A Freedom alternative for Mac, without a subscription

Cloister for Mac is a website blocker with no subscription and no account: you pay for it once. Cloister for iPhone and iPad, on the App Store, is a separate app sold differently: free to download, with Cloister Pro as a yearly or monthly subscription or a one-time Lifetime purchase. Freedom blocks websites and apps on the Mac and on phones, from one account. Its Premium plan, which adds Locked Mode and schedules, is a subscription, or a single payment as Freedom Forever. The difference that matters most is the exit. Freedom’s help article on ending a session says Locked Mode includes “a limited feature for ending an active session”, which “can only be used once every 7 days”. A Cloister session has no exit in the app.

What stays the same

• Support can’t end a session. Freedom: “Freedom Customer Support is not authorized to end block sessions.” Cloister’s support can’t end one either.
• Quitting doesn’t end it. In Locked Mode on a Mac, Freedom can’t be quit during a session. Its Mac menu article adds: “If the app is force quit, it will automatically relaunch and resume the session.” Quitting Cloister doesn’t end a session either.
• Schedules. Freedom Premium has “Recurring Sessions – schedule focus throughout the week”. Cloister’s weekly schedules start a session on their own too.
• The whole Mac, not one browser. Freedom’s Mac page: “Freedom blocks distractions across the entire system, not just one browser.” Freedom does it with “a local proxy, and optional browser plugins”, and Cloister blocks the whole Mac too, below the browsers, tested in Safari, Chrome and Firefox.
• A way to pay once. Freedom Forever is “Premium. One payment, yours forever.” Cloister for Mac is only sold that way.

What Cloister adds

• No exit in the app. Freedom’s weekly early exit works from its dashboard or its phone app, and “the ‘End Session’ option remains visible during the first minute of a Locked Mode session”. You can turn the weekly exit off, or remove it for good. A Cloister session has neither exit, from its first second to its last, and nothing to switch off.
• Every session is locked. Freedom’s Locked Mode is a Premium setting that “is enabled separately on your Freedom dashboard and in the app on each of your devices”. Without it, quitting the Mac app ends the session on that Mac, though a scheduled session carries on if the app is reopened before it ends. Cloister has no unlocked mode.
• No account. Freedom: “One Freedom account works across all your devices.” Cloister has no account. Its licence is activated once on each Mac, and your lists and schedules never leave the Mac.

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

• Your other devices. Freedom runs on Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android, and on Chromebook and Linux through its browser extension. Its sessions sync: “One session. All devices.” Cloister for Mac runs on a Mac. The iPhone and iPad app is a separate app, and the two don’t share lists or sessions.
• Apps on the Mac. Freedom blocks Mac apps as well as websites. Cloister for Mac blocks websites only; blocking apps is planned for version 2.
• Exceptions. Freedom can block the entire internet, with website exceptions on Mac and Windows. Cloister has no allow list.
• Longer sessions. The Freedom Forever page lists “Unlimited Session Length”. A Cloister session is one minute to 24 hours long.
• A free plan, and older Macs. Freedom has a free plan, without Locked Mode, and its Mac app runs on macOS 11 and later. Cloister has a 14-day trial, then is paid for once (see pricing), 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 Freedom

1. Let a running Freedom session end.
2. Download Cloister and follow its set-up.
3. Add the websites from your Freedom blocklists to a Cloister list, or start from one of the seven ready-made lists. Apps don’t carry over: Cloister for Mac blocks websites.
4. Make a Cloister schedule for each recurring Freedom session on your Mac. From then on, those sessions start themselves.

Weighing SelfControl or Cold Turkey as well? Each has a page like this one, SelfControl and Cold Turkey, 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 Freedom comes from its own website and help articles, read on 26 October 2026, and linked below. We have not tested Freedom. 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.