Every roundup ranks them by price and features. Almost none answer the one question that decides whether "free" was a good deal: on the day you want to leave, can you take your history with you?
Switching a notes app is annoying. Switching a habit tracker is different, because the thing you would lose is the entire point of the app. A 200-day streak is not a file you can retype. It is the product.
That creates a trap specific to this category. You pick a free app, you build eight months of history, and then something changes — the free tier shrinks, the app stops being updated, you buy a phone on the other platform. Now the cost of leaving is not the price of a subscription. It is eight months of evidence that you showed up.
Which is why "is it free" is the wrong first question. The right one is: if this app turns out to be wrong for me in a year, what do I walk away with?
This is the distinction the marketing blurs, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.
| Backup | Export | |
|---|---|---|
| What it's for | Putting your data back into the same app | Handing your data to something else |
| Typical format | Whatever the developer chose; often undocumented | CSV, JSON, SQLite — something with a public shape |
| Tied to | An account, a store, or a cloud login | A file you hold |
| Helps you when | You lose your phone | You leave |
An app can have excellent backup and no meaningful export. That app is safe against a broken phone and completely closed against you changing your mind. Both get advertised with the same word — "your data is safe" — and they are not the same promise.
CSV or JSON. You can open it in a spreadsheet or a text editor and see your dates and your values. Even if no app imports it, your history exists outside the app and a determined person could rebuild it. This is the floor.
A full database file rather than a flattened summary. The difference matters: a CSV of check-ins usually loses your schedules, targets and habit settings. A full backup keeps the structure, which is what another app would need to reconstruct the whole thing rather than just the dots on a calendar.
Rare. This is when a second app can open the first app's file directly, with no converter and no spreadsheet surgery. It only happens when a developer deliberately does the work, because there is no standard format for habit data and nobody is obliged to interoperate.
Level 1 is the one to insist on. Levels 2 and 3 are better, but a readable file you hold on your own device is the difference between "I changed apps" and "I started over".
Do this before you have anything to lose, not after. It takes a minute and it tells you more than any review.
An app that passes this on day one will still pass it on day 400. An app that fails it is one you should only commit to knowing that the history you build there probably stays there.
Checked August 2026. Treat this as a starting point and re-run the test yourself — pricing and features in this category change often, which is rather the point of the article.
| App | Getting your history out |
|---|---|
| Loop Habit Tracker | CSV and a full SQLite backup, both documented, free, no account. The strongest position of any of these, and unsurprising for an open-source app. |
| Habitica | Data export plus a public API. Built for people who want their data. |
| Habitify | CSV and a full .sqlite backup. Worth knowing that the API is a paid-plan
feature, so programmatic access is not part of the free tier. |
| HabitNow | Has cloud backup, tied to your Google account and intended for restoring into HabitNow. No published export format, so treat it as backup rather than portability until you have run the test yourself. |
Notice that this ranking looks nothing like the usual "best free habit tracker" list. Apps that score badly on features can score brilliantly here, and the reverse.
Kaizenly is our app, so read this section knowing that. We have put it last and we will keep it factual, because a page arguing you should be able to leave an app would be a poor place to pretend we are neutral.
.db Loop wrote.That last one is the part we would point at. Writing an importer for a competitor's format is work that only pays off for the user, and it is the clearest signal a habit tracker can give about how it expects to keep you: by being worth staying in.