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 and open source under MIT. 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.