A Cold Turkey alternative, with no pause

Cold Turkey Blocker blocks websites and apps on a Mac or a Windows PC, and is sold once. Its own words for a locked block: “almost impossible to stop the block once you lock it.” Locking is a choice you make for each block, and a locked block can still be paused: its features page describes Pause for a Cause, which “allows you to donate to the World Wildlife Fund for a 10 minute break”, unless you turn it off in its settings. Cloister for Mac has no lock to choose and nothing to pause. Nothing in the app ends a session before its timer: there is no Stop button, and its support can’t end a session for you. It is a website blocker for Mac, sold once.

What stays the same

• A timer that can’t be switched off. Cold Turkey’s user guide: “Time based locks will disable the toggle above so you can’t disable the block once started.” A Cloister session can’t be ended early either.
• Weekly schedules. In Cold Turkey Pro, a schedule “will automatically repeat every week”. Cloister’s schedules repeat weekly too, and start a session on their own.
• Paid once. Cold Turkey: “No subscriptions. Pay once, own forever.” Cloister for Mac is a one-time purchase too.
• No account. Cold Turkey’s privacy policy says it stores “your email address when you make a purchase” and “which products were purchased and any associated licences, including product keys or similar”, and lists among its uses “To activate our Software”. Cloister activates its licence once on each Mac, with no account either.
• Your lists stay on your Mac. Cold Turkey: “Your settings and statistics are stored locally on your device.” Cloister’s lists and schedules never leave the Mac either.
• One developer, by email. Cold Turkey’s support page: “As an indie developer, I only have resources to do support via email.” Cloister is made and supported by one person too.

What Cloister adds

• No break to buy. Cloister has no Pause for a Cause. A session’s planned breaks are chosen before it starts, and outside them a blocked site doesn’t load until the session ends.
• Every session is locked. Cold Turkey offers seven kinds of lock, and four of them open on a condition: a password, typing out random text, a countdown, or a restart. A Cloister session has no lock setting: it ends when its timer does, and nothing in the app ends it sooner.
• Nothing installed in a browser. Setting up Cold Turkey includes a step to “install the extensions for all supported browsers”. Cloister blocks below the browsers, for the whole Mac, with nothing to install in any of them. That was tested in Safari, Chrome and Firefox.

How Cloister was tested

Quitting Cloister, force-quitting it, removing the block by hand, tampering with its saved session, moving the clock forward 30 days and restarting the Mac were each tried in the middle of a session on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro) running macOS Tahoe 26, in September and October 2026. The block held. A block removed by hand was back in under a second.

One exception, by design rather than by test: from version 1.0.3, switching Cloister off in Login Items, or stopping it another way, during a planned break keeps the sites open until it runs again.

On 20 September 2026, on macOS Tahoe 26, Chrome with secure DNS set to Cloudflare and Firefox with DNS over HTTPS at Increased or Max Protection stayed blocked.

What you give up

• Windows, and every computer you use. Cold Turkey runs on Mac and Windows, and “one purchase lets you install Cold Turkey products on all computers that you personally use”. A Cloister licence covers one or two Macs.
• Apps. Cold Turkey Pro blocks apps and games, and Cold Turkey can also “lock, log off or shutdown your computer”. Cloister for Mac blocks websites only; blocking apps is planned for version 2.
• Single pages and searches. Cold Turkey can block one page of a site, a YouTube channel, or searches for a keyword, and can block the whole internet except a few sites. Cloister blocks whole sites, and has no allow list.
• Allowances. Cold Turkey Pro has “Pomodoro breaks” and allowances, set in advance. Cloister has planned breaks, but no allowances.
• Longer blocks. A Cloister session is one minute to 24 hours long. Cold Turkey’s timer lock: “Prevents changes until a specified time in the future.”
• Updates for life. A Cold Turkey purchase “includes free lifetime updates”. Cloister’s One Mac and Two Macs licences include a year of updates, and the version you have keeps working after it. Lifetime includes updates for the life of the product: see pricing.
• A free version, and older Macs. Cold Turkey has a free version, and runs on macOS 10.14 to 26. Cloister has a 14-day trial, and needs macOS 15 or later.

Where Cloister falls short

• Safari with iCloud Private Relay switched on gets past the block until Cloister’s network filter is on. The filter blocks it, once you allow it when macOS asks and turn it on in Cloister.
• An app that finds its servers by itself, or connects straight to an address, is not blocked.
• Anyone who starts the Mac in Recovery mode can remove Cloister. That is deliberate: Cloister is a commitment device, not a lock against the Mac’s own administrator.

The support page keeps this list current: known limits.

Moving from Cold Turkey

1. Let a locked Cold Turkey block run to its end.
2. Download Cloister and follow its set-up.
3. Export your block list from Cold Turkey, with the Export button under the list, and add its sites to a Cloister list, or start from one of the seven ready-made lists. Entries for single pages, wildcards or searches don’t carry over: Cloister blocks whole sites.
4. Make a Cloister schedule for each block on your Cold Turkey schedule. From then on, those sessions start themselves.

Weighing SelfControl or Freedom as well? Each has a page like this one, SelfControl and Freedom, and the full comparison sets all four side by side, prices included. On an iPhone, the Opal alternative compares Opal with Cloister for iPhone and iPad.

How this page was made

Everything here about Cold Turkey comes from its own website, user guide and privacy policy, read on 26 October 2026, and linked below. We have not tested Cold Turkey. What it says about how Cloister holds up comes from tests on a real Mac, dated where given. If anything here is wrong or out of date, write to support@getcloister.app and it will be corrected.