Opal vs ScreenZen

One costs about $100 a year and one costs nothing. The interesting part is how much of the gap you would actually notice.

Last checked August 2026 · Read this page as Markdown

The short version

Try ScreenZen first, and do it before you pay anybody. It is free with no paid tier, it is on both platforms, and its pause screen plus open-count limits cover the everyday half of what most people install Opal to do. If it works, you have saved a hundred dollars a year.

Buy Opal if ScreenZen turns out to be too easy to wave away. That is the real difference: Opal's Deep Focus is a block you cannot argue with, and ScreenZen is friction you can always push through. For some people friction is plenty. For others it is a speed bump they stop noticing in a fortnight.

Do it in that order. Paying first and discovering you only needed a pause screen is the expensive mistake here.

How each one stops you

ScreenZen puts a moment between you and the app. Open Instagram and you get a pause screen, a breath, a reminder of what you said you wanted, and — if you set one — a cap on how many times you may open it today. Nothing is ever truly unavailable. The bet is that most opens are reflex, and a reflex interrupted usually does not resume.

Opal removes the app. You start a session or a schedule starts one, the app stops opening, and Deep Focus takes away the ability to end the session early. The bet is that you cannot be trusted in the moment, so the decision should be made by an earlier version of you.

Friction against removal. Which one you need is a question about how you actually fail, not about which is the better app.

Where Opal wins

• Deep Focus genuinely holds when you are trying to defeat it.
• The more finished product — onboarding, charts, presets and schedules.
• Session and schedule logic that is deeper than anything ScreenZen offers.
• Per-category blocking, so newly installed apps do not slip through.
• Support and a company behind it, which a donation-funded free app cannot promise.

Where ScreenZen wins

• It is free. No tier, no upsell, no trial that converts.
• Both platforms, properly — unlike Opal, whose Android build trails.
• The pause screen is the single most cost-effective intervention here.
• Open-count limits catch the reflex that a time limit never sees.
• No account required, and nothing to cancel later.

Both of them are still counting apps, not hours

Opal removes apps, ScreenZen slows them down, and they disagree about how hard the intervention should be. But look at the unit they both work in: the app. You name it, and something happens when you open it.

Which means neither one can answer the question you probably actually have — how much of today have I already spent? You can honour every ScreenZen pause and every Opal session and still finish a day at five hours, spread thinly across a dozen apps that individually never looked like a problem. Nothing was violated. Nothing gets flagged. The total is simply not a thing either product measures against.

PhoneStop starts from the total and works backwards. You set what the day is worth — most people land between two and four hours — and every app spends from that one number. The ring on the home screen drains as you use the phone, warnings arrive at roughly sixty, thirty and ten minutes left inside whatever app you are in, and at zero the screen is taken over: fifteen seconds of breathing or twenty squats, then a one-tap lock.

It is free, like ScreenZen, and it holds no account and no internet permission at all. It is Android only for now.

Disclosure: we make PhoneStop, so treat our own entry with the scepticism it deserves. Everything else here is written from public information and hands-on use; prices and platforms were checked in August 2026 and change often — check the vendor before you pay.