A HabitKit alternative

Updated 26 August 2026

• A habit grid is a record of everything, so it keeps every empty square visible for as long as you keep the habit.
• That is a different pressure from a streak counter, which shows a bad number once and then starts counting again from nothing.
• HabitKit also offers a streak count against a target you set, such as three a week or daily, so switching away from the grid alone does not leave the counting behind.
• A dashboard is an invitation to run several habits at once, and running several at once is the most common reason none of them survives.
• Prices, platforms and mechanics here were read from the UK App Store on 26 August 2026 and will drift. Check your own store.

What the grid is doing

The idea is borrowed from the contribution graphs on code-hosting sites, and it is a good one. A month of behaviour becomes a shape you can read in a second, without numbers and without a report. Colour a square for reading tonight, and next week the block of colour tells you what you have been doing.

It is also honest in a way a headline figure is not. An average hides its own bad patch. A grid shows you the Tuesdays.

The way a picture starts working against you

A grid and a counter fail differently, and the difference is worth naming before you decide anything.

A counter is a status. It says nine, then it says one, and after a fortnight the bad day has left the screen. A grid is a record. The empty square from a Tuesday in March is still in the picture in June, sitting next to the ones you filled. Nothing is wrong with the app when that happens; it is the design doing exactly what it was built to do.

What it costs is specific. Someone who has kept the habit five days in seven for a month has done well by any reasonable measure, and their grid still looks like a moth got at it. The evidence does not support reading it that way. In the field study most often quoted on this subject, people building a daily habit missed opportunities routinely, and a single missed day made no measurable difference to how automatic the behaviour was becoming. The squares record something real. What they cannot show is that most of the empty ones did not matter.

Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. doi:10.1002/ejsp.674

The dashboard asks a second question

A wall of grids looks best when there are several of them, and that quietly settles a decision most people never make deliberately: how many habits to build at once.

The arithmetic is unkind. If you can hold a single new habit on about six days in ten while it is still new, five of them at that rate gives you roughly one day in twelve where the whole board is full. Every other day the dashboard shows a hole somewhere. The board is then reporting the arithmetic rather than your week, and it will keep reporting it until you drop something.

This is the argument for one at a time, and it has nothing to do with which app you use.

What replaces the picture

Take the grid away and something has to do its job, or you are left with a list and a tick.

In Mini Loops the replacement is a question. After the habit you say how it went and, on a day it did not happen, what got in the way. That answer is the useful part. Ten squares tell you that October was patchy. Ten answers tell you that it was patchy because the moment you chose sits inside your commute three days a week.

When the same obstacle turns up often enough to be a pattern, the app proposes one change: a smaller version, a different moment, a different anchor. You accept it or you decline it, and nothing changes on its own. There is no chart, no counter and no percentage in the app, so there is nothing to look at that can make a normal week look like a failure.

The trade is real and worth stating plainly. You lose the glance. There is no picture to admire after a good fortnight, and if that picture is what got you through your last fortnight, that is a genuine loss.

When to stay with HabitKit

Stay if the grid motivates you. Some people fill squares happily for years, and there is nothing to fix. Read this instead only if you are unsure which camp you are in.

Stay if you want several habits on one screen. Holding one at a time is a deliberate constraint here, and it is the wrong tool for someone maintaining eight established routines who wants them visible together.

Stay if you want to pay once. A one-off unlock is available there. Mini Loops is a subscription, which is the honest disadvantage of it over any long period.

Stay if you are on a Mac or an Apple Vision headset and want it there. Mini Loops is an iPhone app.

How to tell which one you are

Open your grid and notice what your eye goes to first. If it lands on the colour, keep the app. If it lands on the gaps, the app is showing you something you cannot act on, and the useful move is a tracker with nothing to lose or a version small enough to survive a bad day.

This page is published by Mini Loops, which makes a competing habit app, so read it with that in mind. HabitKit’s prices, platforms and mechanics above were read from its own UK App Store listing on 26 August 2026 and are recorded with their source; they change without notice, and nothing here is a judgement about how well the app works. Check the App Store for what it does today.