Strides App Alternative: What to Use When Your Charts Show the Slip but Nothing Changes

Strides is one of the most flexible trackers on the App Store. Its listing opens with a simple pitch: "Imagine having all of your most important habits, routines and goals together in one simple to do list." On the US storefront on 10 October 2026 it was rated 4.79 from 19,214 ratings. People rarely leave Strides because it cannot track something. They leave because it tracked everything accurately, the success rate of one habit kept falling, and the chart was the only thing that changed.

This page is for that situation. It is not a list of twenty apps. It explains what Strides is built to do, when it is still the right choice, and what to look for if what you actually need is help on the day after a miss.

What Strides is built to do

Strides is a tracker for almost anything. The listing says "With Strides, you can track good or bad habits, SMART goals, and more." and offers "over 150 templates and the ability to create your own trackers." There are four tracker types. "Streak calendars let you keep up with your success rate, and milestone calendars help you to keep up with project timelines." An Average tracker follows a repeating number and a Target tracker aims at a goal by a date.

Around the trackers the listing names "Progress Reports with everything in one place", charts with history, streak and success rate, "Unlimited reminders to set yourself up for success", notes on logs, Apple Health integration and sync between iPhone, iPad and Mac. The way it describes keeping you going is clear: "Keep up with reminders to hold you accountable and charts to keep you motivated."

What the listing does not describe is what happens to a habit after you miss it, or whether the app changes your plan when the same habit keeps slipping. A miss is recorded and shows up in the success rate; the tools it names for staying on track are reminders and charts.

Why a falling success rate does not fix itself

Self-monitoring works. Harkin and colleagues (2016) pooled 138 studies and found that monitoring progress toward a goal reliably improves the chance of reaching it. But the same review found the effect was larger when the progress was reported or physically recorded, and the useful part of monitoring is acting on what you see. A chart that shows a habit at 54 percent tells you there is a problem. It does not tell you whether the cause was time, energy, place or a week that had no room for it.

Habits are built by repeating the same behaviour in the same context. Lally and colleagues (2010) followed people forming a new daily habit for 12 weeks: the median time to automaticity was 66 days, with a range from 18 to 254, and missing one opportunity did not materially affect the outcome. The weak point is that the context changes. A new shift, a sick child or a trip removes the slot the habit lived in, and a reminder fires into a day that no longer has room for it.

What often follows a visible run of misses is the abstinence violation effect (Marlatt and Gordon, 1985), or the "what the hell" effect (Cochran and Tesser, 1996): once the record says you have broken the plan, the next lapse feels cheaper. So if your Strides dashboard shows one habit sliding while the others are fine, the diagnosis is usually not "I need a better tracker". It is that the plan for that habit was built for your old week and was never rebuilt for the new one.

When Strides is still the right choice

Switching apps is not always the answer. Stay with Strides, or go back to it, if any of these describe you:

• You track more than habits. SMART goals, project milestones, averages and targets by a date are what Strides is designed for. BeMooore tracks one habit and nothing else.
• You want to quit something as well as build something. Strides lists tracking of bad habits as well as good ones.
• You like numbers and reports. Charts, success rates, progress reports and data export are core to Strides.
• You use a Mac or iPad, or Apple Health. Strides lists sync between iPhone, iPad and Mac and Apple Health integration. BeMooore is an iPhone app.
• Your setup is working. If your habits are sticking, the right number of apps to change is zero.

What to look for in an alternative

If the problem was one habit that broke when your week changed, another tracker with more templates or better charts will show you the same slide in more detail. Filter on what the app does after a miss, not on what it can measure:

If your last app was Streaks, see our Streaks app alternative guide; if it was a game that takes health points, the Habitica alternative guide; if an all-in-one routine became too much, the Fabulous alternative guide; if a polished tracker recorded your skips but nothing changed, the Habitify alternative guide; if a chain of perfect days broke, the Productive app alternative guide; if a self-care pet kept you busy but one habit never stuck, the Finch app alternative guide; and if you know the Atomic Habits method and the habit still slipped, the Atoms app alternative guide. The apps side by side are in the best habit tracker app, by the reason you quit the last one.

BeMooore: one habit and a mentor that changes the plan when you slip

BeMooore is deliberately narrower than Strides. It does not track goals, numbers or projects; it is built around one habit and what happens after you miss it. Its App Store listing opens with the problem: "Miss one day and everything resets to zero. That is why most habit apps stop working after week two." What the listing says the app does instead:

• "Missed days do not wipe your progress. No streak shaming, no starting over."
• "An AI mentor that asks what got in the way and adjusts the plan, instead of sending another reminder."
• "Routines that flex around real life: sick days, travel, bad weeks."
• It is made for people who have quit habit trackers before, including people with ADHD whose attention does not run on a schedule.

The suggested start: pick one habit that matters this month, log it with one tap, and when you slip, let the app ask what got in the way and rebuild the plan with you. Where Strides tells you a habit is at 54 percent, BeMooore is built for the conversation about why.

Where it is weaker than Strides, honestly: it has no goal, milestone, average or target trackers, no templates, no charts or data export, no Mac or iPad sync and no Apple Health integration. It is built for one habit rather than many, it has no public rating history yet, and it is iOS only. The BeMooore download is free and the paid plan starts with a 1-week free trial that you can cancel in Settings. Some people use both: Strides for goals and numbers, BeMooore for the one habit that keeps slipping.

Whatever you choose, plan for the missed day

Any app, Strides included, works better with one ritual it cannot do for you: deciding in advance what you will do the day after a miss. Three rules help more than any app choice:

One habit first. Pick the habit that matters most and make it the first thing you log each day, before the easy ones.

Never miss twice, with a written tiny version. One missed day is noise. Write down now what the two-minute version of the habit is, so the day after a miss has a plan instead of a decision.

Name the cause of every miss. Strides lets you add notes to logs; use them. Write one line: time, energy, place or forgot. After three weeks the pattern is usually obvious, and you can change when and where the habit happens. More on choosing an anchor in morning rituals, and on turning goals into daily actions in goal setting and achievement. The case for dropping streak pressure entirely is in habit trackers without streaks, and nine iOS trackers are compared on exactly this point in our missed-day comparison.

Frequently asked questions

References

• Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229.
• Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009.
• Marlatt, G. A., & Gordon, J. R. (1985). Relapse Prevention: Maintenance Strategies in the Treatment of Addictive Behaviors. Guilford Press.
• Cochran, W., & Tesser, A. (1996). The "what the hell" effect: Some effects of goal proximity and goal framing on performance. In L. L. Martin & A. Tesser (Eds.), Striving and Feeling: Interactions Among Goals, Affect, and Self-Regulation. Erlbaum.
• Apple Inc. iTunes Lookup API, US storefront: Strides: Habit Tracker + Goals (id672401817) and BeMooore (id6505137869), retrieved 10 October 2026.