Custom Activity Trackers With Streaks: 5 Apps Compared

The default activity list in most tracking apps reads like a gym brochure. Running. Cycling. Yoga. Maybe meditation, if the designers were feeling generous. Almost nothing you actually want to track this year is in there, not the cold plunge mornings, not the piano practice, not the Sunday meal prep or the language app you keep meaning to open. So you shove it all into “Other” and watch your data go fuzzy.

A real custom activity tracker with streaks lets you name your own activity, pick your own metric, and build a streak around whatever that activity means to you. The category is smaller than you’d expect. Plenty of apps let you rename a preset. Very few let you build something from scratch and track it the way it actually makes sense.

Why Custom Activities Matter

The plain reason is that everyone’s life is different. What’s worth tracking for a parent of two in Brooklyn looks nothing like the list for a marathon trainee in Boulder, or for a software engineer in Manchester who took up the violin at thirty-four. Squeeze every life through the same dropdown and the data turns into a shrug. It’s the same argument for keeping everything in one place instead of five separate apps.

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 isn’t in the default catalog, you’ll log it twice and quit. If you can create the activity in fifteen seconds and tap it every morning, you’ll have ninety entries by the end of the quarter. Friction at the front decides the data at the back.

What “Custom” Should Actually Mean

Most apps that advertise customization mean something thinner than you’d hope. You can rename a preset. You can pick an icon. You can build an activity that amounts to a checkbox: done today, not done today. None of that counts.

Real custom support has a few honest requirements. You should be able to name the activity anything, including emojis and odd little phrasings only you understand. You should be able to choose what to measure, whether that’s minutes for piano, reps for pull-ups, a single tap for “took my supplement,” or the specific units that make a language-learning log diagnostic rather than vague. You should be able to set a frequency that matches your life, daily or weekdays or three times a week, without the app converting a missed day into a punishment. And the activity should feed the same stats and history as everything else instead of living 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 produced. 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 red-eye flight or a three-week-old baby at home, concludes that the app is angry with them and stops opening it. If you recognize that loop, the longer take on why your streaks keep collapsing gets into what’s going on underneath.

Better apps treat streaks the way people actually live, with the kind of slack that adults with ADHD need from a tracker but that helps everyone else too. Flexible schedules, so a streak built on three workouts a week doesn’t shatter the first time you skip a Tuesday. Pause days you can declare without penalty. A view that shows the longer arc instead of only the current number. A streak is supposed to make consistency visible. It is not supposed to manufacture shame.

The five apps below handle that differently, and it’s the main thing separating them.

1. Logly

Logly starts from the idea that the activity is the unit and you get to decide what an activity is. The free version ships with a catalog of more than 600 activities across fitness, wellness, lifestyle, hobbies, and the small unglamorous things people forget belong in a log. Logly Pro adds unlimited custom activities. Name it whatever, pick an icon, set the metric, choose the schedule.

Streaks sit alongside the activity rather than on top of it. Attach one to anything you log and it respects the frequency you set, so a three-times-a-week activity survives a skipped Tuesday intact. The history view shows the longer pattern, which means a missed day reads as a missed day instead of a catastrophe. The mental model matches the one in this piece on running several habit streaks at once without drowning in them: 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. After that it behaves exactly like the built-in ones, with history, stats, and Apple Health or Google Health Connect sync where it applies.

Pricing: Free for the core app and the full preset catalog. Logly Pro adds unlimited custom activities, AI chat, and advanced stats. Best for: People who want to log their own specific activities, not the ones an 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. You get custom habit creation, time-based tracking, and a streak system mature enough to have all the edge cases worked out. Build a habit from scratch and assign it a duration, a count, or plain yes/no completion. The interface leans toward power users who like seeing a lot of controls at once.

The tradeoff is that everything in HabitNow is shaped like a habit. A one-off hike, a concert, a doctor’s appointment: none of those really fit. Streaks also default to strict daily-or-bust unless you go configure otherwise, which most casual users never will.

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 alive.” You pick up to twelve activities, mark them done each day, and watch the numbers climb. The design is genuinely gorgeous, and for a lot of people the small cap is the right constraint rather than a shortcoming.

The ceiling is where it catches you. Twelve activities is the limit, full stop. You can name custom activities and pick icons, but everything ends up shaped like a daily checkbox. There’s no way to record thirty minutes of piano or five pages of reading, only did it or didn’t. If your tracking is binary, this is a beautiful tool. If you want numbers attached to your entries, 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 among Android users who don’t want anything sitting between them and their data. Custom habits, configurable schedules, score-based consistency instead of pure streaks, and full export. No ads, no subscription, no cloud account to create.

What Loop doesn’t attempt is the broader activity log. At heart it’s a habit checkbox app, so events, one-off entries, and anything with rich metrics fall outside its job description. The interface is also a few years behind on polish, which will bother some people and not register at all with 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 been through a lot of design iterations and currently lands somewhere around polished, gentle, and mildly opinionated. Custom habits work cleanly, scheduling is flexible, and the streak treatment is friendlier than what the older generation of apps offered.

The limits show up fast though. Custom habits are mostly shaped like daily commitments, the metrics options are thin (count or duration, mostly), and recent versions push toward the subscription harder than they used to. It’s a decent starter app that runs out of room 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 a comparison is only worth reading if it ends somewhere.

If you want to log a personal set of activities, including the ones that refuse to fit the habit-checkbox mold, with streaks that respect your real schedule, Logly is built for that. Android user after a strict, configurable habit setup: HabitNow. iOS user who wants twelve activities and the cleanest visual streak experience: Streaks. Privacy-first, Android-native, unbothered by an older interface: Loop. Friendly and middle-of-the-road on iOS: Productive.

Ultimately a custom activity tracker with streaks is worth having only if it respects the gap between what your life is and what the catalog assumed it would be. For a wider view of the field, the rundown of apps built for daily activity logging covers what else is out there.

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