Streaks alternative: what you gain and what you give up
Both are one-tap trackers. The difference is what happens the day you miss.
Quick verdict
Streaks is the better-looking icon set and it has been around a decade. miniHabits wins if you want counters, timers and quantities in one list, real statistics, and a streak system that survives a missed day.
If you track six simple yes/no habits and you already own Streaks, stay where you are. Keep reading if you have hit the task cap, if you export to a spreadsheet to answer questions the app will not answer, or if a broken chain has made you delete a tracker before.
What Streaks does better
The design. Streaks won an Apple Design Award and it earned it. The task icons are drawn by hand, they still read at widget size, and the app feels like someone argued about the corner radius. miniHabits is deliberately plainer: monospace numbers, a dot grid, no illustration budget.
The Apple Watch app. Streaks ships a real watchOS app with complications. If your check-in gesture is raising your wrist, that is the app to buy. miniHabits has nothing on your wrist today and Watch support sits behind the web app on the roadmap.
The price. Streaks is a single purchase of a few euros. No subscription, no upsell sheet on launch. miniHabits Pro costs more than Streaks ever will.
Pricing compared
| Streaks | miniHabits | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | none, paid up front | 10 habits, 8 themes, all 5 modes |
| Paid | one purchase, cheap | 25 € a year, or 34,99 € once |
| Subscription only | no | no |
| Money back | App Store refund | 30 days |
Streak rules & shields
Streaks lets you fill in a day you forgot to log, which is fair. It does not let you survive a day you genuinely missed. The chain goes to zero, and the person who was 90 days in is the person most likely to quit.
miniHabits banks a shield every five consecutive days, up to three at a time. Miss a day and one shield spends itself: the chain holds, and the log still shows the day as missed. Nothing is rewritten. Break mode freezes every habit without spending a shield, and those days read as frozen rather than missed. The point is that the record stays honest while the streak stops being a tripwire.
Statistics
Streaks gives you a current streak, a best streak and a completion percentage. That is enough to feel good and not enough to change anything.
miniHabits keeps the whole record: a year heatmap, weekday bias, time of day, and correlations between habits. Mine says reading is 34% more likely on days I meditated first and 18% less likely at weekends. One of those facts changed my schedule. You can also count things: eight glasses, 20 pages, 90 minutes of deep work, kilometres, kilograms. Streaks handles some of this, but the counter, the timer and the HealthKit value live in one list here, and the maths behind them is the same maths.
Widgets & Live Activities
Both apps have Home Screen widgets. In miniHabits the widget check writes straight to the store, so there is no app launch and no sync round trip, and a heatmap widget keeps the year in view. Running timers become Live Activities on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island. Streaks answers that with the Watch app, which is a better answer if your phone stays in your pocket.
Migrating your data
If your copy of Streaks can export CSV, paste the file contents straight into the importer: one date and one value per line is all it needs.
If it cannot, screenshot your task list and paste the images into any LLM together with our migration prompt. It returns JSON in the shape miniHabits reads, which is how we support apps we have never opened. Getting out is the same story in reverse: CSV and JSON export, no lock-in.
FAQ
Is there a free tier? Yes. Ten habits, eight themes, all five tracking modes, widgets and heatmaps, CSV export. No account, no trial timer.
Do I need an account? No. The app opens on an empty list and you add a habit. Cloud sync is optional and uses a device key rather than an email address.
Does miniHabits have a Watch app? Not yet. The web app lands in August 2026, then Android, then Watch.
Can I import a Streaks archive? Yes, through CSV or through the migration prompt. Nothing is uploaded to a server on the way in.
The honest recommendation
Buy Streaks if you want the prettiest tracker on iOS, you live on your Watch, and a dozen or so simple habits is the whole job. It is a good app and it will still be here in five years.
Take miniHabits if your habits have numbers attached, if you want to know why your rate drops at weekends, or if you have already lost a long chain and taken it personally. Also see the Habitica comparison if what you actually miss is other people, and the TickTick comparison if your habits and your tasks keep ending up in the same list.