How often do you set a screen time limit and then tap past it without thinking? If you’re like me, the temptation often wins. That may be the moment when a $59 object on your fridge starts to sound reasonable, and we don’t think you’re wrong to consider it.

We’ve been making distraction blockers for over 15 years, and the thing that works is almost always the same: a block you set up in advance and can’t easily undo if you change your mind. Brick does that with a walk across the room, Freedom with software that covers every screen you own at once.

Brick is a physical device that blocks apps on your phone when you tap it. Freedom is software that blocks apps and websites across all of your devices at once, on whatever schedule you set, with a Locked Mode that prevents quitting when you’re tempted. If your distraction problem lives entirely on your phone, Brick can help. If it follows you to your laptop, you want Freedom.

What is Brick?

Brick is a small grey square, a couple of inches across, that you stick on your fridge or your desk. It costs $59, has no battery, and pairs with a companion app for iPhone and Android. In the app you build up to ten custom modes for different parts of your day, things like Work, Sleep, and Study, each blocking its own set of apps plus a chosen list of Safari websites (Brick FAQ). Tap your phone against the Brick and your mode activates; tap again and everything comes back. You can also start a block without the device by holding the in-app button, and you can set schedules so modes switch on and off at set times, though ending a block early always requires the physical tap. Brick’s site claims more than 55,000 five-star reviews (getbrick.com), and the press has been generous, with writeups in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Vogue.

The tap is a clever piece of design. Walking over to an object and physically touching it turns an abstract decision into a small ceremony, and a ceremony is harder to talk yourself out of than a setting. There’s a reason people write their goals on paper and shake hands on deals. If you have tried screen time limits and blown past every one of them, we understand why a physical object feels like the answer. The willpower problem is real, and Brick takes it seriously. So do we, and our answer just looks different.

What is Freedom?

Freedom is the original distraction blocker. We’ve been doing this for over 15 years and over four million people have used Freedom to get their time back. When Apple purged screen time apps from the App Store in 2018, Freedom’s founder Fred Stutzman was one of the few to push back publicly and called for the Screen Time API that Apple eventually built. The API that most screen time apps run on today was the result of that struggle.

Here’s how Freedom works. You install it on every device you own: iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, or Chromebook. You pick what to block and when. Then you start a session, or make a schedule to start it for you, and the apps you blocked disappear from every device in the session at the same moment. Your phone goes quiet and your laptop goes quiet with it. If you want the session to be unbreakable, you turn on Locked Mode, and there is no tap, toggle, or settings menu that will let you out early.

Freedom vs Brick: the comparison

Where do your distractions live?

Brick blocks on your phone. That’s the whole product. And for some people, the phone really is the whole problem: the bedtime scroll, the Instagram check at dinner, the TikTok session that eats a Saturday morning. If that’s you, you don’t need much: Freedom on your phone alone will do it, and so will a Brick.

But think about where your worst hours go. For most people who work at a desk, the phone is the smaller half of the problem. Much of the damage happens in a browser tab, in the Reddit thread you open between emails and the news site you’ve visited eleven times since lunch. Block your phone and the behavior doesn’t stop, it just migrates to the nearest unblocked screen, the way water finds a crack.

Freedom was built around this fact. A session covers every device you include in it, at the same time, so there’s no unguarded screen to leak through. Blocking Twitter on your phone while it still opens on your laptop doesn’t reduce your distraction. It just moves where you go to find it.

How hard is it to get around the block?

Every blocking tool eventually faces the same test: you’ve blocked something, and now you want at it. Sometimes that’s a weak moment you’d be glad to have stopped. Sometimes it’s a real need, like a text you have to answer. How a tool handles both is most of what separates them.

Brick’s marketing leans hard on this test. Their site points out that screen time limits are easy to ignore and deleted apps are easy to reinstall, which is true. Their answer is physical separation: if the Brick is in the kitchen and you’re at your desk, unblocking requires a walk.

There are two catches. The first is in Brick’s own FAQ: every Brick comes with five Emergency Unbricks, which instantly unblock everything from the app, no walk required (Brick FAQ; support article). The key they promised to take away from you is still in your pocket, five times over. The second catch is the flip side of their own best feature. You can start a block from the app anywhere, which is useful, but ending one requires a tap on the physical Brick. Brick yourself in the morning and forget the device at home, and you’ll spend the day choosing between staying locked out of apps you might legitimately need and burning one of your five emergency exits. The object that creates the commitment is also a single point of failure that has to be in the right place at the right time. Freedom’s sessions live on the devices themselves, so there’s nothing to forget, lose, or drive back home for.

Freedom handles those two moments separately. For the weak one, there’s Locked Mode: turn it on and the session runs to the end, on every device, no matter how much 3pm-you disagrees with 9am-you. There is no button that ends a locked session early, and nothing unblocks all your devices at once. For the real need, there are Session Breaks. If a block is on and you have to grab a two-factor code, pull up a boarding pass, or check an address for the thing you’re working on, you can take one five-minute break, which lifts the block on just the phone in your hand and then closes on its own (it’s off by default in Locked Mode). It’s a way in and out for something you need, not an exit from the session.

What about the price?

Brick’s pitch is “$59, no subscriptions, ever,” and it’s a fair pitch aimed at the real issue of subscription fatigue. Two things complicate the comparison.

First, Freedom has the same option. It’s called Freedom Forever: pay once, use Freedom for life, no recurring anything. Plenty of our users chose it for exactly the reason Brick’s marketing names. If you hate subscriptions, you don’t have to buy hardware.

Second, $59 buys a phone-only block, and the device only works where it physically sits. Brick’s own answer to that is to sell you more than one: shipping is free on two or more, and their FAQ suggests keeping one at home, one in the car, and one at work. That’s a fair fix for the forgot-it-at-home problem, but it also means the real cost of covering your day can be $59 several times over, and none of those Bricks covers your laptop browser at any price. When you compare prices, compare what each one covers, and how many Bricks it takes to cover it.

Doesn’t Brick have scheduling too?

It does, and the difference is narrow enough to be worth stating carefully. Brick has a Schedule tab where you set a start time, end time, mode, and days of the week, and the block activates and deactivates on its own (Brick schedule guide). So the old “you have to choose focus every single time” critique isn’t fair, and we won’t make it. Both tools can start a block for you.

The difference is what happens when you don’t feel like it. On Brick, a scheduled block is only as durable as your willingness to leave it alone, because you can always tap out, and per Brick’s own guide, unbricking during a schedule ends the schedule: brick your phone again and you land in a plain session with no end time, so the pre-commitment you set up is gone after a single exit (same guide). The schedule automates the start, but nothing protects it once you’ve decided otherwise.

Freedom’s schedules run underneath Locked Mode. Set a recurring 9am-to-noon block with Advanced and Recurring scheduling, turn on Locked Mode, and the session both starts on its own and cannot be ended early, on any device, until it reaches the end you chose. There is no tap-out, so the block you scheduled on Monday still runs on Friday, including the mornings you would rather it didn’t. Users report an average of 2.5 hours of productive time gained per day, and the reason is not complicated: the focus happens whether or not you remembered to want it, and nothing lets you tap your way out when the afternoon slump arrives.

What does the research say?

Brick has been widely and favorably reviewed by the press, and those hands-on tests agree it cuts screen time, largely because the physical tap breaks mindless habits. What doesn’t exist yet is a controlled study: no peer-reviewed research targets Brick, and the only quantified outcomes it cites come from an internal survey of 3,500+ of its own users (getbrick.com), meaning people who bought the product and stuck with it. Those reviews establish that the device is pleasant to use, which is a different question from what changes while you own it.

Freedom has been tested the harder way, and more than once. A randomized controlled trial published in PNAS Nexus (Castelo et al., 2025) had participants block mobile internet on their phones for two weeks using Freedom. Attention, mental health, and wellbeing all improved, with the gain in sustained attention comparable to reversing about ten years of age-related decline; the Washington Post covered the study and the results held after the blocking period ended. Freedom has been extensively studied in top-tier research from Carnegie Mellon, Microsoft, and the University of Waterloo. In none of that work were participants given a ritual to perform or a score to protect. Access was removed, and the researchers measured what happened next.

Which one should you choose?

The choice is simpler than the phone-versus-everything split suggests. Freedom already does what Brick does on your phone: install it on just your phone if that’s all you want, block the same apps, put it on a schedule, lock the session. It starts free, a one-time Freedom Forever license costs about the same as a Brick, and if your distraction ever moves to your laptop, Freedom is already there. Brick can’t do anything on the phone that Freedom can’t.

So it comes down to one thing: do you want a physical object involved? Some people do, and that’s fair. Tapping something real is a satisfying ritual, and a Brick on the counter is a reminder the whole family can see. If that’s what you want, Brick is well made and gives you exactly that. If you care about the focus and not the hardware, Freedom is the easier choice: install it on your phone or on all your devices, set your sessions, and let it run.

Can you use Freedom and Brick together?

Yes. If you already own a Brick, the two coexist fine: keep tapping it for your phone if you like the ritual, and run Freedom underneath for everything the Brick can’t reach, your laptop, your browser, and a schedule that starts itself.

But you don’t need both. Freedom already covers the phone, so a Brick is an optional extra, not a missing piece.

Frequently Asked Questions