OurHome Alternatives: which one actually fits your family
OurHome is free and it works — until you need a shared kiosk, a real approval flow, or chores tied to something other than a checkmark. Here's an honest look at OurHome's edge, and the alternatives worth trying instead.
By Jon Horton ·
OurHome shows up in almost every "free chore app" search, and it earns that spot honestly — it's genuinely free, genuinely functional, and it's been stable for years. If you're reading this, OurHome probably isn't broken for you. Something specific is missing, and you're not sure what to replace it with.
We're a homeschool family of seven, and we've run chores through OurHome and several others before building our own. Here's the honest version of where it holds up, where it doesn't, and what to look at instead.
The quick verdict
- Stick with OurHome if free is the hard requirement, your kids are old enough to manage their own login, and a simple checkmark-and-point chore split is genuinely all you need.
- Try Our Family Habits if you want a shared kitchen tablet your youngest kids can use without typing a password, a parent approval step, and chores tied to habit and character instead of just a task list.
- Try Cozi if the thing you actually miscounted was calendar and logistics, not chores — OurHome and Cozi solve different problems and get confused for each other often. We cover that separately in our Cozi comparison.
Where the alternatives differ
| OurHome | Our Family Habits | Cozi | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes, fully free | Yes | Yes (ad-supported) |
| Kiosk / shared-tablet mode | No | Yes | No |
| Parent approval | Yes | Yes | No |
| Habit framing (not just chores) | No | Yes — core of the product | No |
| Points → rewards system | Basic points | Yes — full reward loop | No |
| Shopping list | Yes | No | Yes |
| Calendar | No | No | Yes (best on the market) |
| UI | Dated, functional | Modern | Modern |
What OurHome genuinely gets right
It's free, and not free-with-a-catch — no trial clock, no feature wall that suddenly appears in month two. Multi-kid works. Chores can carry point values, and parent approval is actually supported, which a lot of "free" competitors skip. The shopping-list integration is a nice touch most chore-only apps don't bother with. If a family just needs the chore list split fairly and doesn't need much beyond that, OurHome does the job without asking for anything in return.
That's a real answer for a real slice of families. This isn't a takedown.
Where OurHome leaves a gap
- No kiosk mode. OurHome assumes each kid has their own device and can type in a login. That breaks down fast with younger kids or a family running one shared tablet on the kitchen counter — which is most families with three or more kids.
- The UI hasn't moved much in years. Functional, but it feels like it. Not a dealbreaker, but worth knowing before you commit a family to it.
- Chores stay chores. There's no broader habit framing — no reading streak, no character-building layer, nothing that connects "take out the trash" to the same system tracking "read for twenty minutes" or "practice piano." If chores are the whole ask, fine. If you wanted a wider family habit system, OurHome was never trying to be that.
- Points don't really go anywhere. The reward loop is thin compared to a full points-to-privileges system — there's no equivalent of a weekly digest showing what's holding and what's slipping.
If any of those is the reason you went looking for an OurHome alternative, that's the specific gap we built Our Family Habits around.
What Our Family Habits does differently
Our Family Habits treats chores as one piece of a larger habit system, not the whole system. A parent sets the daily actions that matter — chores, but also reading, practice, character. Kids log themselves in on a shared tablet with kiosk mode — no password, no per-kid device required. A parent approval queue keeps points honest, and those points roll into rewards a kid actually wants, whether that's screen time, an outing, or an allowance if your family runs one. A weekly digest shows what's holding and what's slipping, so you're not manually auditing five kids' worth of chores every Sunday night.
It's especially built for homeschool families, where habit formation is already the underlying goal and chores are one expression of it, not a separate app problem.
What we don't do: a shopping list. OurHome still wins there, and there's no reason to give it up if it's working for your family.
The honest recommendation
- Free is non-negotiable and your kids are old enough for their own login? Stay with OurHome.
- You need a shared tablet the youngest kid can use, or want chores connected to a bigger habit system? Try Our Family Habits free — no card needed.
- Calendar and logistics are the actual pain, not chores? Read our Cozi comparison instead — different problem entirely.
- Want the full field stacked side by side? We ranked the wider set, including allowance-first apps like Greenlight and BusyKid, in the best chore apps for families.
You can run OurHome for the shopping list and Our Family Habits for the habit loop if you want both — they don't step on each other. But if you're choosing one, pick based on whether a shared kitchen tablet and a habit system beyond chores actually matter to your house.
