Goal setting apps, judged on what they put on today's list

On 3 January you typed in that you wanted to run a half marathon by spring. It is now 24 August. The goal is still sitting there at 12 percent, and you have opened that screen maybe four times since the clocks went forward in March.

Every goal setting app is excellent at the minute you type the goal in. The interesting question is what any of them does across the 233 ordinary days that follow, and the lists ranking for this phrase almost never ask it. They count features instead.

One disclosure before the rest. We make Kudos, a free to-do app, so we have a stake in this category, and Kudos sits in the table below with its gaps spelled out, because a comparison we won in every row would be worth nothing to you.

What separates a goal setting app from the list you already have

Check one thing before you install anything: does the goal turn into something that appears in front of you today, without you remembering to go and look for it?

That single question sorts the category. Griply, Strides and Habitica all generate a daily row from a goal you set once. GoalsOnTrack and Lifetick keep the goal on a dashboard that waits for you to open it, while Todoist and Kudos have no goal object at all, so the breaking down is work you do yourself.

Nobody has lost yet. It is just the sort that predicts which app you'll still have on your phone in August, which is more useful to know than how many chart types it ships with.

The seven apps, their free tiers and their prices

Check the date on any price you read. Every figure below came off the company's own pricing page or its App Store listing on 24 August 2026, and Todoist put Pro up by a fifth in December 2025, so these numbers move faster than the articles quoting them.

The apps that keep your goal on a dashboard

GoalsOnTrack is the most structured thing in this list. You write a goal, break it into subgoals, attach tasks and habits, and watch a chart fill. There is no free tier. Membership is $68 a year with a 30-day money-back guarantee, which makes it the most expensive answer here by a wide margin.

Lifetick runs a similar shape through the SMART framework, starting from your core values and working down to tasks. There is a free plan with no expiry, and the paid tier is a single $39.99 yearly subscription on Apple's listing. Android users get the website. That is the whole mobile story on that platform, and it is worth knowing before you spend an evening setting up your values.

Both are good at decomposition, and both share one problem. The goal lives inside the goal app. Nothing arrives in the place where you actually decide what to do with your morning, so the whole arrangement runs on you choosing to visit a screen, and a goal stuck at 12 percent is usually a goal whose owner stopped choosing.

Lifetick's homepage also tells you that people who set clear goals are up to 10 times more likely to succeed than people who don't, and cites nothing for it. No study below comes close. Treat it the way you'd treat any number a product quotes about itself.

The apps that turn a goal into a row you tick

Strides is the sharpest of these on iPhone, and its own help centre is admirably blunt about the limit: free forever for your top three goals and habits, with Strides Plus removing the cap. There is no Android app. Apple's listing shows Plus in-app purchases from $4.99 up to $149.99, covering monthly, annual and lifetime, and the Mac version is still described as upcoming.

What Strides does that the dashboard apps don't is pace. Set a target and a date, and every tracker shows whether you are ahead of or behind the line you would need to hold, in green or red, today. That turns "half marathon by spring" into "you are two runs behind". You can act on the second one.

Griply is the closest thing here to a complete system, and its free tier is the interesting part: two goals, two habits and unlimited tasks, with no expiry. Premium is $2.49 a month billed yearly, so $29.99 a year, or $119.99 once. Two goals is thin. It is also enough to find out whether a daily row was the thing you were missing, before anyone asks you for a card.

Check the platform before you get attached, because it caught me out. Griply's own download page lists Mac, Windows, iPhone and the browser, and no Android app, which is the same gap Strides has. Of the four apps here built specifically around goals, three are Apple-first and the fourth is a website. An Android user's real choices in this list are Habitica, Todoist and ours.

Habitica is the outlier. The whole app is free with no feature cap, and the subscriptions on Apple's listing run from $4.99 a month to $47.99 a year, buying gems and cosmetics rather than function. Your goal becomes a repeating daily attached to a character who loses health when you skip it. Some people love that. Others find the game turns into its own chore, which is why we wrote a whole piece on where people go after Habitica.

The apps with no goal in them at all

Todoist doesn't have a goal object, and it isn't pretending to. A goal becomes a project, and the recurring work becomes recurring tasks. Its free Beginner plan stops at five personal projects and three filters, and Pro is $7 a month or $60 a year after a price rise on 10 December 2025. For somebody who already thinks in projects, that is a perfectly good goal app. It just isn't sold as one.

Kudos is ours, and it holds less than any of them. There is no goal object. What it has is today: tasks worth XP priced by what finishing them takes, a streak, and a small group of people who can see whether you cleared your day. It's free on iOS and Android, and you can start without an account.

If what you need is a system that holds a twelve-month objective and cuts it into quarters, Kudos is the wrong tool and Griply or GoalsOnTrack is the right one. I would rather say so here. Finding out in week two costs you more than reading it now.

What the evidence says about tracking a goal at all

The case for these apps rests on progress monitoring, and it holds up better than most product claims do. Harkin and colleagues pooled 138 randomised studies covering 19,951 people in Psychological Bulletin in 2016 and found that prompting people to monitor their progress moved goal attainment by d+ = 0.40. Small to medium, and real.

The moderators are the part worth paying for. When the information was physically recorded, the effect on attainment was d+ = 0.43 across 106 studies; when it was not recorded, it fell to d+ = 0.29 across 32. Reporting progress to another person did similar work, which is the finding behind what an accountability partner is actually for. Recording beats noticing. That is the whole argument for installing anything, and it also explains why an app you never open earns you nothing.

There is a second finding that no app in this list acts on. Gollwitzer and Sheeran's meta-analysis of 94 independent tests found that an if-then plan naming the when, the where and the how produced d = .65 on goal attainment, comfortably larger than the monitoring effect. "If it is Tuesday at 7 a.m., then I run the river loop" beats "run more" by a margin no interface improves on. Every app here stores the goal. Not one of them makes you write that sentence.

Locke and Latham's review of 35 years of goal setting research.pdf) puts it more bluntly: specific, difficult goals beat urging people to do their best, with effect sizes from .42 to .80, because "do-your-best goals have no external referent and thus are defined idiosyncratically." An app that lets you save "get fit" has saved a do-your-best goal.

What SMART actually stood for

Three of these apps sell themselves on SMART goals. Check the acronym. It comes from George T. Doran's paper in the November 1981 issue of Management Review, and his five words were specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-related.

Assignable, meaning name who will do it. Somewhere between 1981 and the app stores that became "achievable", and a letter that asked who was responsible turned into a letter asking whether the goal was easy enough. That runs against what Locke and Latham measured, since performance kept rising with goal difficulty right up to the limits of ability. Put a name back in the A. Yours, and a day.

Which one to pick

Pick Griply if you're on an iPhone or a laptop and you want one app holding both the goal and the day. It is the only tool here that carries a long-horizon goal all the way down to a task list you'd actually work from, for $29.99 a year. Two free goals is enough to test that.

Pick Strides if you're on iPhone and the pace line is what you want. Three trackers free is a real free tier rather than a trial, which is worth more than it sounds when three is roughly what a person can hold anyway. It costs nothing to test.

Pick GoalsOnTrack if you genuinely run quarterly reviews and $68 a year is a rounding error against what the goal is worth. Pick Habitica for the game. Check our free habit tracker comparison first if what you actually want is the tracking without the role-playing on top of it.

Skip all seven if your goals are already specific and written down somewhere, and the thing that keeps failing is an ordinary Tuesday evening. That is not a goal setting problem. Adding a dashboard to it usually produces one more screen you avoid opening, which is how the half marathon ended up at 12 percent in the first place.