Freedom's Mac client deserves its own look, distinct from the cross-platform pitch of the main Freedom product, because for a specific kind of user — someone who does focused work at a desk, distracted mainly by their computer, not their phone — it's an unusually hard lock. Freedom for Mac's Locked Mode is built specifically to resist the ways a determined person tries to escape a block on their own machine, and Eighty Percent Solutions has clearly invested real engineering effort into making the desktop version of that lock genuinely difficult to route around. Eighty Percent Solutions has published its own documentation walking through exactly what Locked Mode blocks and why, which is a level of technical transparency about a "strict mode" feature that several competitors in this comparison set don't offer in nearly as much detail.
What Freedom for Mac actually does
You build a blocklist of Mac apps and websites and start a timed session; in Locked Mode, Freedom for Mac is built to block quitting the app, block moving it to the Trash, and block force-quitting it via Activity Monitor, all for the duration of the session you set, closing the three most obvious routes a Mac user would normally reach for to kill an unwanted process. This is Freedom's own desktop-specific hardening, documented in its own help center, aimed at the exact ways someone would normally try to kill a blocking app running on their own computer, and it goes noticeably further than most competitors' equivalent "strict" settings. Freedom for Mac's Locked Mode sessions can also be scheduled to start automatically at a set time each workday, so the hardest version of the lock doesn't require you to remember to manually engage it every single morning before you start working.
Where Freedom for Mac is honestly the better pick
If your actual distraction problem happens at a desk, on a Mac, during work hours — not on your phone — Freedom for Mac's specific desktop-hardening (blocking Trash, blocking Activity Monitor, blocking quit) is doing something Mr. Grummel, a phone-only app, simply can't touch, because it doesn't run on a computer at all. It should be said plainly: this is a genuinely harder lock than a quiz question, and Freedom earns that comparison honestly, having built and refined this specific hardening over years of real desktop use. It's also worth noting that this level of Mac-specific hardening required real, dedicated engineering effort distinct from Freedom's mobile apps — blocking Activity Monitor specifically, for instance, is a macOS-specific technical challenge that has no direct equivalent on a phone at all.
| Feature | Freedom for Mac | Mr. Grummel |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | macOS (part of Freedom's broader cross-device product) | iOS & Android (in development) — phone only, no Mac app |
| Core mechanism | Timed session blocking, with a Mac-specific "Locked Mode" that blocks quitting, Trash and Activity Monitor force-quit | Answer a quiz question from the app's curriculum to unlock |
| Self-bypassable during Locked Mode? | No, by design, per Freedom's own help documentation, for the duration of the session | N/A — different device, phone only |
| Physical hardware required? | No | No |
| Price | No free tier; paid plans reported from roughly $3.33/mo billed annually — check freedom.to for the current figure | Not yet announced — join the waiting list |
The one mechanical difference that actually matters
This comparison is less about which friction is stronger and more about which device the problem actually lives on. Freedom for Mac's whole design is aimed at a shared, general-purpose computer where quitting, deleting, or force-quitting an app are the obvious escape routes — and it closes all three deliberately, because a Mac gives a determined user far more system-level tools to fight back with than a phone typically does. Mr. Grummel doesn't attempt that fight at all, because it isn't fighting on a computer; it's a quiz question that stands between you and one specific app on your phone, a device with a much narrower set of built-in ways to kill a background process. It's also worth being honest that a determined, sufficiently technical user could still find edge cases around any software lock on a general-purpose computer, given enough time and motivation — but Freedom for Mac has clearly closed the three most common, most obvious escape routes deliberately and by design.
Who should pick which
If your work happens on a Mac and your distraction does too, Freedom for Mac's Locked Mode is a proven, genuinely hard lock built exactly for that machine, and Mr. Grummel isn't a substitute for it in any meaningful sense. If the problem is the phone that keeps pulling your attention away from that same desk — the buzz in your pocket while you're supposed to be working — that's the specific gap Mr. Grummel is built to sit in instead, and the two tools could reasonably run side by side. It's also worth remembering that Freedom's own broader product, beyond just the Mac client, still requires you to separately install and configure a phone version if you want any coverage there at all, which is exactly the gap Mr. Grummel is built to fill on its own.