Standro vs Stretchly: which one do you actually need?

Fair warning before anything else: I make one of these two apps. I'm going to try to be straight about it anyway, because there is a real answer here and it isn't always mine. Stretchly is a good piece of software, it's free, and for a certain kind of person it's the better pick. If that's you, I'd rather you find that out in the first two minutes than after paying me three dollars.

The two apps look similar from a distance. Both live in your menu bar. Both tell you to take breaks. The difference is what they think a break is, and that difference decides which one you'll still have installed in a month.

What Stretchly does

Stretchly is an open source break reminder, released under a permissive BSD licence and free to use. It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, built as an Electron app, which is how it covers three platforms with one codebase. You install it from a DMG or a Homebrew cask.

Out of the box it runs two kinds of break. Short ones, roughly twenty seconds every ten minutes, and longer ones, around five minutes every half hour after a couple of the short ones. When a break arrives, it takes over the screen and gives you something to do: stretch ideas, eye exercises, small suggestions you can edit or replace with your own. You can postpone a break once, or skip it, and it backs off on its own when you've been idle for a while.

Those numbers are the defaults, and nearly all of it is configurable, including whether breaks are full screen at all. But the defaults tell you what the app is for. It wants to interrupt you, on purpose, and give the interruption some structure.

What Standro does

Standro is a Mac-only app, $2.99 once on the App Store, no subscription and no account. It puts an icon in your menu bar, and at the interval you choose it sends one quiet notification saying it's time to stand. That's the whole interaction. Nothing takes over the screen. Nothing waits for you to confirm. If you're mid-sentence, you finish the sentence.

There are no exercises, no stretch suggestions, no timed break to sit through. The app has no opinion about what you do once you're up. It also has a sit/stand mode for standing desks, where it alternates sitting and standing phases and the menu bar icon shows which one you're in, and it stays quiet during Focus and Do Not Disturb.

It isn't an Electron app. There's no bundled browser engine, which is most of why the download is around ten megabytes. I'm not going to pretend that matters to everyone. It matters to some people, and those people usually know who they are.

The real difference is what a break means

This is the whole thing, and everything else is detail.

Stretchly treats a break as an event with a shape. It has a start, a duration, a suggested activity, and an end. The full-screen overlay isn't a design accident, it's the mechanism. If the break didn't block you, you'd skip it, and if you skip it, you didn't rest your eyes. The app is built by someone who understood that people are very good at ignoring gentle suggestions.

Standro treats a break as a trigger. It says "now would be a good moment" and gets out of the way. Whether you stand for ninety seconds or ignore it entirely is your business. It assumes you're an adult with a reason to be looking at that screen, and that a tool which fights you for control is a tool you'll uninstall by Thursday.

Both positions are defensible. They're just aimed at different people. One of them is right for you and it depends almost entirely on whether you actually take a break when nothing forces you to.

Pick Stretchly if

You want guided breaks. If left alone you will not stretch, and you know it, so having the app hand you something to do for twenty seconds is the point rather than the annoyance.

You need the interruption to be real. A notification you can glance at and dismiss is a notification you'll dismiss forever. A screen that goes away only after the break is finished is what actually gets you off the chair.

You use more than a Mac. Same app, same settings, on Windows and Linux too. Standro has nothing to offer you here.

You care about open source, or you want to read the code, change the break ideas, or run a modified build. Standro is a closed App Store binary. If that's a dealbreaker on principle, it's a dealbreaker, and I'm not going to argue you out of it.

Or you simply don't want to pay for this. It's a legitimate reason and Stretchly is a genuinely good free app, not a crippled one.

Pick Standro if

Full-screen overlays make you want to throw the laptop. Some people find them helpful. Others find them a small violence against concentration, especially if the break lands mid-thought or during a call. If you've tried an overlay app and quit it in a week, you already know which camp you're in.

You don't want a ritual. You don't need exercise suggestions. You need to be told the time has passed, because that's the only part your brain fails at.

You have a standing desk and want the sit/stand rotation handled. As far as I can tell Stretchly doesn't do posture alternation, it does breaks. If what you want is "tell me when to raise the desk and when to lower it", that's a different job.

You want a small Mac thing that feels like a Mac thing, buys once, and never asks you for anything again. No account, no login, nothing leaving your machine.

The things that don't decide it

Price, mostly. The gap is three dollars, once. If you're choosing between these two apps on cost, you're choosing on the wrong axis. Pick the one you'll still be running in March.

Feature counts, definitely. Stretchly has more settings than Standro, and that's on purpose in both directions. More knobs is better when you want to tune the thing, and worse when you want to install it and forget it exists.

And whether either of them is objectively better. They aren't competing to be the same app. One is a break coach. The other is a clock with manners.

How to actually decide

Stretchly is free, so install it first. Give it a real week, defaults untouched, with the full-screen breaks on. That's the fastest test I know, because your reaction on day three tells you everything. If the breaks feel like a helpful hand on the shoulder, you're done, you found your app, and you didn't pay anything.

If instead you find yourself dreading them, hammering the skip link, or quitting the app before a meeting and forgetting to start it again, that's not a settings problem. That's the model not matching you. That's the week to try something that only nudges, whether that's Standro or anything else in that shape.

The failure mode for both apps is identical, by the way. It isn't picking wrong. It's picking one, disabling it during a busy week, and never turning it back on. The best break reminder is the one still running in three months, and neither of us can do that part for you.