Track Custom Activities and Build Streaks: Best Apps Compared

The default activity list in most tracking apps reads like a gym brochure. Running. Cycling. Yoga. Sometimes meditation, if the designers were feeling generous. None of the things you actually want to track this year — cold plunge mornings, piano practice, Sunday meal prep, the language app you keep meaning to open — are in there. So you cram them into “Other” and watch your data go fuzzy.

A real custom activity tracker app with streaks lets you name your own activity, pick your own metric, and build a streak on whatever the activity means to you. The category is smaller than you’d think. Plenty of apps let you rename a preset. Far fewer let you build an activity from scratch and track it the way it makes sense.

Why Custom Activities Matter

The honest reason is that everyone’s life is different. The list of things worth tracking for a parent of two kids in Brooklyn looks nothing like the list for a marathon trainee in Boulder, or a software engineer in Manchester learning the violin. Forcing every life into the same dropdown turns the data into a shrug.

There’s a more practical reason too. People stick with what they care about. If the app makes you fight to log “cold plunge” because it’s not in the default catalog, you’ll log it twice and quit. If the app lets you create the activity in fifteen seconds and tap it every morning, you’ll have ninety entries by the end of the quarter. The friction at the front decides the data at the back.

What “Custom” Should Actually Mean

Most apps that advertise customization mean one of a few things. You can rename a preset. You can pick an icon. You can build an activity that’s only a checkbox — done today, not done today. None of those is real customization.

Real custom activity support has a few honest requirements. Name the activity whatever you want, including emojis or odd phrasings. Choose what to measure — minutes for piano, pages for reading, reps for pull-ups, a simple check for “took my supplement.” Set the frequency that makes sense — daily, weekdays only, three times a week — without the app turning a missed day into a punishment. And the activity should plug into the same stats and history as everything else, not live in a second-class corner of the app.

The Streak Question

Streaks are useful and dangerous in roughly equal measure. Useful because a visible count of consecutive days is one of the cleanest behavior reinforcers software has ever invented. Dangerous because most apps still treat a missed day as a moral collapse — the count snaps to zero, the red warning fires, and the user, who maybe had a fever or a flight or a new baby, decides the app is mad at them and stops opening it. If you’ve felt that loop, the longer take on why you keep breaking your streaks covers what’s actually going on.

Better apps treat streaks the way humans actually live. Flexible schedules, so a streak based on three workouts a week doesn’t break the first time you take a Tuesday off. Pause days you can declare without penalty. A view that shows the longer arc, not just the current count. The point of a streak is to make consistency visible, not to manufacture shame.

The five apps below handle this differently. The way they handle it is the main thing that separates them.

1. Logly

Logly is built around the idea that the activity is the unit, and you decide what an activity is. The free version comes with a catalog of more than 600 activities across fitness, wellness, lifestyle, hobbies, and the small things people forget belong in a log. Logly Pro adds unlimited custom activities — name it whatever, pick your own icon, set your own metric, choose your own schedule.

Streaks live alongside the activity, not on top of it. You can attach a streak to anything you log, and it respects the frequency you set. A three-times-a-week activity doesn’t break because you skipped Tuesday. The history view shows the longer pattern, so a missed day looks like a missed day, not a catastrophe. The mental model is the one in this piece on tracking multiple habit streaks without getting overwhelmed — show up, miss a day, keep going.

Creating an activity takes about twenty seconds. Open the picker, hit create, type the name, pick what to measure, save. From there it behaves exactly like the built-in ones — history, stats, Apple Health and Google Health Connect sync where applicable.

Pricing: Free for the core app and full preset catalog. Logly Pro adds unlimited custom activities, AI chat, and advanced stats. Best for: People who want to log specific, personal activities — not just the ones the app guessed at — with streaks that don’t punish a missed day. Limitations: No web dashboard yet. Bulk export options are limited.

2. HabitNow

HabitNow is one of the more flexible habit-first apps on Android, with custom habit creation, time-based tracking, and a streak system that’s been around long enough to feel mature. You can build a habit from scratch and assign it duration, count, or simple yes/no completion. The interface leans toward power users who want a lot of controls visible at once.

The tradeoff is that everything in HabitNow is shaped like a habit. If you want to log a one-off hike, a concert, a doctor’s appointment, it doesn’t really fit. Streaks default to strict daily-or-bust unless you configure otherwise, which most casual users won’t.

Pricing: Free with ads. Premium around $10 one-time for full features. Best for: Android power users who want strict, configurable daily habits. Limitations: Android-only. Habit-shaped only. Setup curve.

3. Streaks

Streaks (the iOS app) is the cleanest interpretation of “an app that exists to keep a streak going.” You pick up to twelve activities, mark them done each day, and watch the numbers grow. The design is gorgeous and the focus on a small number of tracked items is, for many people, the right constraint.

The catch is in the ceiling. Twelve activities is the cap, which is a feature for some users and a wall for others. You can name custom activities and pick icons, but everything is shaped like a daily checkbox. There’s no notion of “thirty minutes of piano” or “five pages of reading” — only “did this thing or didn’t.” If your tracking is binary, it’s a beautiful tool. If you want metrics, it’s the wrong app.

Pricing: Around $5 one-time. Best for: People who want a small set of binary daily habits with a polished iOS experience. Limitations: iOS only. Twelve-activity cap. No per-entry metrics.

4. Loop Habit Tracker

Loop is the open-source quiet favorite of Android users who don’t want anything between them and their data. Custom habits, configurable schedules, score-based consistency (instead of pure streaks), and full export. No ads, no subscriptions, no cloud account.

What Loop doesn’t do is the broader activity log. It’s a habit checkbox app at heart, and the things you’d want to track that aren’t recurring commitments — events, one-off entries, things with rich metrics — aren’t really its job. The interface is also a few years behind on polish, which matters more to some users than others.

Pricing: Free, open source. Best for: Privacy-minded Android users who want a habit checkbox app with no strings attached. Limitations: Android-only. No metrics beyond simple counts. Older interface.

5. Productive

Productive is the iOS habit app that has cycled through a lot of design iterations and currently sits at “polished, gentle, slightly opinionated.” Custom habits work cleanly, scheduling is flexible, and the streak treatment is friendlier than the older generation of apps.

The limits are real. Custom habits are mostly shaped like daily commitments, metrics options are thin (count or duration, mostly), and the subscription model has become more aggressive in recent versions. Useful starter app, but the ceiling comes fast for anyone who wants to log activities that aren’t strictly habits.

Pricing: Free tier with limits. Subscription around $40/year for full features. Best for: iOS users who want a friendly, well-designed habit tracker with light flexibility. Limitations: Habit-shaped. Thin metrics. Pushes hard toward subscription.

How to Choose

A short decision tree, because comparisons are only useful if they end somewhere.

If you want to log a personal set of activities — including things that don’t fit the habit-checkbox mold — with streaks that respect your real schedule, Logly is the app built for that. Android user who wants a strict, configurable habit setup: HabitNow. iOS user who wants twelve activities with the cleanest visual streak experience: Streaks. Privacy-first and Android-native, fine with older interfaces: Loop. Friendly middle-of-the-road on iOS: Productive.

The value of a custom activity tracker app with streaks comes down to whether the app respects the gap between what your life is and what the catalog assumes. For a wider view of the field, the rundown of the best apps to log your daily activities covers what’s out there.

Create your own activities. Build your own streaks. That’s Logly. Try it free at getlogly.app.