Best Chore & Allowance Apps for Kids in 2026 (12 Compared)

Prices, languages and features verified on 17 August 2026 — read from each app's own store screenshots. Written by a dad who built one of them.

By · , updated · 22 min read
Last updated August 17, 2026
A parent comparing chore apps on a smartphone while relaxing on the couch
Best chore app for kids 2026 — GrowTide parent dashboard showing kids' chore progress and rewards

Short answer: GrowTide is where I would start, for one reason that applies to any family and one that applies to some. The general one: most parents do not have a chore-tracking problem, they have a getting-kids-to-care problem, and GrowTide is built around that: money per chore that adds itself up and splits into Save, Spend and Give, coins that buy rewards the kids picked, ranks, badges and streaks, and earned screen time that runs as a live countdown instead of a promise you have to police afterwards. The specific one: if your family speaks Spanish, French, German, Italian or Portuguese, its interface is genuinely translated into all six, not just its store page.

The honest alternatives, and when they beat it: NeatKid if your kids are under nine, or if you want the cheapest app that still tracks allowance, at $4.99. Chorsee if you want a plain, un-gamified tracker; it is the only one here that advertises widgets for ticking chores off, and GrowTide has none. FamilyWall if you want a shared family calendar more than a chore app. BusyKid or Greenlight if you want a real debit card, both US-only and English-only. If it is the under-nine question that brought you here, the job list matters more than the app: start with age-appropriate chores for kids, by age and how many chores a kid should have each day.

One name you will meet and that I am not recommending: Nipto. It is the biggest chore app in France, Germany and Spain, it is well liked, and at $1.99 a month it is the cheapest here. It also has no allowance in it at all. Chores earn points, not pocket money, and it is built for partners and roommates settling who does the washing up, with kids as an add-on. It is in the tables below because you will be pointed at it, not because it does what most parents are looking for.

One thing no comparison table can settle: an app tracks the deal, it does not make one. If the problem in your house is that nothing moves until you ask, that is separate work — why kids won't do chores without being asked, and how to get kids to do chores without nagging. Settle that first and any of the twelve will hold it.

I built one of these apps, so read the rest of this knowing that. What I can offer instead of neutrality is verification, and a method: on 17 August 2026 I opened all twelve App Store listings and read their screenshots, one by one, along with the Languages field and the in-app purchase list on each page.

How I checked this, and what you should trust

All twelve are on both iOS and Android, so this is not a platform choice, but the two stores are not interchangeable. Prices differ: Google Play lists Chores & Allowance Bot's in-app purchases from $1.99 and Homey's from $0.99, while the cheapest subscription on their App Store listings is $9.99 and $6.99. So do the audiences, and where that matters it is in the app's row below. Every price elsewhere in this post is the App Store one.

Everything below is Apple's own, US storefront, read on 17 August 2026. They vary by country and change without notice, and several of these apps run lifetime and multi-year tiers that a single monthly figure hides. Check your own store before paying.

The complaints under each app come from Apple's public review feeds, read on 17 August 2026 in the reviewer's own language. I pulled more than 1,600 recent reviews across the twelve apps. The feeds are small, so treat these as existence proofs of a pattern rather than frequency measurements.

Ratings need care, so they are in the write-ups rather than a league table. Apple counts them separately in every country: Nipto has 862 ratings in the United States and 1,294 in France, and the US figure alone would understate it badly in exactly the markets this post is about. Where an app is much bigger, or much worse rated, on one of the two stores, that is in its row below.

Where an app does not advertise something, this post says "not advertised" rather than "no". It may well do it without saying so. I can only report what you can find out before installing.

What changed in this update. A lot of new chore apps have turned up since the start of the year, and the first version of this post did not consider them. It compared nine; this one compares twelve. Nipto, NeatKid and FamilyWall are in, and FamZoo is out: its App Store listing was last updated on 26 July 2018 and it is still being recommended by roundups that have not checked. Prices have moved as well. Chores & Allowance Bot now bills $9.99 a month, where the earlier version of this post listed a one-time purchase, and Nipto now has a $17.99 one-time tier alongside its subscription.

Price and languages compared

US App Store prices, verified 17 August 2026. The languages column is a count; which languages each one actually is are listed under the table.

Price, declared store languages and kid limits for 12 chore and allowance apps, verified 17 August 2026.
App Languages Monthly Yearly One-time Real debit card
GrowTide 6 $5.49 $49.99 No No
Nipto 10 $1.99 $12.99 $17.99 No
NeatKid 31 $4.99 $34.99 $79.99 No
Chores & Allowance Bot 11 $9.99 $39.99 No No
FamilyWall 11 $7.99 $44.99 No No
Chorsee English only $8.99 $39.99 $119.99 No
Homey English only $6.99 $59.99 No No
S'moresUp English only $7.99 $79.99 No No
BusyKid English only $4.00 off-store $48.00 off-store No Yes
Greenlight English only $5.99 to $19.98 off-store None listed No Yes
Acorns Early English only $4.00 off-store None listed No Yes
Cozi Family Organizer English only None listed $39.00 Gold, $79.99 Max No No

One caveat on NeatKid's prices. Its three tiers are named "Family Chores & Allowance", "Chores Tracker for Kids" and "Children Chores Chart" rather than by billing period, so the column each falls in above is my reading of the amounts, not something the listing states. Check inside the app before subscribing.

Which languages, app by app

GrowTide first, then by how many languages each one declares.

All five of the multilingual ones cover Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. Where they differ is the long tail: NeatKid adds twenty more, Chores & Allowance Bot and FamilyWall reach into Russian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese or Dutch and Swedish, and Nipto stops at ten. If the language you need is Thai, Ukrainian or Vietnamese, NeatKid is the only one of the twelve that lists it.

For every app but my own, that count is the publisher's declaration on its App Store listing. I have no way to audit whether the interface behind it is really translated, which is the whole point of a section further down. For GrowTide the count is the six translated interfaces the app ships.

Seven of the twelve apps are English-only, which removes them from consideration entirely for a family that does not read English — including the three card apps, which are also restricted to their home markets.

BusyKid, Greenlight and Acorns Early publish no in-app purchases on the App Store at all. They bill outside it, which is why their rows above are marked "off-store": those three figures come from each company's own pricing page rather than from Apple, and they can change without the store listing ever moving.

Pros and cons, app by app

The pros come from each app's store listing, its screenshots and its own website. The cons come from those plus Apple's public review feeds, read on 17 August 2026 in the reviewer's own language. Ordinary features sit in here alongside the standout ones, because most of these apps do most of the ordinary things well.

What "a kid's own view" actually means. Nearly all of these give a child their own screen. Whether that means creating an account for your child is a different question, and most listings never answer it. Six of the twelve document it. GrowTide, Chorsee and BusyKid never create a child account: GrowTide links a device with a six-character code that expires in five minutes, Chorsee uses a six-digit household ID with an optional per-child PIN, and BusyKid has the child enter the parent's email address plus a five-letter code. Homey and Chores & Allowance Bot put the whole family on one login: Homey's FAQ says "kids can login with just the shared family password", and Chores & Allowance Bot tells you to "login to the app with the same email and password". Cozi has no kid mode at all. The other six do not say, so ask before you sign a child up for anything.

Pros and cons of 12 chore and allowance apps for kids, from store listings, store screenshots, each app's own website and Apple's review feeds, 17 August 2026.
App Pros Cons
GrowTide The interface itself is translated into six languages, not just the store page. Earned screen time runs as a live countdown that the parent starts, pauses and stops. Unlimited kids on one price. Twelve ranks, badges and streaks for children who need a reason to care. Focus Mode hides streaks and the leaderboard for a child who finds them stressful. Chores rotate between siblings, and a Free-for-All pool lets any child claim a job. No account or password is ever created for a child. No home-screen widgets, no debit card and no family chat. The free plan covers chores, coins, XP, the twelve ranks, badges and streaks; allowance, screen time, photo proof and rotation come with Pro, after a 14-day trial. And it is new, with 6 App Store ratings, so there is no track record to go on yet.
Nipto Cheapest here by a wide margin, at $1.99 a month, $12.99 a year or $17.99 once. Ten declared languages. Recurring schedules, chores assigned to several people at once, an approval step, and a weekly Scores leaderboard. Well rated where it is biggest: 4.62 in France across 1,294 ratings, and 4.70 in Spain. Much larger than its US listing suggests, with a 500,000+ Google Play install bracket and 4.5 across 6,720 Play reviews. No allowance, pay or pocket money anywhere in it. It is built for partners and roommates, with children as an add-on. The free tier stops at five recurring task groups. Spanish reviewers cannot find how to switch the app into Spanish, and German reviewers report it hanging at signup and a broken purchase button. Its website serves nothing at all to anything that does not run JavaScript.
NeatKid Thirty-one declared languages, the widest here. A picture-based reward catalogue priced in stars, which works for children too young to care about a balance in dollars. Photo proof, nineteen task presets, daily-progress notifications. At $4.99 it is the cheapest app here that tracks allowance. Its own site says it is designed for kids aged five to nine. Steady across both stores: 4.74 on Apple and 4.5 on Google Play, in a 100,000+ install bracket. Its three tiers are named "Family Chores & Allowance", "Chores Tracker for Kids" and "Children Chores Chart", with no billing period on any of them, so you cannot tell a monthly plan from a one-time purchase before you buy. The website is English-only despite those thirty-one declared app languages. Reviewers report being logged out at random and then unable to get back in, and edits that silently fail to save.
Chores & Allowance Bot Eleven languages and the deepest money features here short of a real card: per-child accounts, named savings goals, a running ledger and a graph. Chores rotate between assignees, can be left up-for-grabs with a dollar value attached, and take photo proof. The free tier manages as many children as you want. It reads chore names and amounts aloud for children who cannot read yet. Well established on both stores, with 10,844 Apple US ratings at 4.52 and 4.5 on Google Play in a 100,000+ install bracket. At $9.99 it is the most expensive monthly subscription in this comparison, so the $39.99 annual plan is the sane way in. Children sign in with the same email and password as the parent. The interface looks its age, and the last store update was December 2025. Savings goals sit behind the paywall, and one US reviewer reports the app is unusable with a screen reader.
FamilyWall Eleven declared languages and, unusually, a genuinely localized website in six of them. The most installed app in this comparison once you count Android, in a 5,000,000+ Google Play bracket with 4.7 across 101,000 Play reviews, alongside 4.85 across 22,139 Apple US ratings. By a wide margin the biggest localized family app in France and Germany. Shared calendar, shopping lists, documents, budget tracker, meal planner, real-time location and family messenger. The word "chore" does not appear once on its homepage. Chores are in the app, but they are not what it is selling, so judge it as a family organizer that also tracks them. Reviewers report data loss after updates and difficulty cancelling, recurring across the Spanish, Italian, French and Brazilian stores.
Chorsee The most complete plain chore tracker here, at 4.58 across 11,504 US ratings. The only one of the twelve that advertises widgets for ticking chores off from the home or lock screen. An explicit Everyone, Anyone or Rotate control, subtasks, photo proof, per-chore dollar values, a per-kid ledger and a weekly chore grid. No child account: a six-digit household ID with an optional per-child PIN. English only, and no localized website. It refuses gamification on principle and says so outright: no coins, no badges, no games. That is a deliberate stance rather than a gap, but it makes it the wrong app for a child who needs the game. It is also an iPhone app in practice: against those 11,504 Apple ratings it has 140 Google Play reviews and a 10,000+ install bracket, and the widgets it is best known for are an iOS feature. On Android you are buying something much less proven.
Homey Per-kid wallets, a Reports tab with weekly completion stats, approve-all, savings jars for named goals, screen time as a goal, and a family chat thread in the same app. Free for a family of up to three accounts, and Premium lifts that to unlimited members. The free tier stops at three accounts, which is a parent and two children. Children log in with the shared family password. English only. Its two stores disagree more than anyone else's here: 4.05 on the US App Store against 2.7 on Google Play across 681 reviews, and 2.77 on the German App Store. Last updated January 2026. A German reviewer's app opened in Spanish with no way to change it, and several reviewers could not delete their account.
S'moresUp Rotate, collaborate and compete chore types, photo proof, per-member dashboards, thirteen awards and badges, per-chore age locks from six upwards, and a family calendar. The free tier includes unlimited family members and devices plus a 45-day run at the paid features. Apple App of the Day in February 2021. Its own pricing page now promotes a successor app, It's a Family Thing!, and says the price is rising to $9.99 a month. The last store update was October 2025. English only, and its Play rating has slipped to 3.1 across 1,030 reviews. Photo proof breaking and staying broken is the repeated complaint, with reviewers saying support did not fix it, alongside crashes and a setup they find over-complicated. 44 of 150 recent reviews sit at one or two stars.
BusyKid A real Visa debit card with ATM, Apple Pay and Google Pay, earnings that split into Spend, Share and Save-Invest, and genuine stock investing behind the invest side. A BusyPay QR code lets relatives top the account up, and it is widely installed, in a 500,000+ Google Play bracket. Its own site prices it at $4 a month billed annually. Children sign in with the parent's email address and a five-letter code rather than an account of their own. US only: the cards cannot be shipped outside the United States and investing is open to US citizens only. English only. Getting money back out is the recurring complaint, with failed stock trades, slow transfers and unresponsive support. 72 of 150 recent US reviews are one or two stars.
Greenlight The most reviewed app here, at 488,121 Apple US ratings and 4.8, with another 85,200 Google Play reviews at 4.7 in a 1,000,000+ install bracket. Debit cards with per-store spending controls, chores on recurring schedules, savings paying up to 6%, investing, a Level Up financial-literacy track, and real-time location and SOS alerts. Four published tiers on its own site, starting at $5.99 a month. The cards cover up to five kids, and the 6% savings rate needs the $15.98 tier rather than the entry one. The chore feature is one tab of a much larger product. English only and US only. Cancelling, overdraft charges on empty accounts and account lockouts dominate the complaints, and 62 of 150 recent US reviews are one or two stars.
Acorns Early Formerly GoHenry. Per-child tabs split earnings into allowance, tasks done and still to do, savings goals autosave, investing carries a 1% match up to $7,000 a year, and parents get real-time notification of every purchase. Thirty-five card designs, which matters more to a nine-year-old than it does to you. 4.65 on Apple and 4.5 on Google Play, in a 100,000+ install bracket. $4 a month on its own site. The monthly fee arrived after Acorns bought GoHenry, and reviewers have not forgiven it. English only and US only. Refusals to refund and customer service dominate the complaints: 77 of 150 recent US reviews are one or two stars, the worst ratio in this comparison.
Cozi Family Organizer 396,376 Apple US ratings at 4.81, another 119,000 Google Play reviews at 4.7, and a 5,000,000+ install bracket level with FamilyWall. It is also the first result Apple itself returns for "chores family". A colour-coded shared family calendar, shopping and to-do lists, a recipe box with meal planning, and reminders that nag other people so you do not have to. The free tier is generous, and one upgrade covers everyone in the family. It is barely a chore app. Chores appear once in the store listing, as an example of a to-do list, and there is no allowance, no points, no rewards, no approval step and no kid mode. Gold is $39 a year and Max is $79. English only. Sign-in failures and a widget that insists you are signed out are the most repeated complaints, alongside long-time users who say features have been removed rather than added.

When not to buy mine. If you want to tick chores off from a lock-screen widget, buy Chorsee, the only one here that has them. If you want the chores to end on a real debit card, that is BusyKid, Greenlight or Acorns Early, and only if you are in the US. If you want a family chat in the same app, Homey has one. And if what you actually want is a plain tracker with no game layer, Chorsee is built that way on purpose and GrowTide is the opposite of it.

What GrowTide genuinely does differently

Two things, and only two.

Earned screen time runs as a live timer. NeatKid sells "Extra screen time" as a one-star item in its reward catalogue and Homey tracks screen time as a goal, but in both the parent hands over the time and polices it. In GrowTide the earned minutes run down on a countdown inside the app, the parent controls it, and the parent can stop it. That is a narrow difference, and it is the one I would actually defend. Whether the minutes should be the reward at all is the prior question, and I weighed the trap against the tool in screen time as a reward for chores.

A third thing nearly made this list and does not deserve to: one price covering every child, $5.49 a month or $49.99 a year with unlimited kids on one family account. It is genuinely useful, but it is not rare. Homey advertises unlimited family members too, and Nipto's subscription covers the whole household rather than each person.

The interface is translated, not just the store page. This is the difference that matters most outside English, and it is covered in the next section.

Which chore apps actually work in Spanish, French, German, Italian or Portuguese?

Three are worth shortlisting: GrowTide, Nipto and NeatKid. GrowTide is where I would start. Not because it lists the most languages; it lists the fewest of the three. Because the question that actually decides this is not how many languages the store page claims, but whether the app switches language when your child opens it. That is a different question, and most roundups never ask it.

Five of the twelve declare more than English on their App Store listing: GrowTide (6 languages), Nipto (10), Chores & Allowance Bot (11), FamilyWall (11) and NeatKid (31). The other seven (Chorsee, Homey, S'moresUp, BusyKid, Greenlight, Acorns Early and Cozi) are English-only, which ends the conversation for a family that does not read English.

But a declared language is not a translated app, and this is where most roundups stop looking. Reading reviews in the reviewers' own languages turns up a specific, repeated complaint: the store listing is localized and the app is not.

So the honest version of the language question is not "who declares the most languages", since NeatKid declares thirty-one, but "whose app is actually in your language when you open it". GrowTide ships six translated interfaces and no more; that is a smaller number than three of the apps above and a more useful one.

One more thing, if you are comparing store pages in your own country: nipto.app serves 785 bytes of HTML and no readable content. Open it in a browser and JavaScript builds a normal marketing site, so a person sees a real page. Anything that does not run JavaScript sees nothing at all. Checked 17 August 2026.

The twelve apps, one by one

GrowTide

Best for: families who want the app itself in Spanish, French, German, Italian or Portuguese, and kids who need a reason to care.

Kids get their own view on their own device, linked with a six-character code. GrowTide never creates an account or a password for a child. They see daily jobs, streaks, XP, 12 ranks from Seedling to GrowTide, badges, a coin Marketplace, 45 avatars to unlock, and hidden badges that show only a hint until they are earned. Parents build recurring jobs with step-by-step checklists, rotate a job between siblings on a drag-to-order turn list that hands off daily or weekly, drop jobs into a Free-for-All pool any child can claim, and approve in one tap with photo proof that auto-deletes after 90 days. Allowance is earned per job: each job carries a value, and the app separates what a child has already earned this week from what is still projected from jobs due, then splits the balance into Save, Spend and Give with an optional interest rate on savings. Earned screen time runs as a live countdown the parent starts, pauses and stops, with a per-session cap; it never locks the device. Family Insights adds completion rates, streaks and a per-child chore-reliability breakdown. Focus Mode shows a child fewer jobs and hides streaks and the leaderboard when the pressure is not helping. A good deal is Pro: rotation, Free-for-All, photo proof, the leaderboard and, importantly, allowance and screen-time rewards themselves. The free plan gives unlimited jobs, coins, XP, the twelve ranks, badges, streaks and Focus Mode. Unlimited kids, $5.49/month or $49.99/year after a 14-day trial. Does not do: home-screen widgets, a real debit card, or a family chat. What people complain about: nothing yet, which is a caveat rather than a boast. GrowTide has 6 App Store ratings, too few to read anything into either way. Judge it on the feature list and the free trial rather than the score.

Nipto

Best for: adults splitting housework between them, partners and roommates. Not for paying a child an allowance.

At $1.99 a month, $12.99 a year or $17.99 once, Nipto is less than half the price of anything else here. It is built around sharing housework evenly rather than parent-and-child: chores carry points, land on recurring schedules ("every Monday, Wednesday, Friday"), can be assigned to several people at once, and go through an approval step. Its "Scores" screen ranks the whole household on a weekly bar chart. Biggest in France, Germany and Spain, bigger there than in the US, and well rated everywhere: 4.62 in France across 1,294 ratings, 4.70 in Spain, 4.70 in the United States and 4.47 in Germany, all checked 17 August 2026. Know what you are buying, though: there is no money anywhere in Nipto. Its description never uses the words allowance, pay, pocket money or cash, and it opens with "tired of arguing about who does the most housework?", pitched at "you and your partner, your family, or your roommates". Chores earn points, players compete, and at the end of the week one winner claims a reward. Kids are supported as extra accounts rather than being the point. If what you want is a child earning their allowance, this is the wrong app however cheap it is. One thing worth clearing up, because reviewers keep asking: the $1.99 covers the household, not each person. A US reviewer answers the rumour directly, that "people were saying you have to pay to add someone, but that is NOT true". The real limit is the free tier, which stops at five recurring task groups. Nipto publishes nothing to confirm any of this: nipto.app, and the terms-of-service link on its own App Store listing, both serve the same blank page. What people complain about: Spanish users cannot find how to switch the app to Spanish; German reviewers report it hanging at signup and a broken purchase button; Spanish reviewers hit a five-task cap on the free tier.

NeatKid

Best for: younger children, roughly four to nine, and the widest language list here.

Thirty-one declared languages. Chores are worth stars, and stars buy things from a picture-based reward catalogue — extra screen time for one star, a trip to the cinema for five, a toy for ten, money for twenty. Nineteen task presets get you set up quickly, and daily-progress notifications tell you what got done. Bright, simple, and aimed squarely at kids too young to care about a balance in dollars. What people complain about: being logged out at random and then unable to get back in, and edits that silently fail to save. Several reviewers report losing access for days.

Chores & Allowance Bot

Best for: parents who want a full allowance ledger and are willing to pay for it.

Eleven languages and the deepest money features here short of a real card: per-child accounts with named savings goals, a running ledger, a graph, and weekly allowance. Chores rotate between assignees, can be left "up-for-grabs" with a dollar value attached, and children add photo proof. The interface looks its age. The catch is price: at $9.99 a month it is the most expensive monthly subscription in this comparison — the $39.99 annual plan is the sane way in. What people complain about: savings goals sitting behind the paywall, and one US reviewer reports the app is unusable with a screen reader.

FamilyWall

Best for: families who want one shared calendar more than they want a chore chart.

The six screenshots FamilyWall leads with are a shared calendar, shopping lists, documents, a budget tracker and a meal planner — chores are in there, but they are not what this app is selling. Eleven languages, and by a wide margin the biggest genuinely localized family app in France and Germany. Judge it as a family organizer that also tracks chores. What people complain about: data loss after updates and difficulty cancelling, recurring across the Spanish, Italian, French and Brazilian stores.

Chorsee

Best for: English-speaking parents who want a clean tracker and actively do not want a game.

The most complete plain chore app in this set. An explicit Everyone / Anyone / Rotate control with "rotate every N days, weeks or months", subtasks, photo proof, per-chore dollar values, a running per-kid balance with a ledger, a weekly chore grid, reward goals with progress bars, and the only advertised chore-ticking widgets in this set, so you can tick chores off from the lock screen. It also refuses gamification on principle: no coins, no badges, no games, stated outright in its listing. That is a design stance, not a gap, and for some families it is exactly right. English only. One thing the App Store score hides: Chorsee is an iPhone app in practice. Its 11,504 Apple ratings sit against 140 Google Play reviews and a 10,000+ install bracket, and the widgets are iOS. On Android it is a much less tested choice. What people complain about: remarkably little. Across 185 recent US and UK reviews the one- and two-star ones are mostly noise rather than substance, including a fair number of people who simply dislike chores.

Homey

Best for: English-speaking families who want savings jars and a family chat in the same app.

Per-kid wallets, a Reports tab with weekly completion stats, approve-all, savings jars for specific goals, screen time as a goal, and a family chat thread. Its own site says unlimited family members. English only, and its German App Store rating sits at 2.77 against 4.05 in the US. What people complain about: a German user whose app opened in Spanish with no way to change it, and several who could not delete their account.

S'moresUp

Best for: big families who want structure — and badges.

Advertises its feature list as a verb chain: assign, schedule, remember, rotate, remind, report, nudge, poke "and even beg". Behind that are per-member dashboards with point totals, nine rewards, three savings goals, thirteen awards and badges, per-chore age locks, photo proof and a family calendar. Apple App of the Day in February 2021. English only, and its Play rating has slipped to 3.1 across 1,030 reviews. What people complain about: photo proof breaking and staying broken, with reviewers saying support did not fix it, plus repeated crashes and a setup they find over-complicated. 44 of 150 recent reviews sit at one or two stars.

BusyKid

Best for: US families who want chores to end in a real card, and real investing.

Chores carry dollar values, and what kids earn lands on an actual Visa debit card with ATM, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Earnings split into Spend, Share and Save-Invest, and the invest side buys real stock. A BusyPay QR code lets relatives top the account up. English only, US only, billed outside the App Store. What people complain about: getting money back out. Failed stock trades, slow transfers and unresponsive support recur, and 72 of 150 recent US reviews are one or two stars.

Greenlight

Best for: US families who want spending controls and location safety alongside chores.

The default English-language answer to "app to pay my kids", and the biggest app here by ratings. Debit cards with per-store controls, chores with recurring schedules, savings goals earning up to 6%, investing, a "Level Up" financial-literacy track, and real-time location and SOS alerts. The chore feature is one tab of a much larger product. English only, billed outside the App Store. What people complain about: cancelling, overdraft charges on empty accounts, and being locked out of the account. 62 of 150 recent US reviews are one or two stars.

Acorns Early

Best for: US families who want allowance and investing in one place.

Formerly GoHenry. Per-child tabs show earnings split into allowance, tasks done and still to do; savings goals autosave; investing carries a 1% match up to $7,000 a year; parents get real-time notifications of every purchase. Thirty-five card designs, which matters more to a nine-year-old than it does to you. English only, billed outside the App Store. What people complain about: the monthly fee that arrived after Acorns bought GoHenry, refusals to refund, and customer service. 77 of 150 recent US reviews are one or two stars, the worst ratio in this comparison.

Cozi Family Organizer

Best for: families whose real problem is the calendar, not the chores.

Second only to Greenlight by size, at 396,376 US ratings, and the first result Apple itself returns for "chores family", which is why it is in this comparison despite barely being a chore app. What it actually does is a colour-coded shared family calendar, shopping and to-do lists, a recipe box with meal planning, and reminders that nag other people so you do not have to. Chores appear exactly once in its store listing, as an example of a to-do list: "chore checklists for the kids". There is no allowance, no points, no rewards, no approval step and no kid mode, and the words money, reward and point appear nowhere in its description. Free to use, with Cozi Gold at $39 a year and a newer Cozi Max tier at $79 on Cozi's own site. The App Store carries older Gold tiers from $29.99 up to $59.99. English only. What people complain about: signing in. Login failures and a widget that insists you are signed out are the most repeated complaints, alongside long-time users who say features have been removed rather than added.

Also on the shelf

Search "chores family" in either store and you will scroll past a lot of apps that are not in this comparison. Two are real but small: Chap (284 US ratings) and Chorly (225), both English-only, both competent-looking trackers that simply have not been used by enough people to judge yet. Homsy is worth a look if language matters, with 26 declared languages on 26 ratings. The rest is mostly brand new: Talkio, TaskTike and SmartChores each had zero ratings on 17 August 2026, and Chorefy, iChores and Chore Quest had between one and five between them. That is not a criticism, everything starts somewhere. It is worth knowing that a top-ten store result can be an app nobody has used yet.

Which one should you pick?

None of the twelve decides the two things that actually set the temperature in a house: how much allowance to give by age, and whether allowance should be tied to chores at all. Settle those, then pick the app that tracks them.

Frequently asked questions

Which chore apps for kids are available in Spanish, French, German, Italian or Portuguese?

All twelve are available in English, so this question only narrows the field if you need something else. Five of the twelve declare more than English on their App Store listing: GrowTide (6 languages), Nipto (10), Chores & Allowance Bot (11), FamilyWall (11) and NeatKid (31). Chorsee, Homey, S'moresUp, BusyKid, Greenlight, Acorns Early and Cozi are English-only. A declared language is not a translated app — reviewers of several multilingual-listed apps report they cannot switch the interface out of English, so check the app itself and not only the store page.

What is the cheapest chore app for kids?

Nipto, at $1.99 a month or $12.99 a year, with a $17.99 one-time option. One caveat: Nipto has no allowance or money features at all, so if the point is a child earning pocket money it is the wrong app however cheap it is. The cheapest that does track allowance is NeatKid at $4.99, then GrowTide at $5.49 a month or $49.99 a year. Chores & Allowance Bot is the most expensive monthly at $9.99.

Which chore app lets kids earn screen time?

GrowTide, and it is the only one of the twelve that runs the earned time as a live countdown inside the app, which the parent starts, pauses and stops. Two others advertise screen time as a reward without a timer: NeatKid lists "Extra screen time" as a one-star item in its reward catalogue, and Homey shows screen time as a goal. In both, the parent hands the time over and polices it.

Do any chore apps rotate chores between children?

Yes, four of them. GrowTide hands a job to the next child on a drag-to-order turn list, daily or weekly, on its Pro plan. Chorsee has an explicit Everyone / Anyone / Rotate control with a "rotate every N days, weeks or months" setting, Chores & Allowance Bot has "rotate between assignees", and S'moresUp advertises rotation in its feature list.

Which chore apps come with a real debit card for kids?

BusyKid, Greenlight and Acorns Early. All three bill outside the App Store, so no price shows on their store listing, but all three publish one on their own site: BusyKid $4 a month billed annually, Acorns Early $4 a month, and Greenlight from $5.99 to $19.98 a month across four tiers, covering up to five kids. All three are English-only and US-only.

Is there a free chore app for kids?

All twelve are free to download and all twelve put meaningful features behind a paid tier. Nipto's free tier is capped at five tasks, a limit its Spanish reviewers mention specifically. If you want to pay once rather than subscribe, Nipto ($17.99), NeatKid ($79.99) and Chorsee ($119.99) each sell a one-time tier.

The data behind this post

Everything above is compiled on one page as reusable reference data: chore app data for 12 apps across 7 storefronts. It carries the country availability matrix, the full declared-language lists, pricing including the three apps that bill outside the store, how each app signs a child in, and size on both stores. It is free to reuse with attribution under CC BY 4.0, and it is dated, so you can see how stale it has got.

Sources

Every figure above was read from the App Store listing, the Google Play listing, the app's own store screenshots, or the app's own website on 17 August 2026, US storefront unless stated. Review quotes come from Apple's per-country customer review feeds, read in the reviewer's own language. GrowTide's own details come from the app's feature documentation rather than its store listing.

Company websites, all checked 17 August 2026, for pricing and account details the store listings do not carry:

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