Life’s short, and our bucket lists? They keep getting longer.
One day, you want to be in your best shape ever, and the next is all about upskilling to advance your career. The sheer number of goals we chase every single day can get exhausting, especially if we don’t track the results and use them to fuel our motivation.
How do we do that?
Through goal-tracking apps! Thanks to technological miracles, goal-tracking apps can act as your personal coaches, cheerleaders, and taskmasters rolled into one. I’ve found them helpful for organizing, prioritizing, and tracking every step of my journey.
If you’re looking for one, too, you’re at the right place.
Based on my experience and the testing done by our team at ClickUp, I’ve compiled a list of the best goal-tracking apps, including both free and paid alternatives.
I hope this helps you find the solution you need to crush those big, hairy, audacious goals of yours!
10 Best Goal Tracking Apps for 2024 (Free & Paid)
- The Importance of Goal-Tracking Apps
- The 10 Best Goal-Tracking Apps at a Glance
- The 10 Best Goal-Tracking Apps to Use This Year
- 1. ClickUp—Best for setting and tracking project goals
- 2. Strides—Best for setting a productive daily routine
- 3. Way of Life—Best for building new habits
- 4. Coach.me—Best for personal growth and learning a new skill
- 5. Habitica—Best habit-tracking app with fun-filled gamified elements
- 6. Todoist—Best for task management using minimalist, clean to-do lists
- 7. ATracker—Best for time management for each goal
- 8. GoalsOnTrack—Best for creating detailed action plans for your goals
- 9. Lattice—Best for OKRs and employee goals
- 10. Toodledo—Best for increasing productivity in all areas of your life
- Choose the Best Goal Tracking App
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe Importance of Goal-Tracking Apps
As we pursue big (and small) ambitions, many of us need help with maintaining focus, measuring progress, and staying motivated over time.
And that’s exactly what goal-tracker apps are built for—setting targets, breaking them down into actionable steps, celebrating milestones, working harder toward missed goals, and monitoring how far you’ve come and how much further you need to go.
Unlike traditional paper planners that can be easily lost or damaged, these digital tools provide accessible, real-time data on progress. This data-driven approach enables accountability, motivation, and adaptability while achieving goals.
They surpass simple digital notes by offering structured frameworks, reminders, and analytics that push us to do our best and course correct when needed.
Wondering which apps offer all these benefits and then some? Let’s find out.
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe 10 Best Goal-Tracking Apps at a Glance
To help you choose the best goal-tracking app, we’ve compiled a table summarizing the top 10 options available. Each app offers unique features tailored to different goals and user preferences. Check them out:
| App | Best for | Standout Feature |
| ClickUp | Comprehensive goal-setting and management with adaptable task management capabilities | A suite of customizations for goals overview, a range of collaboration options, and pre-built templates for quick goal-setting |
| Strides | Setting a productive daily routine | Four customizable habit trackers |
| Way of Life | Cultivating good habits and consciously removing undesirable patterns | Built-in diary for identifying bad habit triggers with a time-bound overview of good vs. bad habit patterns |
| Coach.me | Personal growth and skill development | Access to specialized coaches and mentors |
| Habitica | Gamifying habit building | Fun quests and rewards to keep you on track |
| Todoist | Turning every goal or project into tasks and sub-tasks on the go | Beautiful, straightforward, and clean interface |
| ATracker | Time management | Multi-device time tracking for every goal |
| GoalsOnTrack | Creating detailed action plans and vision boards | End-to-end goal setting and progress tracking with planners, worksheets, visualizations, journals, and reports |
| Toodledo | Increasing all-round productivity | Categorizes your time into Life, Work, and Schedule options to manage productivity goals in each area |
| Lattice | Employee goal-setting | Five separate products, including Performance, Goals, and Grow, each focusing on driving performance, OKRs, and continuous improvement |
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe 10 Best Goal-Tracking Apps to Use This Year
We’ve listed apps that aren’t just popular with professionals but those that just about anyone can use to their advantage—students, freelancers, business owners, or office workers.
Let’s start with ‘the everything app’ for your big goals, long-winded projects, and straightforward tasks.
1. ClickUp—Best for setting and tracking project goals
ClickUp is a versatile project management tool that excels at tracking goals for individuals and teams.
ClickUp Goals helps teams and individuals effectively set, track, and achieve objectives. The feature allows you to create specific, measurable goals (including Objectives and Key results or OKRs) and break them down into actionable ClickUp Tasks, subtasks, and checklists.
You can monitor them using customizable progress tracking with numerical, monetary, true/false, and task targets.
If you’re tracking goals for a team, ClickUp lets you share them, assign responsibilities, and track collective achievements. Features such as ClickUp’s Chat view, task discussion threads, @mentions, and the ClickUp Inbox promote seamless collaboration on all your projects. You can also organize your goals in dedicated folders for easy access.
With features like goal dependencies and progress roll-ups, ClickUp Goals ensures everyone is aligned and working toward common objectives.
Besides these, ClickUp offers many prebuilt templates for easily setting and tracking goals. My favorite one has to be the ClickUp SMART Goals Template.
It includes customizable statuses to track project progress, custom fields to categorize and visualize goals efficiently, and custom views such as Goal Effort and SMART Goal Worksheet to adapt to your workflow.
I use this template to:
- Keep track of all goals and targets
- Organize goals into different statuses: Complete, Crushing, Off Track, On Hold, On Track, to keep track of progress
- Monitor and analyze tasks to ensure maximum productivity
- Measure the effort required for each goal
- Set and stick to timelines
The best part is that ClickUp not only helps with goal tracking but also offers features and templates for project management, communication, and collaboration. Think of it as one app to get most of your work done, professional and personal!
ClickUp best features
- Get a high-level overview of goal progress and time spent on projects with ClickUp Dashboards’ multiple widgets, including progress bars, pie graphs, burndown charts, etc.
- Get notifications for upcoming deadlines using ClickUp Reminders. ClickUp reminds you about your tasks from five minutes up to three days before they are due
- View your upcoming tasks in a List, Kanban board, Gantt chart, and any other style of your choice using ClickUp Views
- Collaborate on tasks, share feedback, and work on collective goals together using ClickUp Chat
- Adapt your workflow to any type of task with valuable ClickUp Tasks features, such as custom statuses, priority levels, and dependencies
ClickUp limitations
- Can’t export dashboards easily
- Steeper learning curve compared to tools that offer only goal-tracking
ClickUp pricing
- Free Forever
- Unlimited: $7/month per user
- Business: $12/month per user
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing
- ClickUp Brain: Add to any paid plan for $7 per member per Workspace per month
ClickUp ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.7/5 (9,700+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.6/5 (4,000+ reviews)
Many ClickUp users agree that the platform has become a lifesaving tool for their project goals:
2. Strides—Best for setting a productive daily routine
Strides is one of the few apps on this list in which I found the flexibility to choose from various goal-tracking methods. For example, I could set long-term goals according to milestones or goal values. It also has percentage complete sliders and the option to track good vs. bad habits.
The core objective of this app is to help you build a perfect routine. To do so, you can customize the tracker options and choose how you want to track progress, be reminded of deadlines, and so on.
Strides best features
- Choose from four trackers—Habit for tracking good/bad habits, Target for setting a helpful project timeline, Average for an overview of your goals over a specific time, and Project to track simple milestones
- Monitor your performance across all your goals and habits by week, month, year, or all-time
- Stay motivated with on-track charts that measure success rate, streaks, and more
Strides limitations
- No reward system to keep you coming back and achieving your goals
- The app is available only for iOS users
Strides pricing
- Free
- Strides Plus: Starts at $4.99/month per user
Strides ratings and reviews
- G2: Reviews unavailable
- Capterra: Reviews unavailable
3. Way of Life—Best for building new habits
Way of Life combines habit-building hacks like journaling and keeping to-do lists into an intuitive digital habit tracker.
We loved how it holds you accountable for bad habits. So, instead of just highlighting your good habits, you can figure out a way to navigate situations that may tempt you into falling behind on your habit-building goals.
With the Charts feature, you can spot positive and negative trends over weeks, months, or even years.
Way of Life’s best features
- Track your routines with a unique color-coded system
- Stay on course to achieving your goals with powerful reminders
- Jot down what triggers bad habits using the in-built diary function
Way of Life limitations
- You can only track three habits in the free plan
- There’s no way to track how close you are to achieving a goal. There’s only a yes or no option
Way of Life pricing
- Free
- Premium: Starts at $4.99/month per user
Way of Life ratings and reviews
- G2: Reviews unavailable
- Capterra: Reviews unavailable
4. Coach.me—Best for personal growth and learning a new skill
Coach.me is an excellent platform that connects you to certified coaches and mentors in various specialties. If personal growth is your primary goal, I highly recommend Coach.me.
I found it extremely helpful for skill development because you get 360-degree support for learning the skill of your choice—friends, colleagues, and even a personal coach can keep you on track.
You can also benefit from its versatility—it doubles up as a habit tracker app, so you can enjoy several functions even without signing up for a personal coaching plan.
Coach.me best features
- Set goals and reminders for how many times you want to practice a skill or work on a habit each week
- View weekly and monthly trends of your progress
- Follow daily instructions from coaches to achieve your goal
- Check-in from your iPhone’s Today View widget or on your smartwatch without opening the app
Coach.me limitations
- Occasional check-in glitches that may break your streak
- Limited project tracking functionality
Coach.me pricing
- Habit tracker: Free
- Personal coaching: $100 per month (starts at $25 per week)
Coach.me ratings and reviews
- G2: Reviews unavailable
- Capterra: Reviews unavailable
5. Habitica—Best habit-tracking app with fun-filled gamified elements
Habitica gamifies your list of habits and lets you create fun avatars that grow stronger with task completion. You also earn rewards that let you buy cool avatar upgrades.
What I enjoyed the most was its social media integration. I find it easier to stay motivated with accountability partners With Habitica’s gamified social media integration, it becomes easier to get your contacts involved in your ‘quests’ and work toward the same goals together.
Habitica best features
- Track habits and daily tasks on the go with mobile and web interfaces
- Earn fun rewards for your goals to decorate your avatar with battle armor, mysterious pets, magic skills, and even quests
- Use in-game coins to buy real-life benefits such as free access to TV shows
Habitica limitations
- Limited options to customize challenges
- Navigation can be tricky for some users
Habitica pricing
- Free
Habitica ratings and reviews
- G2: Not enough reviews
- Capterra: Reviews unavailable
6. Todoist—Best for task management using minimalist, clean to-do lists
Todoist is a beautiful, automated to-do list app for task management on the go. It simplifies your goals by turning them into action items. And the satisfaction it gives you when you check an action item or subtask as ‘done’ is unbeatable. Yes, you can do so with one tap or click.
Another remarkable feature is its natural language recognition, which sorts your tasks into Today, Upcoming, and custom filter views. This helps you effortlessly prioritize your goals. It also allowed me to create a shared space for collaborative tasks separate from my personal goals and projects.
Todoist best features
- Capture and organize tasks the moment they come to you with easy-flowing, natural language
- Build habits and keep tabs on deadlines using automated data recognition
- Turn anything into a task on your to-do list from anywhere using 80+ integrations
- Track your progress in several ways—productivity visualizations, activity history, and completed tasks archive
Todoist limitations
- The quality of generated summaries varies, so you have to manually check and revise them for accuracy
- Limited customizations for productivity statistics and report display
Todoist pricing
- Beginner: Free
- Pro: $5/month
- Business: $8/month
Todoist ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.4/5 (700+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.6/5 (2000+ reviews)
7. ATracker—Best for time management for each goal
ATracker is a time-driven goal management app that generates insights into how you spend your time on each goal. This lets you strategically schedule each task and subtask for optimum utilization of your hours.
I explored the app’s advanced settings, and it turns out that you can track aggregated time spent on a group of tasks. ATracker stores all your logs and presents them in both list and calendar views. You can also update your entries or log time later.
ATracker best features
- Start and stop a task with just one touch without unlocking your device
- Track your time on mobiles, tablets, Apple Watches, or computers
- Set daily and weekly goals based on task and tag, including numeric and drop-down tags
- Create reports in the form of beautiful pie charts and bar charts
ATracker limitations
- Occasional glitches in calendar syncing
- Fails to track time for multiple tasks simultaneously
ATracker pricing
- Free
- Pro: $4.99 on iOS and $2.99 on Android (one-time cost)
- Premium: $2.99/month
ATracker ratings and reviews
- G2: Reviews unavailable
- Capterra: Reviews unavailable
8. GoalsOnTrack—Best for creating detailed action plans for your goals
GoalsOnTrack is SMART goal-setting software with multi-level goal structures. This means you can create detailed action plans for every goal and sub-goal. This not only makes it a to-do list app but also a detailed agenda tracker complete with habit, time, and progress-tracking features.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much of your effort is taken on by this software. For example, you get a goal metrics form to fill out to ensure your goal is SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Similarly, there are vision boards, goal-setting templates, and journals for a brain dump. It’s like all your ideas about your goals live inside a multi-story apartment. Everything is within the same complex but separated enough for proper organization.
GoalsOnTrack best features
- Map out every stage of your goals with printable planners and worksheets
- Track goal progress in four ways: by sub-goals, by tasks, by the outcome, and manually
- Drag and drop scheduling with task calendar that integrates with external calendars like Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook
- Track your habit execution with daily checkmarks
- Share goals with your team, log team activities in real time, and post messages or comments on a centralized message board to work together
GoalsOnTrack limitations
- Requires an internet connection
- There is no trial or free version
GoalsOnTrack pricing
- Membership costs $68 per year
GoalsOnTrack ratings and reviews
- G2: Reviews unavailable
- Capterra: Reviews unavailable
9. Lattice—Best for OKRs and employee goals
Lattice is a goal-setting solution for teams. It’s ideal for organizations that want to track work performance while allowing employees to align their professional development with the company’s objectives.
We found it useful for cross-functional project management and ensuring clear collaboration. For example, you can set goals for marketing together in one place and customer service goals separately in another.
You can also set objectives for software development and SMART goals for managers. All of them can be interconnected and collaborated upon in one platform.
The OKR software integrates with Jira, Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft Teams to ensure that goals are always front and center and are continuously acted on.
Lattice best features
- Connect individual targets to department and company-wide goals for performance review
- Integrate OKRs into performance management to align achievement against top business priorities
- Encourage employee engagement with 1:1 meetings and interactions with HR and managers
Lattice limitations
- The website may be slow during the initial loading
- No free version
Lattice pricing
- Performance Management + OKRs & Goals: $11/person per month
- Engagement: $4/person per month
- Grow: $14/person per month
- Compensation: $6/person per month
Lattice ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.7/5 (3000+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.5/5 (160+ reviews)
10. Toodledo—Best for increasing productivity in all areas of your life
Toodledo is an elaborate productivity tool. It offers several options to organize and track goals, with a focus on increasing output. It takes the idea of a simple to-do list and expands it into a detailed workspace so you get more done with each goal or task.
I found its categorizations quite interesting:
- Life: Lets you create to-do lists and notes and share them with friends and family based on the Getting Things Done method
- Work: Helps you outline your projects, assign tasks to your team, and track time spent on each project
- Schedule: Encourages you to make the most of your free time with its in-built scheduler, complete with reminders based on your location, recurring tasks, and calendar integrations
Toodledo best features
- Use folders, tags, contexts, and subtasks to help organize to-do lists
- Sort, filter, and search through your list, and get to know what needs to be completed. The app sends you alerts when tasks are due
- Monitor your self-improvement; stay motivated and achieve your goals
- Write down your memories, use it as a journal—log recipes, trip notes, and more
- Use an outline to plan your next project, record your family genealogy, or any other use cases you can think of
Toodledo limitations
- The Notes feature requires better search functionality
Toodledo pricing
- Free
Toodledo ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.5/5 (60+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.6/5 (70+ reviews)
Summarize this article for me pleaseChoose the Best Goal Tracking App
The apps I tested and shortlisted have a few things in common: they are all simple to use and keep me more organized and productive. While they’re great for setting and tracking goals, very few go beyond the basic features.
I prefer long-term goal-planning tools that help me balance both personal and professional tasks. So, a platform with advanced team collaboration, task management, and project management becomes ideal for me.
In that context, only one tool checks all the boxes—ClickUp!
It simplifies goal tracking with its versatile features and ready-to-use templates. ClickUp’s project management tools let us stay on top of task lists and collaborate with cross-functional teams.
Overall, instead of an individual-only goal tracker, ClickUp gives you the flexibility to work on professional goals as a team. While you can maintain your personal trackers separately, the collaborative functions offer an edge.
Try ClickUp today! You won’t regret it.
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
