Focusbox vs Rize: why I built a simpler focus app

If you've landed here looking for a Rize alternative, I'll be straight with you: Focusbox is a much smaller tool. That's the whole point. I built it because I wanted less, not more.

I used Rize for a good while. It's genuinely well made. It watches what you're doing, categorizes your time, and gives you a focus score and a tidy set of analytics at the end of the day. If you want to understand where your hours actually go, or you bill by the hour and need an accurate record, that kind of automatic time-tracking is real value. I'm not knocking it.

What happened to me, though, is that the dashboard slowly became the thing. I'd open the app and find myself reading charts about my focus instead of actually focusing. The score started to feel like one more number to manage. I didn't need to be measured. I needed to pick a thing, start a countdown, and write down what I was doing.

So I made exactly that. Focusbox is a countdown timer, a check-off task list, and a markdown notepad sitting right next to them. There's no time-tracking, no scoring, no streaks, and no report at the end of the week. When the timer is running, there's nothing to look at except the work. When it's done, it's done.

The deliberate omissions are the feature. Your tasks and notes are local-first — by default they live in a single file on your own disk, with no account and nothing tracked. The app is free for personal use and its code is public. If you ever want it on more than one machine, there's optional end-to-end-encrypted sync, but the app works exactly the same without it.

So here's the honest comparison. If you want analytics and an automatic record of your time, Rize is the better fit and you should use it. If you want a quiet timer with a notepad and nothing watching you, that's Focusbox. You can try it in your browser in a few seconds before you decide.

Side by side

That table is not a scoreboard. Half of those rows are things Rize does and Focusbox refuses to do, and if you need them, the row is a reason to pick Rize.

Who should actually use Rize

Pick Rize if any of these is true. You bill by the hour and need a defensible record of where the time went. You genuinely don't know how your day is being spent and want to find out — automatic tracking is the honest way to answer that, and self-reporting is famously bad at it. You respond well to being measured, and a score going up is motivating rather than stressful. Or you want to see patterns over months: which days are unsalvageable, when your good hours actually are.

None of that is a weakness of Rize. It's a category of tool doing its job. I stopped using it for a reason that says more about me than about the software.

Who should use Focusbox

Pick Focusbox if you already know what the problem is. You don't need a chart to tell you that you spent the morning in your inbox — you were there. What you need is a way to start, and something to hold the thought that would otherwise pull you out.

Also pick it if measurement backfires on you. For some people a focus score becomes a second job: you start optimizing the metric, feeling watched by your own laptop, and treating a bad number as a verdict on the day. If that's you, the fix isn't better analytics, it's no analytics.

And pick it if you care where your data sits. Focusbox needs no account and stores your tasks and notes on your own machine. An automatic tracker, by design, builds a minute-by-minute log of everything you do and keeps it on someone else's server. That's a reasonable trade if you want the analytics; it's a bad trade if you don't.

What you give up by switching

I'd rather say this plainly than have you find out after installing. Moving from Rize to Focusbox means losing: automatic tracking of any kind, all historical data and trends, focus scores, category breakdowns, break reminders, calendar integration, and any report you could send to a client. There's no import — no way to bring your Rize history across, because there's nowhere for it to go.

What you get instead is a small window with a countdown, a list, and a page to write on, that costs nothing and tells no one what you did.

Other things people compare it to

The same reasoning applies to most of this category. Against Session, Focus To-Do, or Be Focused: those are better-featured Pomodoro apps with stats and integrations; Focusbox has a notepad and no stats. Against Toggl or Timing: those are time trackers for billing, which Focusbox flatly isn't. Against Notion or Obsidian: those are real knowledge bases, and Focusbox's single scratch page is not trying to compete.

One point of confusion worth clearing up: this is not FocusBox.io. There's an unrelated product at that domain — an AI-powered to-do list with team plans — and another at focusbox.ai doing email triage. Focusbox here is local-first and source-available, made by one person, with no AI and no teams.

Try it before you decide

You don't have to uninstall anything to find out. Run both for a week — Rize tracking in the background, Focusbox as the thing you actually look at — and see which one you open. If you want the shortest possible test, the Pomodoro timer on this site runs in the page with nothing to install.

Download Focusbox free Open the web app

Questions

Is Focusbox a drop-in Rize replacement?

No. Rize tracks your time automatically and scores it; Focusbox does neither and never will. It replaces Rize only if the tracking was the part you didn't want.

Can I import my Rize data?

No. Focusbox keeps no activity history, so there's nothing to import it into.

Is Focusbox free?

Yes — the app is free for personal and internal use, and its source is public under the Focusbox Community License. Only the optional end-to-end-encrypted sync is paid, at $2/month or $20/year.

Does Focusbox send any data anywhere?

Not by default — no account, no analytics, nothing transmitted. If you enable sync, your data is encrypted on your device before it leaves, so the server only ever holds blobs it can't read.

Is this the same company as FocusBox.io?

No. Focusbox at focusbox.net is unrelated to focusbox.io and focusbox.ai.