Best Focus Friend alternative for Mac

Where Focus Friend wins

Focus Friend turned the focus timer into something you want to finish. You start a session, your Bean sits down to work, and when the timer runs out you earn rewards to decorate its room. Stop the timer early and the Bean is visibly sad about it, which is a softer and, for a lot of people, stickier nudge than a blocked page. Deep Focus Mode locks distracting apps on the phone for the length of the session, Live Activities keep the timer on the lock screen, and break timers turn it into a Pomodoro loop. It won Google Play App of the Year in 2025 for a reason: if the phone is where your attention goes, Focus Friend is the most likeable thing you can put in the way. It is on iPhone and Android, and the iPad build runs on Apple Silicon Macs from the Mac App Store. Focuh has no phone app, no characters and no rewards, and it does not try to be fun.

Where Focuh wins

Focuh is an ADHD todo list for Mac and web. Today sits next to Google Calendar. Week is the week. Loops are standing to-dos with no date: you pull a copy onto today and the loop stays. Goals are the one win for the horizon. Focus Friend is a timer with a character attached; there is no task list, no calendar and no week, so the planning happens somewhere else and the timer does not know what it is for. The Focuh focus timer starts from a task, so the session already knows what it is about, and on Mac the blocklist is part of that session: the block is enforced at the system level through Accessibility, so it covers Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Arc at once, and apps too. Slack, Discord and Messages stay closed for the length of the session. Focus Friend on a Mac is the iPad app, and its Deep Focus Mode leans on iOS Screen Time, so the Mac browser stays wide open while the Bean works. Focuh also syncs the same list between the Mac app and the web app, so the plan is there on any machine even where the Mac blocker is not.

Price: Focus Friend is free to download, with Focus Friend Pro at $3.99 a month, $19.99 a year or $39.99 lifetime for extras, plus paid Bean skins and decoration packs. Focuh is free. Early beta. No subscription. The blocking, the calendar and the web app are not behind a tier. Price is not the reason to switch here; the Mac is.

Who should pick which

Pick Focus Friend if your phone is the problem and you want focusing to feel like a game: a Bean that works when you work, rewards for finishing, app locking on iPhone and Android, and a timer that lives on your lock screen. Pick Focuh if you are on Mac and the leak is the day itself: you need Today next to GCal, a week view, loops that wait until you pull them, and a blocker that holds across every browser and app on the machine while you work, with the same list waiting in the web app. The two do not really compete for the same screen. Plenty of people run Focus Friend on the phone and Focuh on the Mac and let each one cover the device it was built for. Neither is an unbreakable vault: a determined user can switch either off in settings. Choose on which device the day leaks from.

Want the full side-by-side, with the feature table and FAQ? Read Focuh vs Focus Friend.