Exist alternative
Looking for an Exist alternative?
Exist is a correlation dashboard that pulls numbers automatically from Garmin, Oura, Fitbit, Apple Health, Strava, and more, then surfaces patterns for you. If you want that automatic device sync today, Exist is the stronger tool and I will say so. Habit Pocket is the calmer alternative: you choose a small set of habits to log in one grid, and on iOS the app can auto-fill habits from Apple Health (steps, weight, water, workouts, and more — read-only, and only the metrics you pick). Wider device sync (Whoop, Garmin, Oura) and computed correlations are not shipped, and there is a free tier and a one-time price.
5 habits free, forever. No credit card. Your data stays private.
Last updated August 2026 · I re-verified Exist’s pricing, platforms, and integration list against exist.io and its docs in August 2026. I build Habit Pocket — read the verdicts knowing that; where Exist is stronger, this page says so. · By Bohdan Stefaniuk
At a glance
Habit Pocket and Exist, side by side.
Exist is a personal analytics dashboard by two-person indie Hello Code: it pulls your data in from the services you already use and tells you what correlates with what.
Habit Pocket
- Platforms
- iOS, Web (Android planned)
- Price
- Free · $3.99/mo · $29.99/yr · $49.99 once
- Best for
- a hand-picked set of habits in one calm grid
- Standout
- time-of-day tracking with the candle chart, plus manual correlation overlays
Exist
- Platforms
- iOS, Android, Web
- Price
- $6.99/mo · $62.90/yr
- Best for
- passive life-logging across everything you already track
- Standout
- computed correlations from 20+ auto-synced services
Honest take
Habit Pocket or Exist?
No tool is for everyone. Here is the straight answer, including when the other one is the better choice.
Pick Habit Pocket if
you would rather hand-pick a few habits in a calm grid, want a free tier and a one-time price, and prefer your data not be pulled from a dozen connected accounts.
Pick Exist if
you want your stats pulled in automatically from Garmin, Oura, Fitbit, Apple Health, and the like, and you want a dashboard that computes correlations for you.
Side by side
Habit Pocket vs Exist
Where each one leads, in plain terms. A dash in the Habit Pocket column is an honest gap, not a hidden one.
| Habit Pocket | Exist | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free · $3.99/mo · $29.99/yr · $49.99 once | $6.99/mo or $62.90/yr |
| Free tier | 5 habits, forever | 30-day trial only |
| Data export | CSV & JSON, free | CSV, JSON & PDF |
| Auto-import from Garmin / Oura / Fitbit | Soon | |
| Apple Health import | iOS · 15 metrics | |
| Correlations | Manual overlay | Automatic, weekly |
| Numeric, scale & time-of-day tracking | ||
| Mood tracking | Select type (Pro) | Built in |
| Candle chart for sleep & wake times | — | |
| Calm single grid you build by hand | — | |
| Android app | Soon | |
| Public API | Pro | |
| Connect Claude / ChatGPT (MCP) | — | |
| One-time purchase option | $49.99 lifetime | — |
Exist details checked August 2026.
Pricing
Exist pricing vs Habit Pocket pricing (2026)
Habit Pocket
Free, $3.99/mo, $29.99/yr, or $49.99 once (Lifetime)
Free tier: Up to 5 habits with yes/no and numeric types, one auto chart per habit, 60 days of stats, multi-device sync, and CSV/JSON export — no credit card.
Cancel anytime; you keep Pro to the period end, then drop to Free with every habit and entry intact.
Exist
$6.99/mo or $62.90/yr
Free tier: No free tier — a 30-day free trial, then one all-inclusive plan.
Yearly is 25% off. No lifetime option.
The models are genuinely different. Exist is subscription-only: one plan with everything, $6.99 a month or $62.90 a year, after a 30-day trial. Habit Pocket has a free tier you can stay on forever, and Pro is either $3.99 a month or $49.99 once — the Lifetime option costs less than ten months of Exist and never renews. If you expect to track for years and dislike subscriptions, that one-time price is the practical difference; if Exist’s automatic imports save you daily effort, its subscription is buying real work.
Prices checked August 2026. If Existhas changed theirs since, tell me and I'll fix this page.
The honest lists
What Exist does better — and what we do better.
Written so a happy Exist user would read this page and call it fair.
Where Exist genuinely shines
- Automatic import from 20+ services — Apple Health, Health Connect, Fitbit, Garmin, Oura, Withings, Strava, RescueTime, Todoist, Toggl, GitHub, Spotify, even the weather — so most of your data arrives without typing.
- Computed correlations: after about three weeks of data on an attribute, Exist starts surfacing relationships ("you walk more on days you sleep longer") and refreshes them weekly.
- Built-in mood tracking with long-term statistical analysis — the daily mood rating is the heart of the product for many subscribers.
- Runs everywhere: web, iPhone (with Apple Watch), and Android with Health Connect.
- Indie and privacy-respecting: Hello Code is a two-person company in Melbourne that is explicit its revenue is subscriptions, not your data.
- A full read/write API plus CSV, JSON, and PDF exports.
Exist's limitations
- No free tier: after the 30-day trial it is $6.99/month or $62.90/year, and there is no one-time purchase option.
- It is an analytics dashboard, not a habit checklist — there is no grid of habits to tick through, and building a deliberate daily logging ritual is not what it is designed for.
- Correlations need at least three weeks of data per attribute and update weekly, so insights arrive on Exist’s schedule, not the moment you wonder about something.
- Manual tracking (custom attributes, 1–9 scales, tags) is secondary; the product shines when data flows in automatically, which means it shines most for people with wearables.
Habit Pocket's limitations vs Exist
- No automatic import beyond Apple Health on iOS (15 metrics, read-only, a Pro feature). Garmin, Oura, Fitbit, and Android Health Connect are not connected — wider device sync is planned, not shipped.
- Habit Pocket does not compute correlations for you: you overlay two habits on one chart and read the relationship yourself.
- No Android app yet (planned); on a non-Apple phone you use the web app in a browser.
Can Habit Pocket import from Garmin, Oura, or Fitbit like Exist?
No. Habit Pocket’s only automatic source is Apple Health on iOS: a numeric habit can auto-fill from 15 Health metrics (steps, distance, weight, water, exercise minutes, resting heart rate, and more), read-only, with permission asked per metric, as a Pro feature. Anything a wearable writes into Apple Health arrives that way — but there is no direct Garmin, Oura, Fitbit, or Whoop connection, and no Android equivalent yet.
Exist is the opposite: connecting services is the whole idea. It pulls from 20+ integrations across fitness, productivity, music, and weather, on both iOS and Android, and its day is assembled for you. If your goal is a complete automatic record of your life, Exist simply does this better today.
The trade-off is intent: Habit Pocket assumes the habits worth tracking are the handful you decide about daily, and auto-fill exists to remove the tedious ones, not to replace the ritual.
How do correlations work in Exist vs Habit Pocket?
Exist computes correlations for you: once an attribute has about three weeks of data, it starts reporting statistically interesting relationships and refreshes them every week. You do not choose the pairs — Exist scans everything against everything and tells you what it found.
Habit Pocket is manual by design: you pick any two habits and overlay them on one timeline — steps against weight, bedtime against energy — because the app stores real numbers and real clock times. It works from day one and answers the question you actually asked. The chart builder and overlays are Pro features.
If you want an engine that discovers patterns you did not think to look for, pick Exist. If you have specific hunches and want to check them instantly, the overlay is the sharper tool.
Weight, steps & calories — last 56 days
Hover any day to read the exact numbers
Habit grid or analytics dashboard — which fits how you track?
Habit Pocket is a habit tracker: one grid with habits on one axis and days on the other, four habit types (yes/no, numeric, time-of-day, select), streak colors that deepen as a run grows, and a skip state that pauses a streak instead of breaking it. The daily act of filling the grid is the product.
Exist is not trying to be that. It is a dashboard you read, not a checklist you keep: data flows in, the mood rating is the one daily act, and the payoff is analysis over months. Many people use it precisely because they do not want to log things by hand.
The cleanest way to choose: to build the habit of tracking, get the tracker; to understand data you already collect, get the dashboard. Some people run both — they are complements more than rivals.
Privacy and data ownership: hand-logged vs connected accounts
Both products are indie and honest here — Exist states plainly that it makes money from subscriptions, not your data, and it deserves credit for that. The difference is surface area, not intent.
Exist’s model requires authorizing it into the services that hold your life: your health platform, fitness accounts, calendar, to-do app. Habit Pocket holds only what you type into it, plus — if you turn it on — a read-only, per-metric Apple Health connection that runs on your phone. On iOS you can even use it as a guest, where entries live in a local database and are never transmitted at all.
Both export your data (Exist: CSV, JSON, PDF; Habit Pocket: CSV and JSON, free on every tier). On data ownership both pass; on how much of your life a single login can reach, the hand-logged model is simply smaller.
Tracking sleep and wake times in each
If you wear a sleep tracker, Exist wins on effort: your sleep duration and times arrive automatically from the wearable’s platform, and sleep is one of its richest correlation sources.
Habit Pocket makes you type your times — sleep import from Apple Health is planned, not shipped — but stores them as real clock values: a 23:40 bedtime and a 07:15 wake-up, not a duration. The candle chart draws each night as one continuous bar across the month, overnight span handled cleanly, with an optional number overlaid. No other habit tracker has that chart.
Typed times with a purpose-built chart, or automatic times inside a general dashboard — that is the actual choice here.
Switching
How to move from Exist to Habit Pocket.
- 1
Export your Exist archive first (Account → Export data → CSV or JSON) — there is no direct Exist-to-Habit-Pocket import, so this file is how you keep your history.
- 2
Start on Habit Pocket’s free tier and recreate only the habits you actually decide about daily — five slots force a useful edit. Mood works as a select habit; bed and wake times as time-of-day habits (both Pro types).
- 3
On iPhone, connect the numeric habits you kept to Apple Health (steps, weight, water) so they fill themselves — read-only, per-metric permission, Pro.
- 4
Rebuild your favourite Exist insight by hand: overlay the two habits you already know are linked and check the relationship holds in the new data.
- 5
If you want your old history inside the grid, the Pro REST API can backfill any date from your Exist CSV with a small script — an honest workaround, not an import button.
Verdict
So: Exist or Habit Pocket?
Pick Exist if you wear a tracker, live across many connected services, and want a weekly drip of computed insight about your whole life with near-zero daily effort — for the quantified-self person with an Oura ring and a RescueTime account, Exist is the better product and its subscription is fair for the work it does. Pick Habit Pocket if the point is the daily practice: a small set of habits you chose, filled in by hand in one calm grid, with numbers and real clock times you can overlay when you have a hunch — and if you want a free tier to start on and a $49.99 lifetime instead of a forever subscription. The deciding question is whether you want your data collected for you or your attention pointed at what you do next. Dashboards report; a grid you fill in asks something of you every day.
FAQ
Exist vs Habit Pocket — common questions
Exist has no free tier. It costs $6.99 per month or $62.90 per year (about 25% off), with one plan that includes everything and a 30-day free trial — checked on exist.io in August 2026. Habit Pocket, for comparison, has a free tier of 5 habits and a paid tier at $3.99/month or $49.99 once.
Choose Exist if you want automatic data collection from wearables and services plus computed correlations, and a subscription is fine. Choose Habit Pocket if you want a deliberate daily habit grid, a free tier, and a one-time $49.99 lifetime price. They solve different problems: Exist analyzes the life you already record; Habit Pocket builds the daily practice of recording it.
No. Exist is subscription-only ($6.99/mo or $62.90/yr as of August 2026). Habit Pocket’s $49.99 Lifetime is a genuine difference: it costs less than ten months of Exist and never renews.
Only from Apple Health on iOS: numeric habits can auto-fill from 15 Health metrics, read-only, with per-metric permission, as a Pro feature. Garmin, Oura, Fitbit, and Android Health Connect connections are not shipped — that automatic breadth is exactly what Exist does best.
There is no import button — export ships today, import does not. Export your archive from Exist first so you keep your history. The Pro REST API can backfill any date from a script; most switchers simply start fresh with a smaller set of habits.
No. Exist scans your attributes and reports correlations weekly once it has about three weeks of data. Habit Pocket gives you a manual overlay instead: put any two habits on one timeline and read the relationship yourself, instantly. Less magic, more control.
Exist states plainly that it makes money from subscriptions, not your data — a fair and credible claim. The structural difference: Exist works by connecting into your other accounts, while Habit Pocket holds only what you type plus an optional on-device Apple Health read, and its iOS guest mode never transmits entries at all.
Hello Code, a two-person independent company in Melbourne, Australia (Josh Sharp and Belle Cooper). Habit Pocket is also a one-developer product — this is one indie sizing up another, not a corporate takedown.
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