TickTick vs a dedicated habit tracker
Tasks and habits are different data shapes. Here is where the overlap breaks.
Quick verdict
TickTick is a very good task manager with a habit module bolted to the side. If your day is mostly tasks, keep it and use the habit tab for the five or six things you never want to think about again. miniHabits is the better tool once your habits have numbers, targets and a history you want to read.
What TickTick does better
Everything that is not habits, honestly. Natural language input that turns “gym tomorrow 7am” into a scheduled task. A calendar view that merges tasks with your actual calendar. Subtasks, priorities, tags, filters, an Eisenhower matrix, a built in Pomodoro timer with a white noise track. It runs on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, the web and the Watch, and the sync is quick and boring in the way sync should be.
The habit module is also better than most people expect. It handles daily and weekly goals, it has a decent streak view, and it lives one tab away from the work you are actually doing, which is a real advantage. A habit you see every day gets done more than a habit in an app you forget to open.
And the price is fair for what it is. One subscription covers task management, calendar and habits across every platform you own.
Where the overlap breaks
Tasks and habits are different data shapes, and the seam shows in four places.
A task is finished. A habit is a series. A to-do has one state and then it disappears. A habit has 365 states a year, each with a value, and the interesting part is the shape of the series. Task managers store the first thing well and the second thing approximately.
Habits have units. Eight glasses. 20 pages. 90 minutes. 8 412 steps. 78,4 kg. TickTick habits count completions and support a simple goal, but they are not a place to store a value with a unit and then ask what the average was in June. Once you start caring about the number rather than the tick, the module runs out.
Missing a day means something different. A missed task rolls over to tomorrow. A missed habit either breaks a chain or it does not, and that rule is the whole psychology of the category. TickTick resets. There is no mercy mechanic, no shield, no way to pause that is different from quitting.
The statistics stop early. You get a streak, a completion rate and a month grid. There is no weekday bias chart, no time-of-day distribution, no correlation between two habits, and no way to see two years next to each other. For a task manager that is the correct amount of statistics. For the thing you have been doing every morning for three years, it is not.
There is a smaller annoyance too: on the free plan the habit module is limited, so the feature you came for is the one you have to pay to use properly.
And there is a subtler cost that only shows up after a year. A habit inside a task manager inherits the task manager’s lifecycle. When you clean up your projects, archive a list, or migrate to a new workspace because your job changed, the habit history is somewhere in that reorganisation. A dedicated tracker has one job and one archive, so five years of morning data is not sitting in the same database as a product launch you finished in 2024. That sounds like a filing preference until the day you want the history and cannot find it.
How miniHabits handles the same job
It only does habits, which is the entire pitch.
Five tracking modes. Checkbox, counter, timer, quantity and HealthKit. The habit picks the mode. A timer habit runs as a Live Activity on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island while it counts, so the 90 minute deep work block is visible without opening anything. A HealthKit habit fills itself from steps, sleep or workouts and needs no tap at all.
Blocks instead of a task list. Group four habits into a morning block with a fixed trigger and check them with one tap. Schedule three times a week, every other week, or on custom days, and backfill last Tuesday without the completion maths going wrong.
Streak shields. Every five consecutive days banks a shield, up to three. A missed day spends one: the chain survives, the log still records the miss. Break mode freezes everything while you are away, at no cost. Nothing gets faked, which matters if you intend to read this data later.
Statistics worth opening. A year heatmap, weekday bias, time of day, habit correlations, and the shield ledger. The correlation view is where behaviour actually changes: reading is 34% more likely on days I meditated first, and 18% less likely at weekends.
No account. Offline first, device is the source of truth, cloud sync optional and keyed to the device rather than an email. CSV and JSON export are in the free tier.
Pricing compared
| TickTick | miniHabits | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | tasks yes, habits limited | 10 habits, 8 themes, all 5 modes |
| Paid | subscription, per year | 25 € a year, or 34,99 € once |
| Lifetime option | no | 34,99 € |
| Platforms | almost all of them | iOS 17+, web in August 2026 |
| Account required | yes | no |
Feature matrix
| TickTick habits | miniHabits | |
|---|---|---|
| Yes/no habits | yes | yes, checkbox mode |
| Counters with a target | basic | yes, value stored |
| Timers | Pomodoro, not per habit | yes, with Live Activities |
| Quantities with units | no | yes |
| Health data | no | HealthKit, fills itself |
| Streak mercy | none | shields and break mode |
| Year heatmap | no | yes, and a widget |
| Weekday bias | no | yes |
| Correlations | no | yes |
| Tasks and calendar | excellent | none |
| Platforms | six of them | iOS, web in August 2026 |
What the habit module gets right
Two things, and they are underrated.
The habit tab is next to your work. A tracker you have to remember to open is a tracker you stop opening, and TickTick solves that by putting habits one tab away from the thing you already check twelve times a day. Adjacency beats features more often than app reviews admit.
The weekly goal model is sensible. “Five times this week” is how most real habits behave, and TickTick handles the partial week without the guilt architecture that daily-only trackers impose. If your habits are genuinely weekly rather than daily, this is a good place to keep them.
Signs you have outgrown the habit tab
You have started keeping a spreadsheet next to the app, because the question you want answered is not on any screen.
You are logging a number in the habit note field, in text, so that you can read it back later.
You lost a long streak to a single missed day and felt the urge to fake the entry rather than accept the reset. That impulse is the app teaching you to corrupt your own record, and it is the clearest sign the mechanic is wrong for you.
The setup I would actually run
Use both. This is not a diplomatic answer, it is the setup on my own phone.
TickTick holds the work: projects, deadlines, the calendar, anything with a due date. miniHabits holds the repeating things with numbers on them: the reading counter, the deep work timer, steps from Health, the morning block. There is no integration between them and it turns out none is needed, because the two lists never wanted to be the same list.
If you need one app for everything, keep TickTick and accept thinner habit data. That is a defensible trade, and I would rather say so than pretend a second icon on your Home Screen is free.
Migrating your habit history
TickTick exports your data as CSV from the web app. Habit records come out as dated rows, which is exactly the shape the miniHabits importer wants: one date, one value, one line.
If the export is awkward, screenshot the habit tab and paste the images into any LLM with our migration prompt. It returns importable JSON. Nothing leaves your phone on the way in, and CSV and JSON export get you back out.
You are a data extractor. From these habit-tracker
screenshots, output ONLY valid JSON:
{"habits":[{"name":str,"mode":"check|count|timer|
quantity","target":num,"unit":str,"schedule":str,
"entries":[{"date":"YYYY-MM-DD","value":num}]}]}
Rules: ISO dates, no commentary, omit unknown fields.One detail worth planning for: decide which habits are moving before you export. Half the rows in a task manager’s habit tab turn out to be tasks that repeat, and those belong where they already are.
FAQ
Does miniHabits do tasks? No. It has no inbox, no due dates and no projects, on purpose.
Can I still use the TickTick Pomodoro? Yes, though a timer habit in miniHabits stores the minutes as data afterwards, which the Pomodoro does not.
Is there a web version? August 2026. Android and Watch after that. The roadmap is where the email field lives.
Do I need a subscription? No. The free tier covers ten habits and all five modes, and Pro is available as a one time purchase at 34,99 €.
Can miniHabits show my habits in a calendar? There is a year heatmap and a per-habit history, which is a calendar with the value drawn on it. There is no month grid with your meetings on it, because there are no meetings in here.
What about recurring tasks that are not habits? Leave them in TickTick. Watering the plants every Sunday is a repeating task, and forcing it into a streak system produces a number that means nothing.
The honest recommendation
Stay with TickTick if your habits are simple yes/no items, if you want one subscription across six platforms, or if the calendar view is what holds your week together. It is one of the best task managers on the market and the habit tab is a reasonable bonus.
Switch, or add, miniHabits when the number matters more than the tick. Also worth reading: the Streaks comparison if you want the prettiest single purpose tracker, and the Habitify comparison if cross platform sync is the thing you cannot give up.