Freedom and Cold Turkey: when you want a sledgehammer

You are done with reminders. You want the one that cannot be switched off.

Two names come back at that point, and they are Freedom and Cold Turkey. Every list of blockers has both, and most of them sit the two side by side as though picking one were a matter of taste. It is not. They are barely the same kind of object. If you have been reading Cold Turkey Blocker reviews and Freedom app alternative round-ups in the same evening, you have been comparing a machine to a subscription.

So here is the answer first, because you have four tabs open and a card in your hand.

Cold Turkey does not run on an iPhone. Not a limited version, not a companion app, not a browser extension you sideload. Their own FAQ puts it plainly: "Linux, ChromeOS, Android, iOS or other operating systems are not supported." If the screen that eats your evening is the phone, that decision is already made and you can close two of the tabs.

And Freedom's free plan cannot lock a session. Locked Mode, the setting whose entire job is stopping you quitting, is Premium. So is any session longer than two hours, and so is anything scheduled ahead of time. The free tier is a demonstration of the idea. The sledgehammer starts at $3.33 a month.

Cold Turkey is a desktop program, and that settles most of this on its own

Windows and macOS. Pro costs $45, once, with no subscription anywhere in it, which in a category built on renewals is worth saying out loud.

The free version blocks websites, keeps a list of exceptions, runs blocks on a timer and shows you statistics. Application blocking is Pro. Every locking feature is Pro. So free Cold Turkey is a website blocker you can turn off, which is a fine thing to test with and not the thing you came here for.

The locks are why people talk about it. Pro will hold a block until a time you name, or across a range of days, or behind a password, or until a countdown finishes, or until you have typed out a string of randomised characters, or until the computer has been restarted. You can stack them. There is also Frozen Turkey, which is not a block on any particular app: it locks the machine, or logs you out, or shuts it down, for a length of time you set before it starts, and while it is running you cannot get into the settings to argue.

It is the only tool here that turns off the computer rather than the website.

What it costs you is the right to change your mind. Lock the working day at eight on Monday morning, and at three in the afternoon a client asks you to look at the account you locked. Depending on which lock you chose, that is a wait, or several minutes of copying random characters into a box, or nothing at all until you have restarted the machine and lost what was open.

Which is the product working exactly as designed. It is also a bill, and you pay it on the days you were right the first time. People who get on with Cold Turkey are people whose week has a shape they can describe in advance. People who bounce off it are usually people whose Tuesday does not.

Freedom's real feature is that it is on every device at once

Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android, Chromebook. One session syncs across all of them, so starting a block on the laptop takes the phone down with it. Nothing else in this piece does that, and if you already know that a phone-only fix lasts about eleven days, cross-device is probably the thing you were actually shopping for. If you want the best blocker for Mac and iPhone in one purchase, there is exactly one product on this page that covers both, and it is not ours.

On the iPhone, Freedom says it uses Apple's Screen Time and VPN frameworks to hold apps and websites. That is not a criticism, it is the only door Apple leaves open. Every third-party blocker on iOS goes through the same one.

The Mac is where it gets interesting, and where the two halves of this category stop resembling each other. Apple's shielding frameworks, the ones that let one app put a screen in front of another, are listed for iOS, iPadOS and Mac Catalyst. There is no macOS entry. So on a desktop nobody inherits Apple's enforcement: every blocker has to build its own, from nothing, against an operating system that assumes you are the administrator. That is why the desktop tools feel so much more homemade and so much more brutal at the same time.

Two things to know before you subscribe. Website exceptions, the setting where you allow one site and block the rest of the web, are Mac and Windows only; on the phone you get the blunt version. And Freedom is shaped like sessions, which are things you start or things you scheduled earlier, and recurring schedules are Premium. If 10:47 on a Tuesday was not on the calendar, nothing happens at 10:47 on a Tuesday.

The money: free plan, then $8.99 a month, or $3.33 a month billed yearly, or $99.50 once for the Forever plan, which the site currently lists against $199. The free plan will start a session by hand, for up to two hours, and will let you quit it whenever you like.

What both of them ask of you is the same thing

Cold Turkey wants you to lock a block on Sunday for Thursday. Freedom wants you to schedule the session. Underneath the two very different products is one identical demand: a decision made in advance, by a calmer person, about what you may do later.

That technique is not a trick and it is not weak. Given a calendar, a sledgehammer is unbeatable. Nine to five, a dissertation, a deadline with a date on it, a Sunday you have already promised to somebody. If your problem has a shape you can describe on Monday, buy one of these two and stop reading comparison posts.

Three honest paths, and the first two are not us

If the laptop is where the evening goes, buy Cold Turkey Pro. Forty-five dollars, once, and nothing else on this page is close on a desktop. Frozen Turkey and the restart lock have no equivalent anywhere in the phone half of this category. Try the free version first alongside the free ways to block a site on a Mac, and if the free ways hold, keep your $45.

If it moves between devices and you keep a calendar, buy Freedom Premium. One session across the phone and the laptop is a genuine thing that no stack of built-in settings reproduces. Budget for the subscription rather than the free plan, because the free plan will not lock, and an unlockable session is a reminder with a login.

If it is the phone, after ten, and it never books itself in, neither of them is your answer. Not because they are bad. Because they are scheduled, and your problem is not.

What a standing rule costs instead

The alternative to a sledgehammer is not a lighter sledgehammer. It is something that was already there, at 10:47 on a Tuesday, because it never went off duty and nobody had to remember to start it.

Which is the part where we admit we make one. Scrappy is a small scruffy dog who stands in front of the apps you name. He knows three rules and no fourth: quiet hours, a daily limit, and an open limit, which is a cap on how many times a day you may look. You set them once and then you stop thinking about them, because there is no session to begin.

He is not a wall, and that is the honest difference between him and everything above. Knock and he answers. Politely the first time, surprised the second, firm the third, and by the fourth he is one word long. Getting past him costs a treat, and treats come from walking, roughly two thousand steps for one, and one buys five minutes. They are not for sale. They never will be. Each app also gets a resistance level: negotiable apps open for a treat, firm apps make you sit for ten seconds first, and absolute apps mean he will not take the treat at all, which is as close to Frozen Turkey as a phone reasonably gets.

The safety rails are the same on the free tier as the paid one. Removal lock closes the eleven o'clock delete-and-reinstall loop, and switching it back off takes a day, which is deliberately longer than an urge lasts. There is one emergency pass a month, for boarding passes and real emergencies, and he does not scold you for using it. There is no account and no sign-up, and your Screen Time is drawn by a sandboxed Apple extension that cannot phone home.

Free Scrappy is one whole rule, uncrippled, plus every rail above. Pro is $19.99 a year, $4.99 a month, or $39.99 paid once. That is the one place we will be smug in a piece like this: the free version can lock.

And the limit, because a comparison that only flatters the author is worth nothing. He is on the iPhone. There is no Mac app yet. One is coming, and until the day it actually ships, a laptop problem is better served by Cold Turkey or by Freedom, and we would rather write that down than have you find it out in week two.

The three of them, on one page

Read the bottom row rather than the price row. It is the only one that describes what happens to you at eleven at night, and it is the row people discover last, usually about four days after paying.

If what you want is the ranking rather than the reasoning, we put every one of these on a single axis and timed how long each takes to get past. Cold Turkey wins that one outright, and it should.