Done app alternative: when counters are not enough
Done nailed the several-times-a-day habit. The trouble starts at the fourth habit and the paywall.
Quick verdict
Done was one of the first iOS trackers to understand that some habits happen five times a day, not once, and its counter ring is still the nicest way to log a glass of water. miniHabits is the better fit once you want more than a handful of habits, timers alongside counters, or statistics that go past the streak.
What Done does better
The multiple-times-a-day model. Most trackers ask did you do it. Done asks how many times, and the ring fills as you tap. If your habits are water, cigarettes, stretching breaks and vitamins, that interaction is close to perfect and it is the reason people stay.
The check-in animation. Small thing, real thing. Tapping a habit in Done feels good, and an app you enjoy tapping gets tapped.
Simplicity. There is no project structure, no calendar, no social layer. You open it, you tap, you leave. That restraint is why it has lasted.
Where it stops being a good fit
The free tier is three habits. That is enough to evaluate the app and not enough to use it, so in practice Done is a paid app with a demo attached.
Everything is a counter. There is no timer with a Live Activity for a 90 minute block, no quantity with a unit for kilometres or kilograms, and no Health integration to fill steps or sleep without a tap. If your habits are all countable that is fine. Most people’s are not.
The statistics stop at the streak and a simple chart. There is no weekday bias, no time of day, and no correlation between habits, so the app can tell you that you missed and never why.
A missed day resets the chain, with no mechanism between a perfect record and starting over.
How miniHabits handles the same job
Counters are one of five modes, and they work the same way: set a target of eight, tap through the day, the value is stored rather than the tap. Alongside them: checkbox habits, timer habits that run as a Live Activity on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, quantity habits with any unit, and HealthKit habits that fill themselves from steps, sleep and workouts.
The free tier is ten habits rather than three, with all five modes, widgets, heatmaps and CSV export. Pro is 25 € a year or 34,99 € once.
Missing a day is survivable. Every five consecutive days banks a shield, up to three, and a miss spends one so the chain holds while the log still shows the miss. Break mode freezes everything for as long as you leave it on, and costs no shields.
And the statistics answer questions: a year heatmap, weekday bias, time of day, and correlations between habits. Mine says water is 26% more likely on days I logged a workout, which is the kind of fact that changes a routine.
Pricing compared
| Done | miniHabits | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 3 habits | 10 habits, all 5 modes |
| Paid | subscription | 25 € a year, or 34,99 € once |
| Timer habits | no | yes, with Live Activities |
| Health sync | no | yes |
| Export | limited | CSV and JSON, free tier |
Migrating your data
Done keeps its history on device with iCloud backup, so the practical route is screenshots: capture each habit’s history, paste the images into any LLM with our migration prompt, and it returns importable JSON. If you have a CSV from a backup, paste the contents straight in.
FAQ
Do I need an account? No. miniHabits opens on an empty list and never asks for an email.
Can I keep the counter interaction? Yes. Counter is one of the five modes and it is one tap per increment.
Is there a one time purchase? Yes, 34,99 € for lifetime Pro, with a 30 day money back window.
The honest recommendation
Stay with Done if three or four countable habits is the whole job and you like the ring. It does that one thing well and there is no shame in a small tool.
Move when you want timers, units, Health data or an answer to why the rate dropped. The Habitify comparison is worth reading if you also need Android or a web client, and the Streaks comparison if a Watch app is the deciding factor.