How Forest works
Forest is the original gamified focus app and still one of the best-loved. You plant a virtual tree, set a timer, and the tree grows while you stay out of your phone. Leave early and it withers. It is a clean, emotionally effective piece of design, and its real-tree-planting partnership gives the streak genuine weight.
The catch is structural: Forest only helps during a session you chose to start. It is a commitment device, and commitment devices are least available exactly when you need them most.
How Champ works
Champ inverts the trigger. You do not start anything — you set up shields once, and the intervention arrives on its own, at the moment you open a shielded app. The days you would never have thought to start a Forest session are precisely the days Champ is working.
The garden reward is similar in spirit, with one deliberate difference: nothing in Champ dies. Trees you have grown stay grown. A system that punishes a lapse tends to get deleted after the lapse.
Side by side
| Champ | Forest | |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | Automatic — fires when you open a shielded app | Manual — you start a session |
| Works when you forget | Yes, that is the design | No — requires you to start it |
| On failure | Nothing is lost; the garden is cumulative | Your tree withers |
| Offers an alternative to scrolling | Yes — a 30-second guided reset | No — the goal is simply to stay away |
| Real-world tree planting | No | Yes, via its partner programme |
Choose Forest if…
Choose Forest if your problem is focus during work you have already decided to do, and if a wilting tree motivates rather than shames you. Its real-tree planting is something Champ does not offer and should not pretend to.
Choose Champ if…
Choose Champ if the problem happens on the days you never opened a focus app at all — the evening scroll, the queue, the 11pm drift.
Champ's free tier is enough to find out which camp you're in.
Get Champ — free