs out of road — the task cap, the Apple-only lock-in, and habits being all it does.
- Streaks is genuinely excellent and costs $5.99 once — if it is working for you, there is no argument here worth reading.
- People leave it for three reasons: the cap on daily tasks, the Apple-only lock-in, and the fact that it tracks habits and nothing else.
- tracck keeps habits, calories and tasks in one Today view, and lets you switch off the modules you do not want.
- The honest trade: Streaks has the better Watch and widget story and a one-time price; tracck covers more of your day.
Most “alternative to X” posts open by explaining why X is secretly terrible. This one cannot, because Streaks is not. It has been the default recommendation for iPhone habit tracking for years and it has earned that.
So the useful question is narrower: what are the specific walls people hit, and is the thing you are hitting one of them?
What Streaks gets right
- A one-time price. $5.99, once, no subscription. In a category that has gone almost entirely to recurring billing, that is close to a moral position and it is the single best argument for the app.
- Apple Health does the work. Habits like walking 10,000 steps or closing your stand ring auto-complete from Health data. You never tick them, because your phone already knows.
- The best Watch and widget story in the category. Complications that let you check a habit off from your wrist, and home screen widgets that mean you rarely open the app at all. Nothing else is as good at this.
- Shortcuts support. You can trigger completions from anywhere in iOS, which makes some genuinely clever automations possible.
If you are an iPhone-and-Watch person tracking a handful of daily habits and nothing else, you are already using the right app. Close this tab.
The three reasons people look elsewhere
The cap. Streaks limits how many tasks you can track in a day. For most people that ceiling is invisible; for anyone tracking a real routine it arrives fast, and then you are pruning habits to fit the app rather than the other way round. It is the most common single complaint, and it is a design choice rather than an oversight — the cap is part of what keeps the app calm.
Apple only. No Android, no web. Fine until you switch phones, or want to check something from a laptop, or share a routine with someone who is not on iOS. There is no export route into the rest of your life.
It tracks habits, and that is all. This is the one that actually sends people looking. Streaks is a habit tracker in the strict sense. The moment you also want to log what you ate, or keep hold of what you planned to do today, you are opening two more apps — and the streak that broke on Tuesday and the four days you stopped logging meals live in different places, so you never see that they are the same story.
| Streaks | tracck | |
|---|---|---|
| Habit tracking | Excellent, with a cap on daily tasks | Unlimited, with heatmap and genre grouping |
| Calorie tracking | Not included | AI photo and voice logging, macros, meal plans |
| Tasks and planning | Not included | Projects, focus sessions, progress charts |
| Apple Health auto-complete | Yes — a core strength | Not the same depth |
| Apple Watch complications | Best in class | Not a match for Streaks |
| Platforms | Apple only | iOS first |
| Turn off what you do not use | Not applicable — one job | Modules switch on and off |
| Price | $5.99 once | Free to start, first 3 AI actions included |
Where tracck is different
tracck is built on the assumption that your day is not filed into categories. The 6am run, the protein you hit at lunch and the deadline you moved twice all happened to the same person on the same day, and they belong on the same screen. Habits, calories and tasks are three modules of one Today view.
The obvious objection to that is bloat, and it is a fair one — it is exactly why people who tried an all-in-one app went back to Streaks. So the modules switch off. Only tracking habits this month? Turn calories and tasks off and tracck becomes a plain habit tracker with nothing else on screen, your data waiting where you left it. Cutting for the summer? Switch calories back on. The app is the size of your life rather than the size of a feature list.
That is also a constraint on us rather than just a feature for you: the habit module has to survive comparison with dedicated habit trackers, or it does not deserve the switch.
Who should stay on Streaks
Plenty of people, and we would rather say so than win an argument we should lose. Stay if you live on the Watch — nothing here beats those complications. Stay if you are under the task cap and have never noticed it. Stay if $5.99 once against any subscription is the whole decision for you; that is a completely rational position.
Switch if you have started pruning habits to fit a limit, if you are already running a calorie app and a to-do app alongside it, or if you want the thing three separate apps structurally cannot give you: one picture of the whole day.
Build the tracker you actually need
tracck starts with Home and lets you snap on Habits, Calories and To-do — only what you want, nothing you don't.
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