The best free habit tracker apps for iPhone, and where each free version stops

Three published lists, three different answers about one app. EasyHabits says Streaks gives you six habits. HabitBox says twelve, paid only. Streaks' own website says you can "choose or create up to 24 tasks".

None of those is a typo. Only the last one comes from the people who wrote the app.

That is the shape of almost every "best free habit tracker app for iPhone" list you'll find. Each publishes a habit cap for each app, hardly any says where the number came from, and the numbers contradict each other. So I opened every listing myself.

Here is the short answer, read off each app's own App Store page or pricing page on the day I wrote this, 21 August 2026. On iPhone, only Habitica and Finch let you track unlimited habits without paying. Habitify, Way of Life and Do Habits stop at three. TickTick stops at five. Streaks has no free version at all: it costs $5.99, once, and that is the whole transaction.

One disclosure before the table. We make Kudos, a free to-do app built on XP and streaks, so several of these compete with us. Kudos is not in the table, because it tracks tasks and a daily streak rather than a grid of named habits, and dropping it into a habit tracker comparison would waste your time. Three of the five lists I read while writing this are published by companies that make one of the apps they rank, and all three say so somewhere on the page. This is me saying so.

The free ceiling on every major iPhone habit tracker

Two rows in that table need more than a cell each, and one of them is the app most of these lists get wrong.

The two that are genuinely free

Habitica is the outlier, and it has been for years. Its App Store listing says the app "can be fully enjoyed for free", and the in-app purchases behind that sentence are gems and subscriptions running from $4.99 for a month to $47.99 for a year. What the money buys is pets, quests and monthly item bundles. No habit count is held back.

The catch is the game itself. Habitica wraps your habits in an RPG with a party, a boss and a character who takes damage when you skip a daily, and its App Store rating is 4.2 from 3.2K ratings, a long way under the 4.8s and 4.9s most of this category carries. Whether that game carries you or turns into another thing to maintain is the entire question with Habitica. You'll know inside a week.

Finch is the other one. It's free in a way that surprises people who assume a cute app must be a funnel. Goals, journaling and mood tracking are all in the free tier, and Finch Plus buys outfits, soundscapes and adventures rather than access. Its rating is 4.9 from 742,000 ratings, which is the largest sample in this comparison by a factor of eight.

We went through Finch's pricing in detail, including why Apple lists nine separate Finch Plus purchases at eight different prices and why no two reviews agree on the cost.

Where the three-habit wall comes from

Habitify, Way of Life and Do Habits all stop at three, and each one publishes the number somewhere you can check.

Habitify is the clearest about it. Its pricing page lists "3 habits" and cross-platform sync under the free plan, then puts advanced reminders, Apple Health integration, calendar sync and the Zapier API behind Premium. Do Habits, which most lists still call Done, states it in the App Store description itself: "The FREE version of Do Habits allows you to create up to 3 habits." It's the only one I found that names its own cap in the first screen a buyer reads.

You have to infer it with Way of Life. Its listing flags unlimited items, cloud backup and CSV or Excel export as premium features, and Zapier's app tester puts the free tier at three habits.

Three looks chosen rather than arbitrary, though I'd only call that a guess. It's about where a tracker stops being a toy and becomes the thing you check every morning, which makes it the most valuable moment to ask somebody for money. Whether it matters depends entirely on you. If you're tracking water, a walk and ten pages, three is plenty and you will never see the wall.

Streaks costs $5.99, and the ceiling is 24 tasks

Streaks costs $5.99 as a paid download from Crunchy Bagel Pty Ltd, and Apple's listing shows no in-app purchases at all. The pricing model ends there. There's no subscription, no Pro tier and no free version to hit a wall in. It holds 4.8 stars from 27,000 ratings and was updated two days before I checked.

The ceiling is 24 tasks, not six and not twelve. Streaks says so on its own homepage, in the developer's own words, and neither of the published figures matches what the people who wrote the app say about it. I don't know their source. Nobody who printed them linked to the page that would have settled it.

If you typed the word "free", it's still worth doing the arithmetic: $5.99 paid once is $114 less than Habitify's lifetime unlock, and less than a single year of TickTick, Habitify, Habitica or Productive.

The truly free tracker you can't have on iPhone

Ask anywhere online for a habit tracker with no ads, no cap and no subscription at all, and somebody will say Loop. They're right, and it won't help you.

Loop Habit Tracker is GPLv3 open source, and its README states plainly that "there are no in-app purchases" and that the easiest way to install it is "through the Google Play Store or F-Droid". There is no iOS version. The project has never shipped one, so an App Store result carrying that name is not this app.

This is worth saying out loud. It explains why iPhone lists feel thinner than Android ones: the category's reference implementation of "free" isn't available on the platform at all, so every iPhone recommendation is a freemium app with a wall somewhere, or a $5.99 purchase, or Habitica.

Why the price you read is never quite the price you pay

Habitify's own pricing page advertises Premium at "$59.99 / forever". Apple's listing for the same app shows Habitify Pro Lifetime at $119.99, alongside a $49.99 yearly, an $8.99 monthly and a $29.99 Plus tier. Both were live today. Neither is lying: one is a sale, the other is the list price, and which one you meet depends on where you tap.

Productive is the extreme case. Apple lists an "Upgrade Productive" purchase at $3.99 and a "Productive Premium 1 Year" at $19.99, $39.99, $59.99 and $79.99, which is four annual prices for one product. Its description confirms a cap exists without naming it: "With the Premium feature, you are able to create as many habits as you want." HabitBox puts the free tier at five habits. RoutineBase quotes "around $3.99/month or $23.99/year". Neither matches Apple.

The same gap opens on HabitKit. Its App Store page describes grid charts, widgets and local-only storage in detail and never once mentions a habit limit. ProdApps reports the app as "limited to 4 habits in free version" and quotes Pro at $1.99 a month, $19.99 a year and $41.99 for lifetime. Apple shows the same three tiers at $0.99 to $1.99, $5.99 to $11.99, and $14.99 to $29.99. Somebody is reading a different storefront, a different month, or an old screenshot.

TickTick shows how fast this moves. Six days before I wrote this, its App Store annual price was $35.99, which our own Todoist and TickTick comparison quoted in its opening line. Today Apple lists Annual TickTick Premium at $49.99, and TickTick's own upgrade page shows US$49.99 a year against a free tier of 5 habits and a Premium ceiling of 299. From outside, a discount ending and a price rise look identical. Either way the figure we printed six days ago is now wrong, which is the whole argument for checking the listing yourself on the day you buy.

How to choose in about five minutes

Count the habits you actually want to track this month. Not the aspirational list, the real one.

If it's three or fewer, the caps are irrelevant to you and you should pick on feel rather than on a spreadsheet. Open Habitify and Do Habits. Use each for two days, then keep the one you didn't have to think about.

Four to eight is harder. Pay for one, in which case Streaks at $5.99 is the cheapest serious answer on iPhone and the only app here with no in-app purchase attached to it at all. Or use Habitica or Finch, and accept that both wrap tracking in something else: a role-playing game in one case, a bird you're looking after in the other.

If you already use TickTick, stop shopping. Its habit tab gives you five free habits inside an app you open anyway, which beats a sixth habit in an app you'll have forgotten by Thursday.

One thing no cap can fix. A tracker records whether you turned up; it doesn't get you there. If your problem is that the grid is accurate and the days are still empty, a bigger grid won't help, and restarting a broken streak is a different skill from choosing an app.

A habit is also not a goal, and the apps built for the second job sort differently. If what you're tracking is a target with a date on it rather than a daily tick, the goal setting apps are worth comparing separately, because the question there is whether the goal ever reaches today at all.