Heartbeat vs Principal Task
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Heartbeat
Track your daily and weekly progress towards your goals with this simple app. It features an easy-to-use timer that continues even when the app is closed, sending notifications upon completion. Review your activity history with a clear log.
- Set and track goals
- Daily and weekly progress monitoring
- Persistent goal timer
- Completion notifications
- Activity log
- Add, edit, delete activities
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A simple and straightforward goal-tracking app. Heartbeat allows you to set goals and track daily and weekly progress towards them. An easy-to-use goal timer allows you to track your daily goals, and each goal shows how much time is remaining before completing that goal. The timer works even when the app is closed and reopened later. It will send you a notification when the goal timer is running and the goal time is completed. An easy-to-read log of activities makes it simple to view your activity history and add, edit, or delete activities later.
Principal Task
This app helps you manage tasks by tracking your completion rate against new tasks created. It offers a unique 'Task Velocity' score to show if you're keeping up with your workload. Organize with folders, contexts, and priorities, with advanced features available through a premium subscription.
- Task Velocity score
- GTD-native structure
- Due dates and repeating tasks
- Markdown support
- Kanban boards
- Private templates
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Track your Task Velocity — the ratio of tasks you complete against the ones you create, updated every day. See at a glance whether you're ahead or falling behind, not just what's on your list. Principal Task is a GTD-native task manager built for people who've outgrown to-do apps. Folders, contexts, priorities, statuses, and unlimited nested subtasks — organized the way real work actually happens. TASK VELOCITY Your 30-day completed-vs-created ratio, shown as a simple multiplier. Free members see their current score. Premium unlocks the full history, filterable by folder, context, priority, and status. SYSTEM HEALTH A live verdict — Healthy, Strained, or Overloaded — so you know where things stand today, separate from where they're heading. BUILT FOR GTD Folders and sub-folders, contexts, priorities, statuses, and stars. Subtasks nest as deep as you need, with independent completion — no forced parent-child status. KANBAN, HEATMAP, TEMPLATES See your work as a board. Watch your activity over time. Turn repeatable processes into templates you can apply in one tap. BUILT FOR AI ASSISTANTS Principal Task connects to AI assistants over MCP — read and write your tasks, subtasks, and folders directly from the assistant you already use. SHARE WITHOUT FRICTION Share a task list with a four-word link. No account required to view. You control how long it stays open. Free, no credit card. Premium is about $3/month or $24/year, and it doesn't limit how much you can do — it unlocks Task Velocity history, Kanban, the Activity Heatmap, and private templates. Principal Task. Software that gets out of the way. Terms of Use: https://principaltask.com/terms
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Heartbeat at none against Principal Task's 2. Heartbeat also leads on ratings volume (3 vs 1) and iOS requirement (13.0 vs 15.0). On price, rating, update cadence and ads there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Principal Task sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $3.99 per month. Heartbeat asks for nothing beyond the download.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Heartbeat against 5.0 for Principal Task. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 3 and 1 respectively.
Heartbeat ships an update every 2 months, Principal Task every 3 months. The most recent releases landed on October 24, 2026 and October 18, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Heartbeat | Principal Task |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (3 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 3 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 months — better | Every 3 months |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Monetization | Free — better | Free with in-app purchases |
| Devices | iPhone, iPod | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better |
| Requires iOS | 13.0 — better | 15.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 3 MB | 32 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Daniel Rosenthal | Zechariah Schwenk |
Customer experience
Heartbeat
Principal Task
In-app purchases
Heartbeat
No in-app purchases
Principal Task
- Monthly Subscription$3.991 Month
- Annual Subscription$29.991 Year
