The best family chore apps, honestly compared
Eight apps, what each one actually costs, and who each one is genuinely for. Prices read off the companies' own pages this month, not copied from other lists.
Last checked September 2026.
Disclosure, before anything else
Nido is one of the eight apps below and we built it. You should read this list knowing that, the way you should read every 'best chore app' article — most of them are written by one of the companies on the list, and most of them do not say so.
What we can offer instead of a claim to neutrality is a list you can check. Every price came from the company's own page or app store listing in September 2026. Every entry says what the app is bad at, including ours. Nido is not the first entry and is not named the winner, because for several of the families reading this it is not the right answer.
How we evaluated them
Four questions, asked of each app: what does it cost a family of four in a year, is it still being maintained, does it work for young children as well as teenagers, and where does the chore list actually live — a phone, or somewhere the family walks past.
Maintenance mattered more than we expected. Two of the best-liked apps in this category have effectively stopped shipping updates, and one of them is gone entirely, so every entry below carries the date of its most recent iOS release and its App Store rating, read from Apple's own listing data in September 2026.
We have not lived in all eight for a year. Where a judgement is about feel rather than fact, it is marked as ours rather than stated as truth.
The short version
| App | What it is | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cozi | Shared family calendar with lists | Free with ads; Cozi Gold $39 a year | A big household calendar everyone already knows how to use |
| Skylight Calendar | A touchscreen you buy, plus software | Display, plus Skylight Plus at $79 a year | Wanting it to arrive in a box and mount on the wall |
| Nido ours | Chore board, calendar and kitchen recipes on a screen you own | Free for 2 kids and 10 chores; $4.99 / month | A kitchen wall screen, with privileges as the reward |
| Greenlight | Kids' debit card with a chore tracker | $5.99 to $19.98 a month, up to five kids | Allowance and money lessons for older children |
| BusyKid | Chores that pay onto a prepaid card | $4 a month, billed annually | Paying real allowance without Greenlight's price |
| S'moresUp | The most chore features of any app here | Free tier; Premium around $8 to $10 a month or $79.99 a year | Complex households with rotas and approvals |
| Homey | Simple chores and allowance | Free up to three accounts; paid above that | Small families who want something plain |
| FamilyWall | General family organiser | Free tier; Premium sold in-app | Calendar, location and lists in one place |
Prices checked September 2026 from each company's own pages. They change — verify before you subscribe.
Cozi
The default answer in this category for a decade, and it has earned it: nearly 400,000 App Store ratings at 4.8, updated within the last fortnight. The shared calendar is excellent, the shopping and recipe sides are mature, and every parent's phone already has it.
The chores are the weak part. They are shared to-do lists rather than a system — no repeating chore that carries over, no rewards mechanic children care about. And the free tier carries adverts, which sit next to your six-year-old's task list until you pay $39 a year for Cozi Gold to remove them.
Best for: families whose real problem is the calendar, with chores as an afterthought.
Weakest at: motivating children. Nothing here makes a chore feel worth doing.
Skylight Calendar
A wall-mounted touchscreen showing a merged calendar, chores with star rewards, meal plans and a photo screensaver. It is the nicest object in this list by some distance, it arrives ready, and the app behind it is actively maintained — 4.8 stars across more than 50,000 ratings.
The cost is the argument. You buy the display — a few hundred dollars depending on size — and then the features most families bought it for, chore rewards and meal planning among them, sit inside Skylight Plus at $79 a year. If the family stops using it, you own a screen.
Best for: households with no spare tablet who want one box, mounted, working.
Weakest at: letting you find out cheaply whether your family will use a wall calendar at all.
Nido — ours
The same wall board as a Skylight, running in a browser on a tablet you already own. Repeating chores that carry over when missed, eggs banked per chore and spent on a rewards shelf you stock yourself, and a kid-locked view for younger children. Free for 2 kids and 10 active chores, with no ads on any plan.
Two things the other entries here mostly do not have. It carries its own family calendar — you add events directly, and Google Calendar merges in on top only if you want it, so nothing forces you into a Google account. And the kitchen half is a real feature rather than a list: a recipe book, a weekly meal plan that builds the shopping list, and a cooking mode on the wall screen that scales the ingredients when you double the batch, runs timers, and keeps the display awake while your hands are covered in flour.
The honest weaknesses: Google is the only outside calendar it syncs from, so an iCloud or Outlook household ends up typing events in twice. It does not handle money — no card, no allowance — so if pocket money is your motivator, buy Greenlight or BusyKid instead. And it is a young product with a small user base next to Cozi's, which is a real risk to weigh after what happened to OurHome.
Best for: families with an old tablet in a drawer who want the chart — and the week's dinners — on the wall rather than in a pocket.
Weakest at: syncing non-Google calendars, and anything involving money.
Greenlight
A debit card for children with parental controls, savings that pay interest, investing on the higher plans, and a chore tracker that pays allowance straight onto the card. Heavily used and actively maintained — 4.8 stars across nearly half a million ratings.
It is a banking product, not a chore product. Plans run $5.99 a month for Core up to $19.98 for Family Shield, covering up to five children, and there is no free tier at all, so the chore tracker stops the day you stop paying. Card replacements and custom cards cost extra.
Best for: children old enough for a card, where the lesson is money rather than tidiness.
Weakest at: young children, and anyone who wants to try before subscribing.
BusyKid
The cheap way to pay real allowance: chores in the app, money onto a prepaid card, with save-spend-share buckets and the option to buy fractional shares. Their site quotes $4 a month billed annually, with up to five cards, which undercuts Greenlight substantially.
It is also the least well-reviewed app in this list — 3.4 stars on the App Store, where the recurring complaints are about card and transfer problems rather than the chore side. Read those reviews before you commit; the chore tracking is fine, the banking around it is where families report friction.
Best for: allowance on a budget, if you can tolerate rougher edges.
Weakest at: reliability, on the evidence of its own store reviews.
S'moresUp
If you want features, this is the one. Rotating chores, competitive and collaborative chore modes, photo proof, approval workflows, penalties, auto-allocation, reports. Nothing else here comes close on depth. There is a genuine free tier after a 45-day trial of the paid features.
Two caveats. The pricing has been in motion — their page lists an introductory $7.99 a month against a $9.99 regular rate, with $79.99 a year, so check which applies on the day. And its last iOS release was October 2025, which is a long gap in a category where everyone else shipped in the last month.
Best for: large or complicated households that genuinely need rotas and approvals.
Weakest at: simplicity, and lately at shipping updates.
Homey
Plain chores and allowance without the ceremony: assign tasks, track them, link them to pocket money you pay yourself. Free for up to three accounts, which is enough for a single parent and two children, with a paid tier above that.
Their site no longer publishes the price of that paid tier — you find it at the point of purchase in the app, which is not a good sign. The iOS app was last updated in January 2026 and sits at around four stars. Usable, and worth a look if you want something small, but it does not feel like a product with momentum.
Best for: small families who want the simplest possible chore list.
Weakest at: transparency about what it costs.
FamilyWall
A general family organiser — shared calendar, lists, meals, budget and location sharing — with chores as one module among many. Well maintained and very well liked: 4.8 stars across more than 20,000 ratings, updated last month.
The premium price is not published on their site either; it is an in-app purchase. And because chores are one feature of ten, the chore system is shallower than S'moresUp's or Nido's — there is no rewards economy children get invested in.
Best for: families who want one app for calendar, lists and location.
Weakest at: making chores feel like a game worth playing.
And one that is no longer an option: OurHome
OurHome still turns up at the top of lists like this one, and it should not. Its own App Store link returns no app, its Google Play listing 404s, and its website has not answered on HTTPS in a long time — all checked in September 2026. There was never a shutdown announcement.
It is the cautionary entry in this list. It was free, ad-free and had no revenue at all, which is a lovely thing to use and an impossible thing to sustain. Ask of any app here how it makes money, because that is the question that decides whether it still exists in three years.
How to choose in one minute
- Want the chart where the family walks past it, on a screen you already own — Nido.
- Want it to arrive as hardware, mounted and ready — Skylight.
- The calendar is the real problem, not the chores — Cozi.
- Chores should pay actual money — Greenlight if budget allows, BusyKid if not.
- Five children, a rota and an approval process — S'moresUp.
- Calendar, lists and knowing where everyone is, in one app — FamilyWall.
- The recipe book and what is for dinner should live on the same screen as the chores — Nido or Skylight.
If it is still close, the tiebreaker is cost of being wrong. Three of these want money before they show you anything. Start with one that does not.
Questions people ask
- You made one of these apps. Why should I trust the list?
- Because the list is checkable. Every price here came from the company's own pricing page or app store listing in September 2026, and every app's App Store rating and last update date is stated so you can see which ones are still being maintained. Nido is not first, it is not called the winner, and its weaknesses are written down.
- What is the best free chore app?
- Cozi if you mainly want a shared calendar and can live with adverts; Nido if you want repeating chores and a rewards system with no ads; Homey if you have three family members or fewer. None of the card-based apps have a usable free tier, because the card costs them money.
- What happened to OurHome?
- It is no longer on either app store — its own App Store link returns nothing and its Google Play page 404s, checked September 2026. There was never a shutdown announcement. If you were an OurHome family, you need to move.
- Do I need to buy a display?
- No. Skylight and Hearth sell you the screen, which is a fair trade if you want something that arrives mounted and ready. Nido runs in a browser on a tablet you already own, so you can try the idea before spending anything on glass.
- Should chores pay pocket money or privileges?
- Both work and it depends on the child's age. Money teaches budgeting and needs a card app like Greenlight or BusyKid to do properly. Privileges — screen time, choosing the film, a later bedtime — cost nothing, work from about age four, and are easier to reverse when a week goes badly.
Try it on the tablet in your drawer.
Free for 2 kids and 10 chores, no credit card, nothing to deliver.
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