Looking for a Goblin Tools alternative with a feelings half too?

Goblin Tools is a small, sharp set of AI utilities built around one real problem: a task feels too big to start. Its best-known tool, Magic ToDo, breaks a task into smaller steps the instant you ask it to, with nothing to set up first. It's a genuinely excellent tool for that exact job, and it has nothing built for the feeling that's often sitting underneath the stuck task, a rejection, a wave of shame, or a pile-up of everything at once.

What Goblin Tools actually does well

Goblin Tools holds a 4.8-star rating on its official App Store listing^[1]. Its own site is kept free through sponsorships, with a cheap optional Pro tier for sync and history^[4]. Its core design choice is exactly right for this audience: nothing runs automatically. A task breakdown only happens when you tap the tool for that specific item, so it never surprises you with unrequested AI output. It's zero-setup, works the moment you open it, and a lot of its most loyal users describe coming back after months away with nothing lost and nothing to catch up on, which is a real and valuable design choice for a tool built for an inconsistent brain.

Where it stops

Goblin Tools solves the doing half of being stuck and doesn't touch the feeling half at all. There's no path for naming what you're feeling, getting distance from a harsh thought, or working through a rejection or a mistake that's eating at you; it breaks a task into steps and stops there. That's a deliberate, narrow focus, not a flaw, but it means the shame or panic that often sits underneath a stuck task, a pattern documented as a core, well-studied feature of ADHD in its own right^[2], has nowhere to go inside the tool itself.

Worth knowing plainly: a number of Goblin Tools' own reviews describe the Pro tier moving from a one-time purchase to a subscription. One, titled "Not a good move" (App Store review, Oct 2026)^[1], says the developer "moved the app to subscription, booting users who paid before." Another describes paying a one-time $0.99 fee in 2023 and now being asked to pay a monthly subscription for the same thing^[1]. It's a smaller, narrower version of the billing-trust issue that shows up across this whole category, worth checking the current terms on before paying.

A real pairing, not a rivalry

These two tools are genuinely complementary rather than competing. Goblin Tools is arguably the sharpest tool available for turning a big, stuck task into a concrete first step once you're ready to act. A tool built around the feeling first is for the moment before that, when shame or panic is the actual thing in the way of even getting to the task, a moment where simply holding the harsh thought as a thought rather than a fact has been shown to make it feel less convincing^[3]. Using Goblin Tools for the doing half and something else for the feeling half isn't a compromise, it's matching each tool to the job it was actually built for.