Streaks vs Todoist vs Things 3 vs Notion: 1 Habit Winner

Subscription fatigue is real in 2026. The average iPhone productivity user is paying for at least two apps that partially overlap — a task manager and a habit tracker — without realizing one smart choice could replace both. Streaks costs $4.99 once and does one thing obsessively well. Todoist and Things 3 have tens of millions of loyal users who already live in them daily. Notion templates promise a habit dashboard in under 15 minutes. This guide ranks all four on the metrics that actually change behavior: friction, Apple Health sync, streak recovery, and long-term stick rate.

The Subscription Overlap Nobody Talks About

Here's the trap most people fall into. They start with a task manager — Todoist, Things 3, whatever — then add a habit tracker because the task manager doesn't quite scratch the itch. Six months later, they're paying for both and using neither consistently. The apps don't communicate, the friction compounds, and habit-tracking fatigue sets in.

This pattern is more common than it sounds. A 2024 survey by the Doist team found that over 60% of their power users had tried at least three separate productivity apps in the previous year. The problem isn't lack of options. It's lack of clarity about what each tool is actually built for.

The four apps in this comparison represent genuinely different approaches to the habit problem. Streaks is purpose-built for it. Todoist and Things 3 are task managers that support habits as a secondary feature. Notion is a blank canvas. Understanding that hierarchy first saves you from buying the wrong thing. Before committing to any of them, thinking through how to choose the right mobile app before downloading is a useful five-minute exercise that catches subscription overlap before it becomes expensive.

Streaks: Built for Habits, Not Productivity Theater

Streaks has been on the App Store since 2015. Version 7.0 landed in September 2023 with redesigned widgets, improved Apple Watch integration, and a revamped statistics view. As of May 2026, it's a $4.99 one-time purchase — no subscription, no tiered plans, no annual nag. That pricing feels increasingly rare, and genuinely appreciated.

The interface is a grid of colored circles, each representing one daily habit. Fill the circle, extend your streak. Miss a day, the circle stays hollow and the streak resets. It sounds almost aggressively simple. That's intentional.

Apple Health Integration

This is Streaks' headline feature, and it earns the billing. You can link any habit to an Apple Health category — steps walked, active calories burned, sleep duration, mindful minutes, blood glucose — and Streaks reads that data automatically. Walk 8,000 steps before noon and your "daily walk" habit marks itself complete. You never open the app.

That passive completion mechanic is something none of the other three apps in this comparison can replicate. It's the difference between a habit tracker that rewards you for logging versus one that actually connects to your behavior. For health-adjacent habits, the distinction is transformative. Streaks also writes to certain Health categories, so completion data can flow back into your fitness ecosystem. The pipe runs both directions.

You can track up to 24 habits simultaneously — split across morning and evening — with time-of-day segmentation that matters if your routine is structured around two separate blocks. Most users don't need all 24 slots. But it's there.

Streak Psychology and the Unforgiving Reset

Streaks takes a hard line on consecutive completion. Miss two days and your streak resets. You can enable one skip day per week — useful for planned rest days — but there's no retroactive forgiveness, no streak freeze, no "I was on a 14-hour flight" exception.

Some users find this brutal. I'd argue it's honest. Apps that offer generous streak freezes arguably let you lie to yourself about your consistency: a 300-day streak containing 40 freezes is a 260-day streak in practice. Streaks refuses to paper over that math. Whether that's motivating or demoralizing depends entirely on your psychology — and that's worth knowing about yourself before you commit.

What Streaks Can't Do

No task management. No notes. No subtasks. No project structure. If your habit is "read 20 pages," you get a binary tap — done or not done. There's nowhere to log which book you're reading or how far you've gotten. For behavioral habits with no context (exercise, medication, hydration, sleep), this limitation never surfaces. For habits that benefit from reflection or nuance, you'll want a separate system alongside Streaks. That's a real constraint worth accepting upfront.

Todoist: When Your To-Do List Doubles as a Habit Tracker

Todoist crossed 50 million registered users in January 2026. It's one of the most mature task managers on any platform, and its recurring task engine is legitimately powerful — arguably more flexible than most people realize.

Setting Up Recurring Tasks as Habits

Creating a habit in Todoist means creating a recurring task. The natural language date parser is excellent: type "every weekday at 8am," "every 3 days," or "every other Monday" and it resolves instantly. You can set tasks to recur on a fixed schedule or "after completion" — the latter matters for habits where the interval is more important than the calendar date. Take your vitamins, wait 24 hours, take them again, with no midnight-reset weirdness.

What Todoist does not have is a streak counter. Completing a recurring task simply moves it to the next occurrence. There's no visual run of consecutive days, no "you're on day 23" indicator. The Karma system tracks productivity points over time, and consistent habit completion indirectly boosts your score, but that's gamification layered over task completion — not a habit-specific mechanic.

For some users, the absence of streaks is actually a feature. If streak anxiety triggers avoidance behavior — where the fear of breaking a 40-day run makes you skip the habit entirely — Todoist's neutral model removes that dynamic. You did it or you didn't, with no psychological weight attached either way.

Apple Health: The Gap

Todoist has no Apple Health integration. None. Completing a task does not write to Health, and Health data cannot auto-complete a task. For health-adjacent habits where passive completion would be valuable — workouts, sleep, step counts — this is a real limitation. For cognitive and productivity habits — writing daily, reviewing your calendar, studying a language — it's completely irrelevant.

Things 3: Beautiful Repetition With a Blind Spot

Things 3 costs $9.99 on iPhone as of May 2026, with separate purchases required for Mac ($49.99) and iPad ($19.99). Cultured Code has never put it on sale. The design is the benchmark for iOS productivity apps — clean typography, satisfying completion animations, a sense of calm most task managers can't replicate. If the aesthetic of your tools matters to you, Things 3 sets the standard.

How Repeating Tasks Work

Repeating tasks in Things 3 are well-implemented. You can set a task to repeat daily, on specific weekdays, weekly, monthly, or after a set interval following completion. The Upcoming view shows a multi-day timeline, so your habits appear in context alongside your real commitments. You can see Monday through Sunday, understand the shape of your week, and plan accordingly.

What's missing is the same gap as Todoist: no streak counter. Things 3 doesn't track consecutive completions, doesn't surface "you've done this 34 days in a row," and doesn't penalize missed days beyond moving the task to the next occurrence. The system is logistically elegant and psychologically neutral — helpful or harmful depending on your motivation style.

I've used Things 3 as my primary task manager for close to two years. The repeating task system is smooth enough that I never feel friction setting up new habits. The problem is I can't tell at a glance whether I've been consistent — I'd have to scroll back through my log manually, which is exactly the friction point that makes a dedicated habit tracker worth having.

Things 3 and Apple Health

Zero integration, same as Todoist. Things 3 repeating tasks live entirely inside the app with no Health data flowing in either direction. For people serious about tracking daily habits alongside health data on iPhone, this is the distinction that ultimately separates Things 3 and Todoist from Streaks — and it's not a close race.

Notion: The Customizable Habit Dashboard That Demands Discipline

Notion's personal plan is free as of May 2026. The Plus plan starts at $12/month. For habit tracking, the cost is almost irrelevant — the real investment is time and sustained attention.

Notion has no native habit tracking. What it has is a powerful database engine and a large template ecosystem. A community habit tracker template takes about 15 minutes to set up. A custom one — with streak formulas, weekly review prompts, and conditional color formatting — can take several hours and requires real comfort with Notion's formula syntax, which changed significantly with Formula 2.0 in 2023.

The Notion Habit Dashboard in Practice

The typical setup uses a Database in table or calendar view, with a row per day and checkbox columns for each habit. Rollup formulas calculate weekly completion percentages. A streak column uses a backward-counting formula to identify consecutive checked days. It's genuinely clever once it's working.

The real advantage Notion offers: your habit data is a queryable database. Want to see which habits correlate with your highest-rated days? Add a mood column and filter by it. Want your completion rate during travel months versus home months? Set a date-range filter. No other app in this comparison supports that kind of retrospective analysis. For data-driven people, that's not a minor differentiator.

The honest downside: the meta-work of maintaining the Notion system is its own recurring task. If you're already a daily Notion user with your work, notes, and projects organized there, adding habits is a natural extension with near-zero additional friction. If you're not, you will spend more time maintaining the infrastructure than building the habits themselves.

Notion and Apple Health

No integration and no realistic path to one without third-party tools. Notion is a web-first platform with no HealthKit framework access. You could theoretically build an Apple Shortcuts automation that reads Health data and writes it to a Notion database via the API — but that's a weekend engineering project, not a habit setup.

Apple Health Integration: The Ranking That Settles It

The table is blunt. If Apple Health integration is a requirement — and for fitness, sleep, and health habit tracking, it should be — Streaks is the only app in this group that delivers. The other three share the same gap regardless of their other strengths.

This matters more as Apple Health becomes the central hub for third-party health data. Garmin, Strava, Oura, Fitbit, and WHOOP all write data into Health. Any app that can read Health can passively benefit from all of those integrations simultaneously. Streaks sits at the center of that network. Todoist, Things 3, and Notion sit entirely outside it.

For users who have already rotated through a few apps without finding the right fit, the breakdown of six iPhone habit apps ranked specifically by streak recovery mechanics covers additional options including Habitify and Habit — Tracker & Goal Planner, which compete directly with Streaks on the Health integration front.

The Pricing Math

The Todoist Pro + Streaks combination is arguably the sweet spot for people who need real task management and real habit tracking simultaneously. You're not forcing either tool to do something it wasn't designed for, and the $52.99 combined cost is still less than many single-app subscriptions in the productivity space.

The counterintuitive point: for users whose habits are mostly health-related, Streaks alone at $4.99 — with Health doing the heavy data lifting — may be everything they need. No task manager required. The $48 Todoist subscription becomes unnecessary overhead if your actual to-do list lives in Apple Reminders or on paper.

If you want to explore the broader free-tier landscape before spending anything, a tested comparison of seven free habit trackers for iOS and Android in 2026 covers several options that handle streaks competently — though none match Streaks' Health integration depth.

What to Do Next

Pick your path based on your actual setup, not the most popular recommendation.

1. Already on Todoist Pro? Add Streaks for $4.99 one-time to cover the Health integration and streak psychology gap. Keep Todoist for projects and tasks. The two apps don't overlap meaningfully — they're solving different problems.
2. Already on Things 3? Same logic applies. Things 3 as your task OS, Streaks for daily behavior loops and Health data passthrough. Total additional outlay: $4.99.
3. Starting from zero, habits only? Download Streaks. One-time price, no subscription, Apple Health integration built in, purpose-built for the use case. Evaluate a task manager separately only if you genuinely need one — don't add it preemptively.
4. Deep in the Notion ecosystem already? Add the official Habit Tracker template from Notion's gallery and commit to 30 days without customizing it. Only invest time building custom formulas if the default template's limits become genuinely painful.
5. Sensitive to streak failure? Use Todoist's recurring tasks without the streak layer, or use Streaks with the weekly skip enabled. Both options reduce the pressure of the all-or-nothing reset dynamic that derails some users.
6. Health data is your primary source of truth (Garmin, Oura, Strava, WHOOP)? Streaks is the only app here that reads from Apple Health automatically. The others require manual logging regardless of what your devices already know about your day.
7. Evaluating multiple apps simultaneously? Cap your trial period at 30 days per app and track completion rates, not feelings. The app you actually use consistently is always the right answer — regardless of which one looks best on a comparison table.

Sources & Further Reading

• Apple — HealthKit Developer Documentation — Apple's authoritative technical reference for which data categories third-party apps can read from and write to Apple Health; essential for understanding true integration depth versus marketing claims.
• Doist Blog — Long-form research and survey data from the team behind Todoist, covering productivity system design, recurring task behavior, and multi-app usage patterns among power users.
• Cultured Code Support Center — Official documentation for Things 3's repeating task system, schedule types, and the completion-based recurrence logic; the ground truth for what the app can and cannot do.
• Notion Help Center — Formula 2.0 Reference — Comprehensive documentation for Notion's current formula syntax, including the rollup and date functions required to build a functioning streak tracker inside a Notion database.
• Lally et al. (2010), UCL Health Behaviour Research Centre — The peer-reviewed study that established the 66-day average habit formation timeline, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, replacing the widely misquoted 21-day myth with data from 96 participants tracked over 12 weeks.