Focus Bear & Fabulous — What’s the difference?

Ready to upgrade your habits? Let’s compare two popular habit apps, Focus Bear and Fabulous.

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Productivity is important, but so is taking care of yourself. That’s where Focus Bear and Fabulous come in. Both apps aim to help you get things done and improve your well-being, but they go about it differently.

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Focus Bear aims to make your morning and evening routine impossible to forget by making your smart phone and computer your habit allies. Instead of starting the day doomscrolling news or developing a bad case of FOMO from instagram, Focus Bear will guide you through your habits one at a time, blocking distractions and showing relevant Youtube videos (e.g. a meditation or exercise video) to keep the motivation high. .

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Fabulous has a similar goal but is only available on your smart phone. It won’t block distractions but it has a lot of helpful content, fun sound effects and a community of other habit formers to help motivate you.

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So, which app is right for you? Here’s how both apps stack up against each other.

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Focus Bear

Morning Routine Mode

Focus Bear is designed for people who’ve tried other habit apps but still haven’t managed to lock in a solid morning routine. It takes over your computer and phone in the morning and walks you through your morning routine activities one at a time. Apps that aren’t relevant to your morning routine (looking at you Instagram) are automatically blocked.

To make habits like meditation/yoga/HIIT easier, you can embed relevant Youtube videos and follow along. Because the video is embeded, you don’t have the distractions of the Youtube algorithm.

Deep Work Mode

Focus Bear isn’t done after you finish your morning routine. The app also helps you focus and concentrate better during the day. You’ll transition from your morning routine into Super Pomodoro Mode where the app will take you through as many pomodoro blocks (25 minutes/50 minutes/as long as you want it to be) as you think you can handle.

All distractions are automatically blocked while you’re in the deep work part of the pomodoro block. Instead of having to specify every distracting website (there are a lot out there!), you tell Focus Bear which apps and URLs are productive and it will block everything else on all your devices.

Doing too much deep work can be dangerous if you don’t take breaks. Focus Bear regularly intervenes to remind you to loosen up your body, drink some water, do some deep breathing or any other activity that keeps your mind and body in good shape.

Fabulous — Motivational Life Coach

Fabulous is a daily planner and self-care habit tracking app. This app works like a “coach” and uses behavioral science to help people make intelligent changes and build healthy habits.

Fabulous has a comprehensive approach to goal setting and habit formation. Providing personalized advice and articles helps users develop healthy habits.

Fabulous allows users to track their sleep and water intake, focus, and productivity for people who want to develop healthy habits in all areas of their lives.

Its key features include;

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• Creating custom routines
• Tracking mood
• Coaching from real people

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App-to-App Similarities and Differences

Goal Setting

Focus Bear doesn’t have a goal setting feature. Instead it operates on the assumption that if you do your habits every day, you will reach your goals. You can see graphs showing your progress which is very motivating.Fabulous has a built in goal-setting feature that allows you to set goals and track your progress. It does rely on you updating your progress which can be tricky sometimes.

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Reminders

Like every productivity app, Focus Bear and Fabulous allow users to set reminders for their habits. Focus Bear enables users to set reminders for specific times of day, while Fabulous allows users to set reminders for general periods (e.g., morning, afternoon, evening). This is helpful for people who want to be reminded to complete their tasks at specific times.

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Although both Focus Bear and Fabulous share the common goal of helping users develop healthy habits, they differ in how they go about achieving this. Focus Bear takes a more hands-on approach, essentially taking control of your devices until you complete your habit. This may be seen as more effective as it eliminates the possibility of simply ignoring reminders. The target demographic for Focus Bear is people with ADHD who quite often need more overt prompts.

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On the other hand, Fabulous relies on push notifications to remind users to stick to their habits. While this may be less intrusive, it also means that users can more easily ignore such reminders if they so choose and may therefore be less effective for people with ADHD.

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Task Completion

Focus Bear allows users to see how many days in a row they have completed their habit and their longest streak. Fabulous also enables users to see their overall completion rate for each habit. Both apps allow users to track their progress.

Pricing

Both apps are paid. Focus Bear charges $5/month for access to its desktop (Mac and Windows) and mobile apps. Fabulous charges $3.33/month for the mobile app only.

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Focus Bear v Fabulous

Fabulous is well suited to people who are unlikely to ignore push notifications, are generally pretty good at sticking to their habits and who want a lot of information about habit formation. Focus Bear is better for people with ADHD or who really struggle with their habits and productivity and need a tool that is more hands on.

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Get the apps from focusbear.io and thefabulous.co