The short version
| App | Time to first task | Setup required | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Briskly | Seconds. Point the camera. | None. No account. | Starting when you are stuck |
| Tody | Once rooms and tasks are in | Build your areas first | Long-term upkeep of a whole home |
| Sweepy | Once the household is set up | Rooms, tasks, people | Splitting chores fairly |
| Home Routines | Once your checklists exist | You design the system | People who love a system |
1. Briskly
Briskly
Best for the fifteen minutes before someone arrives
You point your iPhone camera at the room. On-device AI reads the mess in about three seconds and produces a list of short timed tasks. You tap start on the first one and go. Nothing to name, nothing to schedule, no account to create.
Each task gets a countdown, and nothing runs long enough for you to talk yourself out of it. The current task and timer sit on your Lock Screen as a Live Activity, so you are not holding the phone while your hands are full. There is an Apple Watch app for skipping a task when you are holding a bin bag. You take a before photo and an after photo, and the slider between them is the bit people actually send to the group chat.
Where it wins
- Genuinely no setup. This is the whole point of it.
- The plan is made for you, which matters if deciding is the part that stalls you.
- Room scans and photos stay on the device. No cloud AI looks at your kitchen, and no account is required.
- Music from Spotify or Apple Music changes track every time you hit next.
Where it loses
- iPhone only. No Android, and no web version.
- It is not built to be a long-term maintenance system for a whole house. If you want a rolling schedule across twelve rooms, the apps below do that better.
- No household sharing. You cannot assign the bathroom to someone else.
- Scan, timer and streak are free forever, but music, unlimited photos, full history, Rooms and Habits, and unlimited saved cleans are Briskly Pro (from £0.99 a week or £19.99 a year in the UK).
If your flat is already clean and you want to keep it that way with a system, Briskly is not the best pick on this page. If you are stuck in the doorway right now, it is.
2. Tody
Tody
Best for keeping a whole home ticking over
Tody's good idea is that cleanliness decays. Instead of putting "mop the kitchen" on a fixed date and feeling guilty when you miss it, each task gradually becomes more urgent the longer you leave it. Open the app and you see what most needs attention right now, rather than a list of things you have already failed to do on time.
That framing genuinely helps with guilt, and it models how homes actually get dirty. It is a well-liked app for good reason.
Where it wins
- The decay model beats rigid calendars for real life.
- Strong at whole-home coverage across many rooms.
- Flexible enough to fit an unusual home or an irregular week.
Where it loses
- You have to build it first. Rooms, tasks, frequencies. That is a planning session, and planning is the thing some of us cannot do.
- It tells you what is most overdue, not how to get through the next twenty minutes.
- The interface takes a little learning.
Tody is the better app if your problem is forgetting. Briskly is the better app if your problem is starting.
3. Sweepy
Sweepy
Best for houseshares and couples
Sweepy is built around the fact that most cleaning arguments are really arguments about fairness. It handles multiple people in a household, spreads the workload, and keeps the whole thing visible so nobody has to keep a private mental tally of who last cleaned the bathroom.
If the actual problem in your home is distribution rather than motivation, this is the most useful app on the list.
Where it wins
- Household sharing and workload balancing that genuinely defuses arguments.
- Clean, modern interface.
- Good at showing effort, which is half the point when you live with other people.
Where it loses
- Setup is the heaviest here, because it has to be. Rooms, tasks, and people all need entering.
- Sharing means accounts and sync, so it is not a no-account option.
- Overkill if you live alone.
Nobody needs a fairness engine at eight in the evening when a friend has just texted "on my way". But for the ongoing negotiation of a shared flat, Sweepy is the right tool.
4. Home Routines
Home Routines
Best for people who genuinely like a system
Home Routines comes out of the FlyLady tradition: zones, repeatable checklists, and a focus timer for short bursts. It has been around a long time, and it has a devoted following because for the right person it works permanently.
The gold stars for completed tasks sound twee until you meet someone who has kept a streak going for two years because of them.
Where it wins
- Very customisable. You can shape it to your exact home and week.
- The built-in timer supports short focused bursts, which is the right mechanic.
- Checking things off is quietly satisfying, and that matters more than it sounds.
Where it loses
- You are the one designing the system, which is a real amount of up-front work.
- The interface looks its age next to newer apps.
- If you abandon the routine for a fortnight, coming back to it feels like a debt.
Home Routines rewards the kind of brain that finds comfort in structure it built itself. If building the structure is the barrier, it is the wrong starting point.
So which one should you actually get?
Be honest about which problem you have, because they need different tools.
- You cannot start. You stand in the doorway and nothing happens. Get something that makes the plan for you and puts a clock on it. That is Briskly.
- You forget. Things quietly go a month without being cleaned and you would rather they did not. Get Tody.
- You live with people and it is not even. Get Sweepy.
- You want a system you maintain on purpose. Get Home Routines.
The one genuinely bad move is downloading a scheduling app to fix a starting problem. You will spend forty minutes lovingly configuring a chore system, feel like you have achieved something, and go to bed with the flat exactly as messy as it was. Everyone has done it. It is a very convincing way to avoid cleaning.
A note on privacy, since cameras are involved
Briskly's scan runs on your iPhone using Apple's on-device Vision and Apple Intelligence. Photos and room scans are never uploaded and are not sent to any external model or cloud AI service.
We do collect anonymous usage events, such as app opened, features used, device model and app version, sent to a private database we own. No photos, no task names, nothing tied to your identity. The privacy policy spells this out in plain English.
Frequently asked
What is the best iPhone cleaning app if I struggle to get started?
Pick whichever one has the shortest setup, because setup is where this fails. Briskly was built for exactly this: point the camera, get a timed list in a few seconds, no account. The other three are better at long-term upkeep but all want you to enter rooms and tasks first.
Is there a cleaning app that does not need an account?
Briskly needs no account, no email and no login for its core features. Anything with household sharing, Sweepy included, generally needs an account so data can sync between people.
Are these apps free?
All four have a free tier and a paid upgrade through in-app purchase. In Briskly the scan, timer and streak are free forever, and Pro is £19.99 a year, £2.99 a month or £0.99 a week in the UK. We have not quoted figures for the other three because their prices change and vary by country, so check the App Store rather than trusting a number in a blog post.
Which one is best for ADHD?
None of these are medical products, including ours. The feature that tends to help with executive dysfunction is having the plan made for you instead of by you, plus a countdown you can see. That is what Briskly is built around. Some people with ADHD do much better with a system they designed themselves, and for them Home Routines is a serious contender. There is more detail in our piece on cleaning paralysis and ADHD.