Are they competitors?

Not really. They serve different roles in an ADHD productivity stack. The closest "competitor" framing would be against full task systems with built-in AI breakdown, but most of those tools handle breakdown as a side feature; Goblin Tools handles it as the primary feature.

KeptMind vs Goblin Tools: two different ADHD tools compared

Should I pay for either?

Goblin Tools is free for basic use; the paid tier removes ads and unlocks higher-quality breakdowns. KeptMind has a free tier covering core capture and Today list functionality, with paid tiers for SMS escalation, longer history, and AI quotas. Pay only after using the free tiers extensively to verify fit.

Can Magic ToDo replace breaking down tasks myself?

For most stuck tasks, yes — and that is the point. ADHD initiation difficulty is partly about not seeing the next concrete action; outsourcing the breakdown removes the bottleneck. Over time, you may notice patterns in the breakdowns that improve your own breakdown skills, but using the tool indefinitely is also fine.

What about privacy concerns with AI tools?

Both tools process content with cloud-based AI. For most ADHD use cases (task descriptions, casual writing) the privacy implications are minimal. For genuinely sensitive content, use neither and rely on local-only tools. Read each tool's privacy policy if uncertain; both are relatively transparent about their data practices.

Goblin Tools and KeptMind are both built for ADHD brains, but they solve different problems at different points in the workflow. Understanding the difference helps you use each where it works best.

What Goblin Tools is

Goblin Tools is a free, browser-based collection of AI tools for ADHD. The Magic ToDo feature takes a task and breaks it down into smaller steps. The Formalizer rewrites text in different tones. The Judge estimates how long a task will take. The Chef suggests recipes based on ingredients.

Goblin Tools is excellent for the task breakdown problem — when you have a task but cannot figure out where to start. The AI breakdown removes the executive function required to decompose a complex task into actionable steps.

What KeptMind is

KeptMind is a full mobile task management app built around voice capture. It handles the entire workflow from capture to completion: speak a thought, get a structured task, see it in your energy-aware Today list, get escalating reminders for critical items.

Head-to-head

Task breakdown: Goblin Tools wins. The Magic ToDo feature is specifically designed for this and is excellent.

Voice capture: KeptMind wins. Goblin Tools has no voice capture.

Mobile experience: KeptMind wins. Goblin Tools is browser-based and not optimized for mobile.

Cost: Goblin Tools wins — it is free. KeptMind has a free tier but full features require a subscription.

Reminders and follow-through: KeptMind wins. Goblin Tools has no reminder system.

Offline use: KeptMind wins. Goblin Tools requires an internet connection.

The ideal workflow

The ideal ADHD workflow uses both: KeptMind for capture and daily task management, Goblin Tools for breaking down complex tasks that feel overwhelming. When you capture a task in KeptMind and realize you do not know where to start, paste it into Goblin Tools' Magic ToDo, get the breakdown, and add the first step back to KeptMind.

Who should use Goblin Tools alone

Goblin Tools alone is sufficient if you only need help with task breakdown and do not need a full task management system. It is particularly useful for students and people who use other task managers but occasionally get stuck on complex tasks.

Two ADHD apps with completely different goals

KeptMind and Goblin Tools both target ADHD users, but they solve different problems entirely. KeptMind is a full task management system with capture, triage, and execution support. Goblin Tools is a focused utility — a Magic ToDo that breaks one overwhelming task into smaller steps, plus a few other small AI-powered helpers. They are not really competitors; they often work well together.

For users new to ADHD productivity tools, the comparison helps clarify what each does well. Magic ToDo solves the specific problem of "I have this one task and I cannot start because I cannot see how to begin." KeptMind solves the broader problem of "I lose tasks before they reach a system that can act on them, and the systems I have tried require too much maintenance."

What Goblin Tools does well

The Magic ToDo is genuinely useful for stuck tasks. Paste in "redo my resume" or "plan my sister's wedding" and the tool produces a step-by-step breakdown that often makes the overwhelming task feel approachable. The breakdown is not always perfect — AI-generated steps occasionally miss context — but the rough scaffold is usually enough to overcome initiation paralysis.

Goblin Tools also offers a Formalizer (rewrites informal text into formal language and vice versa) and a Judge (estimates emotional tone of messages), which are situationally useful for ADHD adults navigating professional communication. These features are niche but well-implemented for the specific use cases they target.

What KeptMind covers that Goblin Tools does not

KeptMind is a complete task management system; Goblin Tools is a set of AI utilities. KeptMind handles capture from any context (voice, text, lock-screen widget), routes captures into a structured Today list, surfaces what is doable based on current energy, and provides escalating reminders for critical items. Goblin Tools does none of these — it is meant to be opened when you need help with a specific stuck task, not to manage your day.

The implication: KeptMind alone provides a complete productivity system. Goblin Tools alone does not; it needs to live alongside whatever task system you actually use. Many ADHD adults pair Goblin Tools with KeptMind, Todoist, Apple Reminders, or whatever they have — the tool fits any task system rather than replacing one.

When to use Goblin Tools

Three specific scenarios where Goblin Tools earns its place. First, when a task in your task system has been sitting for more than a week without movement, paste it into Magic ToDo to get a breakdown. The breakdown often reveals why the task has been stuck (it is actually four tasks; one of the steps requires information you do not have; the original framing was too vague). Second, when writing a difficult email or message, the Formalizer can produce a starting draft that you edit, which is faster than writing from scratch. Third, when you cannot tell whether a message you received is upset or neutral, the Judge produces a rough emotional read that is sometimes useful for ADHD adults who struggle with social tone calibration.

When to use KeptMind

KeptMind is the primary task system. Open it when capturing thoughts, planning the day, or executing on the Today list. The voice capture handles the moments where typing fails; the AI parsing handles the triage that manual sorting fails; the energy-aware Today list handles the day-to-day execution. KeptMind is what you live in; Goblin Tools is what you visit occasionally for specific stuck moments.

What to do this week

If you have one task that has been stuck for over a week, paste it into Goblin Tools' Magic ToDo today. Read the breakdown and identify the single first concrete step. Schedule a 25-minute block in the next 48 hours to do that step. The exercise often unblocks long-stuck tasks faster than any amount of self-reflection on why the task was stuck. If your broader bottleneck is task management itself rather than specific stuck tasks, look at KeptMind or another full task system; Goblin Tools alone will not solve that problem. The tools are complementary; recognizing what each is for prevents the trap of expecting any single tool to handle the full ADHD productivity surface area.

A note on long-term practice with keptmind vs goblin tools

Most ADHD adults who eventually settle into stable productivity practice describe their relationship with topics like keptmind vs goblin tools as evolving across years rather than locking in after one decision. The first six months tend to involve more experimentation than feels comfortable; the second six months produce the early signs of what fits; years two and three are where the practice consolidates and starts to compound. Treating any single intervention as a permanent answer is usually a mistake; treating the willingness to keep adjusting as the durable skill is closer to how successful long-term ADHD productivity actually works.

What this means in practice: do not commit to perfect adoption of anything you read about keptmind vs goblin tools. Commit to running a focused experiment, observing the result honestly, and either keeping or releasing the intervention based on real data from your specific life. The data will sometimes contradict the consensus advice, including the advice in this article. When that happens, trust the data rather than the consensus — your ADHD brain has its own pattern, and the right configuration for you may differ from the median user. The discipline of personal calibration over imitation is one of the more underrated parts of long-term ADHD self-management; it produces durable systems where copying produces brittle ones.

Across years, the small habits compound. A single capture saved in the right moment is small; a thousand of them across two years rebuild your relationship with reliability. A single calendar buffer respected on Tuesday is small; the cumulative on-time arrival rate across months changes how you experience your own life. Treat each small alignment with what your brain actually needs as a deposit in a long-term account; the interest rate on those deposits is higher than any single dramatic productivity transformation, and the cumulative effect is what produces the genuine improvement that ADHD adults seek and that the right systems quietly deliver.

Common pitfalls when applying these ideas

Three patterns repeat across ADHD adults trying to integrate practices around keptmind vs goblin tools. First, attempting too many changes simultaneously. Adopting five new habits in a single week is the most common path to abandoning all of them within a month. The discipline of one change at a time, with three weeks between additions, looks slow but produces the only durable results. Second, treating productivity practice as a moral obligation. When the practice becomes "I should be doing this," it triggers the resistance pattern that ADHD brains apply to obligations generally, and the practice collapses. Reframing practice as experimentation rather than duty preserves the engagement needed to keep going through the inevitable rough weeks.

Third, comparing yourself to ADHD adults whose productivity practices look impressive online. Social media surfaces survivor stories and selectively presented success; the median experience of building any ADHD productivity practice involves substantial messiness, repeated false starts, and stretches that look nothing like the highlight reels. Your real progress at the six-month mark will not look like the polished narratives you read about; it will look like a stack of partial wins, abandoned attempts, and one or two practices that actually held. That is the real shape of success, and recognizing it as success rather than as inadequacy is itself one of the more important internal shifts of sustained ADHD self-management.

Building from one small win

If this article overwhelms you with options around keptmind vs goblin tools, pick exactly one element and run it for seven days. Not three elements, not a system; one specific change. At day seven, evaluate honestly whether the change produced any visible benefit. If yes, continue for another two weeks before adding anything. If no, choose a different single element. Most ADHD adults who eventually arrive at sustainable practice describe the path as a sequence of seven-day experiments stacked across months, not as a single decisive transformation. The pace feels slow in the short term and produces durable results in the long term, which is the trade-off most worth making.

The internal narrative around small wins matters as much as the wins themselves. A seven-day experiment that produced a small improvement is a real success, not a disappointment compared to some imagined dramatic transformation. Treating small wins as actual wins rebuilds the relationship between effort and outcome that years of unsuccessful productivity attempts often erode. Across enough small wins, that relationship becomes durable enough to support the larger changes that initially seemed out of reach. Most adults who eventually live well with ADHD describe the journey as cumulative small wins rather than single breakthroughs, and that lived experience is what the literature also points toward when read carefully.

Coming back to this article in a few months

Articles like this one tend to read differently at different stages of the ADHD productivity journey. On a first read, the volume of options often feels like more reasons to feel inadequate; on a re-read after six months of practice, the same content often produces specific recognition of which parts now apply and which do not. Bookmark this article and return to it after running an honest experiment. The second visit usually surfaces nuances the first read missed, and that pattern of returning is part of how ADHD adults eventually integrate productivity ideas into actual life rather than treating them as one-time information. The most useful productivity content for ADHD users is the content you read, ignore for a while, and come back to when a specific need surfaces; that pattern of delayed application is normal rather than evidence of failure.

If this article was useful, these related guides cover adjacent ground and are worth reading next:

Each of the linked articles approaches the topic from a slightly different angle, and reading two or three of them together usually produces a more complete picture than any single article can. The shared underlying neurology means that improvements in one area often unlock progress in others, which is why the topics interconnect even when they appear separate at first glance.

Frequently asked questions

Are they competitors?: Not really. They serve different roles in an ADHD productivity stack. The closest "competitor" framing would be against full task systems with built-in AI breakdown, but most of those tools handle breakdown as a side feature; Goblin Tools handles it as the primary feature.
Should I pay for either?: Goblin Tools is free for basic use; the paid tier removes ads and unlocks higher-quality breakdowns. KeptMind has a free tier covering core capture and Today list functionality, with paid tiers for SMS escalation, longer history, and AI quotas. Pay only after using the free tiers extensively to verify fit.
Can Magic ToDo replace breaking down tasks myself?: For most stuck tasks, yes — and that is the point. ADHD initiation difficulty is partly about not seeing the next concrete action; outsourcing the breakdown removes the bottleneck. Over time, you may notice patterns in the breakdowns that improve your own breakdown skills, but using the tool indefinitely is also fine.
What about privacy concerns with AI tools?: Both tools process content with cloud-based AI. For most ADHD use cases (task descriptions, casual writing) the privacy implications are minimal. For genuinely sensitive content, use neither and rely on local-only tools. Read each tool's privacy policy if uncertain; both are relatively transparent about their data practices.