Forest is the original focus-timer game: stay off your phone and a tree grows, leave early and it withers — used by tens of millions, with real trees planted through a partner charity. Paused is a different shape of app, so this is a comparison rather than a pitch — the table starts with what Forest does better.
| Forest | Paused | |
|---|---|---|
| Known for | Forest is the original focus-timer game: stay off your phone and a tree grows, leave early and it withers — used by tens of millions, with real trees planted through a partner charity. | Block Schedules that switch your chosen apps off at set times and back on afterwards, one-tap Focus sessions for right now, and a streak that counts the days you kept the block. |
| Genuinely better at | Motivation for a single session. A growing tree, friends planting together and real-world trees make a 25-minute focus block feel worth something. | Paused is for the recurring case: a Block Schedule that fires every night or every workday without you starting a timer, plus a streak. |
| Day to day it feels like | Focus time grows something or scores something — trees, plants, points, a character, a leaderboard — so the reward for staying off the phone is visible. | A small, boring wall. You pick the apps, pick the hours, and they stop opening — no coins, no plants, no hardware, no reasons to type. A calm Paused screen where the app used to be. |
…you want a focus timer with a reward you can see and share. Paused is a schedule with a streak.
We would rather you kept an app that fits than switched and quietly turned it off after a fortnight. A blocker you have disabled is not a blocker.
Said up front, because this is the part comparison pages usually leave out.
Get Paused — free on the App StoreGet →