When comparing Habitica vs Task Coach, the Slant community recommends Task Coach for most people. In the question“What are the best cross-platform task apps?” Task Coach is ranked 22nd while Habitica is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Task Coach is:
With access to the source code, savvy users can make under-the-hood tweaks to suit their work style.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Can use peer pressure to motivate
The app allows creating a party with other people and go on a quest together. Here, your actions affect not just you, but everyone else in the party as well. If you fail a task, the party loses health, if you complete a task, the party gains experience, etc.
Pro Gamifies the process to motivate
The app takes cues from role playing games by having a system that rewards certain behavior with experience points, levels, and gear upgrades. It also allows you to set custom rewards that you come up with yourself such as watching an episode of your favorite TV show.
Pro Free and open source
With access to the source code, savvy users can make under-the-hood tweaks to suit their work style.
Pro Unlimited nesting of items and lists
When things grow in complexity, their parts can be turned into discrete task items within a hierarchical structure.
Pro Tracks hours and budget
Task Coach allows you to track how long it actually takes to complete a task and can be used to analyze the resulting impact on billing and budget.
Pro Tracks percent finished
Cons
Con Occasional bugs and laggyness
The app is still in beta and has the occasional bug to work out.
Con Can cause needless stress
As with most gamified systems it includes punishments for failures. Fear of failure can cause stress and failures can demotivate.
Con No updated package for recent linux distros
deb package available to download does not install app
Con Multiple users can access a file over a network, but there’s no web-based interface for straightforward collaboration
A task file may be opened by several instances of Task Coach, either running on the same computer or on different ones (on a network share for instance). When you save, Task Coach will merge your work with whatever has been saved on the disk prior. Conflicts are automatically resolved, usually by you winning the conflict.
This serves two use cases: 1) A single user opening the task file on several computers (work, home, laptop) and 2) several users working on the same task file.
The first case is the most common and the most secure. The second case may be dangerous. Most network disk sharing protocols do not support the kind of file locking that would make this 100% secure. A list of common protocols and their behavior can be found in the Task Coach help file.