Home List vs Cozi

Both put your household’s lists and calendar in one place. The difference is how much of it you get without paying, and what happens when someone is actually standing in the shop.

Your list speaks up at the shop

Cozi’s shopping list is a list you have to remember to open. Nothing happens on its own — which is exactly when it fails, because the moment you need it is the moment you are not thinking about it.

Home List starts working when you arrive. Pin the shops you use, and if you turn up with items still unchecked your phone tells you — with the app closed, from a locked screen. It also tells the rest of your household you are there, so whoever is at home can add the thing they forgot while you are still walking the aisles. It appears on your phone before you reach the till.

That is the whole product, and no version of Cozi does it at any price.

No ads. Not on the free tier, not ever.

Cozi lists “No Ads” as a reason to buy Cozi Gold, at $39. That tells you what the free tier looks like: your family’s calendar and lists, with advertising in among them.

Home List has never shown an ad and has no plan to. Nothing about your household is for sale, and the free tier is not a place we put pressure on you.

What costs $39 there is free here

Cozi Gold’s own page lists what you are paying for: no ads, month view on your phone, calendar search, more than one reminder per event, change notifications, a birthday tracker — and Shopping Mode, the feature that keeps checked items out of your way while you shop.

In Home List all of that side is free. The month view, the calendar, the reminders, the chores, the shopping list that sorts itself into departments so a big shop reads in the order you walk it. And the arrival alert, which is the one thing on either list that works when nobody has opened an app.

Home List Premium exists — $2.99 a month or $24.99 a year — but it covers more than two shops, spending analytics and restock predictions. Everything this page is about is on the free tier.

It also tells you what the shop cost

Photograph the receipt on the way out and Home List reads the line items, matches them to what was on your list, and keeps a record of what your household actually spends and where. Over a few weeks it starts predicting what you are about to run out of.

Cozi does not do this. Most list apps do not — a list forgets an item the moment you tick it, and with it goes the only record of what anything cost.