The Best Productivity Apps Without Streaks or Gamification

Most task apps now keep score. There is a number somewhere that goes up when you tick things off, a level you are working towards, or a chain of days you are not supposed to break. If you have gone looking for a productivity app without gamification, you have probably found that the search results are mostly articles arguing you should want the opposite.

So here is the other list: task managers and planners that hold your work and never grade it. Seven of them, with what each one costs and where each one is weak.

Full disclosure before you read any further: we make one of the apps below, Lullim. It is in the list because it genuinely fits the brief, and we have tried to be as blunt about its limits as about everyone else's. Prices were checked on 3 August 2026 and are in US dollars.

What counts as gamification in a task app

Worth being precise, because the obvious version is not the common one.

The loud kind is easy to spot: experience points, levels, avatars, badges. The quiet kind is far more widespread, and it is the same machinery with the costume off. A completion percentage on your day. A weekly productivity score. A ring that fills. A number of consecutive days displayed where you cannot miss it.

The test is not whether the app looks like a game. It is whether the app issues a verdict. A record of what you did is information. A number that rates what you did is a score, and a score invites you to work for the score.

That distinction matters because the two feel identical for the first week and completely different by the third. There is a longer version of the argument, including what the research on rewards actually found, in the case for productivity without streaks.

How these were chosen

Four criteria. The app has to be a real planner or task manager rather than a habit tracker. It has to ship with no points, levels or streaks turned on by default, or let you remove them entirely. It has to be actively maintained. And its price has to be public, which is a lower bar than it should be.

Seven apps that do not keep score

Apple Reminders

Free, if you already own an Apple device. It syncs through iCloud, handles due dates, locations, lists and shared lists, and it has never had a point, a level or a streak.

Its virtue is that you already have it and it will still be there in ten years. Its limit is that it is a list rather than a plan: it will tell you what is due today, but it will not help you decide whether today has room for it. And it is Apple only, so it is a dead end if you use a Windows machine at work.

TeuxDeux

Four dollars a month, or three dollars a month billed annually, with the first week free. Web, iOS and Android.

TeuxDeux is a row of days and the things you plan to do in them, and that is nearly the whole product. Anything you do not finish rolls over to tomorrow by itself. There is no score anywhere, and the only nudge is an optional daily email you have to ask for.

The limit is the same as the appeal: there is no calendar integration, so your meetings live somewhere else and you are the one holding both pictures in your head. If your days are mostly self-directed, that is fine. If your days are mostly meetings, it will mislead you.

Things 3

A one-time purchase, which is now rare enough to be a feature. On the App Store today it is $9.99 on iPhone, which includes the Apple Watch app, and $49.99 on Mac. The iPad and Vision Pro apps are sold separately. Syncing through Things Cloud is included at no extra cost, and there is no subscription.

It is a careful, quiet piece of software with a genuine structure underneath it: areas, projects, a Today view, a Someday list. No scores, no nagging, no engagement mechanics of any kind.

Two honest limits. Buying every platform separately adds up to more than a hundred dollars, which is a real amount of money to spend before you know if the system suits you. And it is Apple only.

Super Productivity

Free and open source under an MIT licence, on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS and the web. It has no points, levels, streaks or badges.

This is the one to look at if you want to own your data outright: it syncs through your own Dropbox or WebDAV rather than someone's server, and it integrates with Jira, GitHub, GitLab and Linear if your work lives in those.

The caveat is worth stating clearly, because it cuts against the theme of this list. Super Productivity is built around time tracking, and it will show you detailed metrics about your working day. That is information rather than a verdict, so it passes the test above. But it is a great deal of information, and if the thing that makes you anxious is being measured at all, measuring yourself in six-minute increments may not be the cure.

Lullim

This is ours, so weigh it accordingly.

Lullim puts your tasks and your calendar side by side in one view, so the day you plan is checked against the hours you actually have. There is a weekly planner you can drag tasks across, notes, quick capture, and Google Calendar overlaid rather than re-entered. Extras like a focus timer are opt-in menus that stay off until you turn them on.

There are no streaks, no badges, no points, no completion percentage, no weekly score, and no notifications at all. Not deferred, not planned for a later release. It is free to start with no card, and a 14-day trial runs before the app asks for payment.

The limits: it runs in a browser and there is no native mobile app today, so it works on a phone but it is not a phone-first tool. It is also a young product, which means a smaller feature surface than Things or Todoist and a shorter track record than either.

Sunsama

Twenty-five dollars a month, or twenty dollars a month billed annually, which is $240 a year. There is a 14-day trial and it does not ask for a card up front.

Sunsama is the most opinionated app here. It walks you through planning each day, asks you to estimate how long things will take, pulls tasks in from tools you already use, and closes the day with a shutdown ritual. No points, no streaks: the pressure it applies is structural rather than scored.

Two things to weigh. It is expensive, at roughly the cost of every other app on this list combined and then some. And the guided ritual is either the reason you love it or the reason you quietly stop opening it, with not much middle ground.

Todoist, with Karma switched off

Todoist is the most gamified app in this article by default, which is exactly why it belongs here: the gamification is optional and most people never find the switch.

By default it runs Karma, a points system with nine levels from Beginner to Enlightened, daily and weekly goals, bonus points for hitting them, and streaks for consecutive days. You also lose Karma points when a task sits four or more days overdue, which is a penalty applied at precisely the moment you are least in need of one.

All of it can go. On the web: click your avatar, open Settings, choose Productivity, toggle Todoist Karma off, and click Update. You can set your daily and weekly goals to zero, and vacation mode pauses the whole thing without wiping your history.

With Karma off, Todoist is a fast, mature, cross-platform task manager with a good free tier and paid plans listed on their pricing page. If you already have years of work in it, switching it off is a smaller change than migrating, and it may be the entire fix.

The ones to check before you commit

Two worth naming, for different reasons.

TickTick is frequently recommended as a calm alternative to Todoist, and it is genuinely a good app, but it is not ungamified. Its own help centre explains that the Achievement Score rises as you create tasks, complete tasks, focus and track habits, that your level rises with it, and that levels can be exchanged for exclusive themes. That is a points system with unlockables. We could not find documentation for turning it off.

Habitica is the honest one. It is a role-playing game where your to-do list is the game, with a character, experience points, gold, party quests and damage taken when you skip things. Nobody could be misled about what it is, and for some people it works. It is simply the opposite of what this article is about.

For anything else you are considering, the check takes a minute. Open the app's settings and look for a section called Productivity, Achievements, Stats or Progress. If there is a number there that rises and falls with your behaviour, that is the mechanic, whatever it is called. Then find out whether it can be switched off, because that answer varies more than you would expect.

What you are actually choosing

Removing the scoreboard does not make you organised. Nothing on this list will.

What it changes is what happens on a bad week. In a scored app, a bad week is recorded as a loss, and the loss is waiting for you when you come back, which is a large part of why people do not come back. In an unscored one, a bad week is just a week that has passed, and reopening the app on Monday costs you nothing.

That is a smaller promise than most productivity software makes. It is also the one that tends to still be true in six months, when the initial dread of opening the app would otherwise have set in. Pick whichever tool above fits your platform and your budget, then judge it by how it feels to return to after a fortnight away.