Comparison

Obedience app alternatives, and how to choose

PlayNObey · 22 September 2026 · 5 min read

Why do people leave Obedience?

Three reasons, and they are specific enough to pick a replacement by. The first is the bill: Obedience is charged per person, so a couple buys two subscriptions to use one shared system. The second is the free tier — it caps you at five habits and takes away photo proof, which is the verification loop most people installed a D/s app to get. The third is shape: it is a habit tracker, so it is built for a routine that runs every day, and a lot of people actually want something to play for one evening.

None of those are bugs. Obedience is the incumbent for good reasons — it has been around longest, its web version is genuinely usable, and it is the gentlest first hour in the category. The reasons above are just the three places where a different app is a better fit, and which one you should move to depends entirely on which of the three brought you here.

Which alternative fits which problem?

Match the app to your reason for leaving, not to its feature list. The table is current as of September 2026; prices in this niche change often, so check the source before paying for anything.

The split that matters most is the last-but-one row and it is not the one the app stores organise by. Almost every app in this category — Obedience, Kneel, Obey, SubTasks, mysub — is a habit tracker wearing different clothes. One person assigns recurring tasks, the other completes them, points accrue and streaks build. If that is what you want, you are choosing on price and depth, and Kneel wins on both.

If what you actually want is an hour with a beginning and an end, none of them are built for it.

Is there an alternative that is free in a way that matters?

Two, and they are free for different reasons. Chaster's free tier gives you one active lock with three extensions, which is a real slice of the product rather than a teaser. PlayNObey is free because nearly all of it runs on your own device — there is no per-user server cost to recover, so there is no per-user price to charge. ObeyCoins, an in-app currency, are the only thing there is to buy.

Everywhere else "free" means a trial. Obedience's five-habit tier without photo proof is a demo of the thing rather than a smaller version of it. Kneel's free tier is more generous — one dynamic, ten tasks, three rituals — but the features that make Kneel worth choosing are all on the other side of the paywall.

That distinction is worth checking before you migrate, because the migration itself is the expensive part. Moving a set of tasks, a set of rules and a shared habit between two people takes an evening of typing, and doing it twice because the free tier turned out to be a demo is the common story in this category.

What do you give up by switching?

Whatever the app you are leaving is best at — and being honest about that is the only way the rest of this page is worth reading.

Leaving Obedience costs you the most familiar interface in the category and the only really good web client among the trackers. If both of you already have it installed and neither of you is annoyed by the bill, there is no argument here worth acting on.

Leaving it for PlayNObey specifically costs you the habit-tracking model altogether. We do not do streaks, daily recurring tasks or a points economy that accrues over weeks, and if that structure is what holds your dynamic together then this is the wrong swap. It also costs you sync-everywhere convenience: because the database lives on your device rather than in an account, a second device is a deliberate pairing step and not a login, and a device you lose takes its copy with it.

Where PlayNObey fits, and where it does not

It fits if you want an evening you play, with proof at the end of it. You build a quest — a set of tasks and dares — or a roulette that picks what happens next, you carry it out, and you hand back a photo or video that the other person approves or rejects. It runs in a browser, as a Windows app and as an Android app, from one codebase, and it is 18+.

It fits particularly well if where your photos end up is the thing that stopped you paying for anything at all. Every other app on the list above stores proof on a server, and the strongest of them — SubTasks — encrypts each field before the database while still holding the keys to decrypt it. Ours never goes anywhere by default: quests, images, video and proof sit in a local database on the device that made them. Three things leave, each a deliberate act — an encrypted message to somebody who is offline, anything you publish to the community, and one daily "this device was used" ping if you switch it on.

It does not fit if you want a daily rhythm with a points balance, or if you need both partners looking at the same synced account from any device at any moment. Those are real requirements and Kneel serves them better than we do.

One thing to be accurate about before you try it: penalties are opt-in for a board you build, which starts with an empty penalty wheel and costs nothing when a proof is turned down. Starter packs are the exception — they install a penalty catalogue along with the board, so a first quest made that way arrives with the wheel already populated. You can empty it in the editor, but you should know it is there.

If the reason you are reading this is the second row of that table — proof, without paying, without it landing on somebody's server — open it in a browser and build one quest. Nothing installs and no account is needed to find out whether the shape fits.