Free LookAway alternatives for Windows and browsers

What LookAway does well

LookAway is a native Mac app built around the 20-20-20 rule, and it is careful about when it interrupts. Its Smart Pause holds breaks during meetings and calls, video, screen recording, deep focus apps and fullscreen games, and a heads-up with snooze comes before each break. Break screens can show your own images, gradients and messages, and it adds optional blink and posture nudges between breaks.

It costs $19 once for one Mac, $29 for two, or $99 for five, with a 7-day trial, and it is also on the Mac App Store and Setapp. If you’re on a Mac and willing to pay, it is a strong choice. The reasons to look elsewhere are a Windows or Linux computer, a work machine where you can’t install apps, or wanting something free.

Free system-wide options

Stretchly is free and open source on Windows, Mac and Linux, and is the closest free match: mini and long breaks with a heads-up, idle detection that counts time away as a break, and a pause while Do Not Disturb is on. Its site doesn’t say it detects calls or video by itself.

Workrave is free and open source on Windows and Linux, with frequent micro-breaks, longer rest breaks, an optional daily limit and exercises at the start of a break. To keep it out of a call, you switch it to quiet mode yourself. On a Mac, Time Out’s core is free, and its rules can hold breaks for chosen apps, calendar events, Focus and calls in FaceTime, Teams or Zoom (its site doesn’t say which of these need a paid Supporter purchase).

Blink Eye (Windows, Mac, Linux) has a free tier with paid premium features. EyeLeo, a free Windows app, is listed as discontinued.

Browser options

If most of your screen time is in a browser, an extension needs no install beyond it and works on any computer that runs that browser. eyeCare is free on Chrome and Firefox and reminds you with a notification, a sound and a flashing toolbar icon. Its listing mentions no call detection; you switch it off and on.

BlinkPause is free on Chrome, Edge and Firefox. Like LookAway, it has 20-20-20 breaks with a heads-up before them, and it holds back during calls (in a browser tab). Its breaks also wait for fullscreen, video and a pause in your typing. Unlike LookAway, it adds a blink cue every minute on the page you’re reading. What you give up: it can’t see or draw over desktop apps, so outside the browser it reaches you only through an optional system notification for breaks; there is no Mac or Windows app; and it is new, with no store ratings yet.