Habitica and Habit Rewards both pay you for doing your habits. The difference is what the payment buys. In Habitica, gold and experience power up a pixel-art character, and your friends can fight bosses with you. In Habit Rewards, coins buy rewards from a list you write yourself, like a coffee out or an evening off.
Full disclosure: Habit Rewards is our app. We've tried to be fair to Habitica, which is free, open source and has kept a lot of people on track for over a decade. If you are choosing between the two, the questions below matter more than any feature list.
Table of Contents
The short answer
- Pick Habitica if you like RPGs, want friends in a party to keep you honest, or want a free app that also runs in the browser.
- Pick Habit Rewards if you want the payoff to be something real you chose, a clean habit list without game menus, and harder habits to pay more than easy ones.
What is Habitica?
Habitica turns your habits, dailies and to-dos into a role-playing game. Doing them gives your character experience and gold; missing a daily costs your character health. Gold buys gear for your avatar, and you can also add custom rewards to the Rewards column and buy those with gold.
- Social: join a party with friends and take on quests. In a boss quest, your missed dailies hurt the whole party, which is a strong reason not to skip.
- Three kinds of task: habits (tap + or −, any time), dailies (on a schedule, with a streak counter) and to-dos.
- Forgiving at the end of the day: when a new day starts, Habitica asks whether you did yesterday's dailies, so you can record what you forgot to check off.
- Everywhere: web, iPhone and Android, free with an optional subscription. Rated 4.3 from about 3,500 ratings on the US App Store.
Where people struggle: there is a lot of game to manage (classes, gear, pets, quests), and losing health for a bad day feels like punishment to some people. If you stopped opening Habitica, it was often one of those two things.
What is Habit Rewards?
Habit Rewards is a habit tracker with a reward shop and no game around it. Every habit pays coins when you check it off, and you spend the coins on rewards you write and price yourself.
- Coins by difficulty: each habit pays 1, 4, 8 or 16 coins, so a hard workout is worth more than drinking a glass of water.
- Your own reward list: write a reward, set its coin price, and claim it once your balance covers it.
- Tasks pay too: one-off to-dos, like booking the dentist, earn coins alongside your habits.
- Build or quit: track habits you want to start and ones you want to stop.
- Bad days: a day you don't check off costs nothing (only marking a habit as failed costs its coins). You can go back and check off a day you forgot, and a Skip, bought with coins, keeps a streak alive.
- See your progress: streaks, a progress grid for every habit, reminders and home-screen widgets.
- iPhone and Android (no web app), free for three habits with a Pro subscription for more. Rated 4.75 from 440 App Store ratings.
Side by side
| Habitica | Habit Rewards | |
|---|---|---|
| What you earn | Experience and gold | Coins: 1, 4, 8 or 16 per habit |
| What it buys | Avatar gear, pets, and custom rewards you add | Rewards you write and price |
| Missed day | Missed dailies cost health (your party's too in a boss quest) | Costs nothing unless you mark it failed; a Skip costs coins and saves the streak |
| Social | Parties, quests, challenges | None: it's just you |
| To-dos | Yes | Yes, one-off tasks that pay coins |
| Quitting habits | Negative habits (the − button) | Quit habits |
| Streaks | On dailies | On every habit, with a progress grid |
| Record a forgotten day | Yesterday's dailies, at the start of a new day | Earlier days: pick the date on Home |
| Platforms | Web, iPhone, Android | iPhone, Android |
| Price | Free, optional subscription | Free for 3 habits, Pro subscription for more |
The real difference: what the rewards are
Both apps work the same way underneath: a small, immediate payoff for doing the habit, which psychologists call a token economy. What matters is whether the payoff still feels worth it in month three.
Habitica's payoff is inside the game: a stronger character, a rare pet, a quest your party wins. That stays exciting for as long as the game does. You can add your own real-life rewards in Habitica, but they compete with the gear shop for the same gold.
Habit Rewards only has real-life rewards, so the whole app is built around them: rewards are priced in the same coins your habits pay, harder habits pay more, and claiming one is the moment the app celebrates. If your best Habitica days were about the gold and not the party, this is the part you'll recognize. Need ideas for the list? See 70 ways to reward yourself, or build a dopamine menu.
Which one should you pick?
Ask what got you to do the habit on a good day.
- Your friends? Stay with Habitica, or bring a friend into it. Parties are what it does best.
- The game itself? Habitica, or one of the other gamified habit trackers.
- Earning something you actually wanted? Try Habit Rewards: write three rewards, price them, and see if the coins pull you through a week.
Still comparing? Our guide to the best habit tracker apps groups 13 apps by what keeps you motivated.
✅ Try Habit Rewards: the habit tracker that pays you
Every habit pays coins by how hard it is (1, 4, 8 or 16). Write your own reward list, put a coin price on each treat, and claim it once you've earned it.
- Daily, weekly and monthly habits, plus one-off tasks that pay coins
- Reminders, streaks and home-screen widgets
- A 10-coin Skip for the days you can't
- Free for three habits, on iPhone and Android
On a computer? Scan the code with your phone (it opens the App Store or Google Play), or get it on the App Store.
Using Notion?
Start with our free Notion habit tracker and formulas, or get the aesthetic Notion Habit Tracker template with heatmaps and streaks.