Every list of these ranks the same eight apps and never says which one you should install.

So this one is sorted by the argument you are actually having. Find the sentence that sounds like your kitchen and buy the thing next to it.

We make one of these, which you should weigh accordingly. You will notice the first two recommendations are not ours.

“We disagree about what needs doing, and when”

Buy: Tody. Free, or $9.99 a year.

Most chore apps are a weekly grid, and a weekly grid can only hold daily and weekly jobs. Bed sheets, filters, the shower descale and the boiler service run on their own clocks, so they fall off the chart entirely. Which is exactly the set of jobs nobody remembers.

Tody is built around that. Every task has its own realistic interval, and the app shows how far along that interval it has travelled: green can wait, red is overdue. You clean the thing that is actually due rather than the thing that is on today’s row.

A weekly chart is not a plan for a house. It is a plan for a week, and houses do not run in weeks.

The free tier covers one person. Premium is $9.99 a year and adds multiple homes. Premium+ runs $25 to $80 a year depending on household size and adds live sync plus FairShare, which gives each person a contribution target — the closest thing in this category to an answer for “who is actually doing more”.

“The children need chasing”

Buy: something with points. Sweepy has a free tier.

Points, streaks and a leaderboard genuinely work on children of roughly five to twelve. Sweepy turns the house into a scoreboard and lets everyone see who is contributing.

Sweepy’s free tier covers unlimited custom tasks and the leaderboard. There is a premium tier that generates a daily checklist for you; the site does not publish what it costs, which is worth knowing before you plan around it.

“We need the calendar sorted too”

Buy: Cozi Gold. $39.

Cozi has been the family organiser since 2005: a shared calendar with lists, meal planning and chores attached. If your chore problem arrives bundled with four people’s schedules colliding, that is the product with two decades of work behind it.

The free tier carries ads. Gold is $39 and removes them. We compare ourselves to Cozi properly here, including where it beats us.

“Chores are the least of it”

Buy: a household app. Chirpy is free to start.

For some houses the chores are a symptom. The actual load is that one person knows when the car is due, what the insurance renewal costs, which document expires in March and what is for dinner on Thursday.

A chore app fixes one square of that and leaves the rest where it was. If that sounds like your house, the thing to move is the whole admin, not the washing-up rota.

Chirpy is free to start, $59 a year for Plus and $89 for Pro. It is newer and narrower on chores than Tody, which has thought harder about cleaning intervals than we have.

The four, side by side

The free answer, which is often the right one

Before any of this: put a name against every recurring job and agree its frequency once. Write it anywhere both adults can see. That is free, it takes twenty minutes, and it is most of the benefit.

An app earns its place when the list gets long enough that maintaining it becomes its own chore, or when the jobs run on frequencies a weekly chart cannot hold. Why most chore charts die by the third Sunday goes through the four reasons, and none of them is the software.

And if the real problem is that one person is holding the whole map in their head, splitting the mental load is a different job from splitting the tasks. No app on this page fixes that by itself.

Common questions