Flowdayz vs Streaks: an honest comparison

There is a particular Thursday that decides whether you keep using a habit app. Something ran late, the day got away from you, and at eleven at night you are looking at a number that is about to go back to zero.

Streaks and Flowdayz answer that Thursday in opposite ways, which is why the two get compared. This is that comparison, written by the people who build Flowdayz, which is worth knowing before you weigh anything below.

At a glance

	Streaks	Flowdayz
Core mechanism	Up to 24 daily tasks, each building a run of consecutive days	One planned action a day, sized to your schedule
On a day you miss	The streak resets to zero, or costs your one grace day if the 2-Day Rule is on	Uncounted; the cumulative total is unchanged
Where the plan comes from	You define the tasks and their schedules in advance	Your own answers, resized as your week changes
Automation	Reads Apple Health, so steps, water and workouts tick themselves off	None; you mark the action done
Where it runs	iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple Vision Pro	iPhone and Android
Customisation	78 colour themes, over 600 icons, emoji and text icons	Minimal by design
Price	$5.99 once, no subscription	$49 a year, or $8 monthly

How Streaks works

Streaks is made by Crunchy Bagel, an Adelaide studio, and it won an Apple Design Award at WWDC 2016. That award is not decoration. The app has been maintained continuously since June 2015, the widgets are good, and the Apple Watch app is among the better ones on the platform.

You choose up to 24 tasks. Each gets a schedule: every day, particular weekdays, a set number of times per week, or specific days of the month. Tasks linked to Apple Health complete themselves, so a 5,000 step goal or a water target ticks over without you touching the phone. There are timed tasks, negative tasks for things you are trying to do less of, 78 themes and more than 600 icons.

The App Store description states the goal in one line: "Your goal is to build a streak of consecutive days."

How Flowdayz works

Flowdayz is a feel good app. You learn what actually makes you feel good and what gets you into flow, usually the smallest things, and the app helps you get there every day. It starts from a different assumption: you already know roughly what would help, and the problem is that the plan was calibrated to a week you are not actually having.

You answer a short set of questions once. It builds a routine around your real schedule, shows one action at a time, and then gets out of the way. There is no list of 24 to clear and nothing to keep pace with.

What happens on a day you miss

Crunchy Bagel's own homepage does not hedge this.

Don't break the chain, or your streak will reset to zero days.

That is a coherent design position, stated by the people who built the product rather than inferred from the outside. Loss aversion is real. A number you do not want to lose will get you out of bed on some mornings when nothing else would.

It has a failure mode too, and it is the one worth planning for. The cost of a broken streak is rarely that people stop doing the thing. It is the fortnight that actually happened becoming invisible, and the app turning into the part of the day that feels bad.

Both readings above describe the same fourteen days: twelve kept, two missed. A streak reports three. A cumulative record reports twelve. Flowdayz stores the second version, deliberately, and a missed day is never subtracted from what came before it.

The 2-Day Rule, and what it actually does

Streaks has answered this criticism in part, and the answer deserves reporting rather than ignoring.

Streaks 10, released on 17 September 2024, added an opt-in setting the developers call the 2-Day Rule. In their own words it "gives you a single day's grace if you don't complete a task". Miss Monday and the day is marked skipped rather than missed, and the run survives.

The sentence after that one is the important one. Crunchy Bagel state that you must then complete the task on Tuesday, "otherwise it is marked as 'missed' and your streak resets to 0."

So the grace is a loan, and the repayment falls due the next morning. Which is, reliably, the morning of a bad week rather than a good one. The mechanic is softened. It is not removed, and the number still goes to zero.

Streaks also lets you plan exceptions in advance. A task can run Monday to Friday, or three times a week, or on set days of the month, and the company puts it plainly on its own site: "Some tasks aren't for every day. Set the days so you don't break your streak." For anything with a predictable shape, that solves the problem completely.

It asks you to know in advance which days are going to go wrong. That is the part no scheduling option can supply.

Where Streaks is the better choice

When you want to pay once. $5.99, no subscription, no in-app purchases listed. Flowdayz is $49 a year. On price this is not close and it would be odd to pretend otherwise.

When you live inside Apple's ecosystem. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro, with Control Center widgets, Siri Shortcuts, Live Activities and complications. Flowdayz is a phone app on iPhone and Android, and that is all it is.

When you want the tracking to happen without you. Streaks reads Apple Health and completes tasks on its own: steps, distance, water, mindfulness, workouts. Flowdayz has no Health integration at all.

When the streak genuinely works on you. Some people respond well to a rising number and shrug when it breaks. If that is you, this post is not about you, and Streaks is better made than most of what you will find.

Where Flowdayz is the better choice

If you have been round this loop a few times, downloaded a tracker in January, built something respectable, missed a Thursday and quietly stopped opening it by February, the counter is the mechanism. Take the counter away and the loop has nothing to run on.

It also suits people who do not want 24 things looking back at them. Flowdayz shows one, sized to the day you are actually having, and when something keeps getting missed it reduces the size of the ask rather than pushing harder.

What Flowdayz does not have

Stated plainly, because these are real and worth weighing.

• No Apple Watch, iPad or Mac app. iPhone and Android phones, nothing else.
• No Apple Health integration. Nothing ticks itself off.
• No one-off price. A subscription, after a seven day trial.
• No 24 tasks. If you want a dozen things tracked at once this is the wrong product, though the number itself is worth a second look.
• No customisation to speak of. No themes, no icon library, no emoji.

Price

Streaks is $5.99 in the US and £5.99 in the UK, paid once, with no in-app purchases listed on its App Store page.

Flowdayz is $49 a year, which is about $4 a month, or $8 monthly if you would rather not commit to a year. A seven day trial comes first, and the renewal date and amount are both shown before you confirm.

Streaks costs less than one month of Flowdayz. If price is the deciding factor, it has already decided.

What the subscription pays for is a plan that keeps changing as your weeks do, rather than a tracker for a list you wrote yourself in a more optimistic mood. Whether that is worth the difference is a fair question, and for plenty of people the answer will be no.

Decide it in twenty seconds

Three questions that decide it

1. Are you on Android? Then it is already settled. Streaks is Apple only.
2. Do you want to write the list, or be handed one thing? Streaks tracks the list you define. Flowdayz decides the single action and sizes it to the day.
3. When you miss a day, what actually happens in your head? If the honest answer is a small drop of dread, the counter is producing it, and a grace day that falls due tomorrow will not fix that. A record that only ever adds is the plainer fix.

If the honest answers point to Streaks, buy Streaks. It is six dollars and it is very good.