What is Cold Turkey Blocker?
Cold Turkey Blocker is a desktop blocker for Mac and Windows known for being hard to circumvent — locked timers and frozen sessions that hold even if you quit or restart.
How they differ
These two sit at opposite ends on purpose. Cold Turkey's strength is that you can't get around it: once a session is running, the distraction is gone and staying gone is the point. If you bypass every soft limit you set, that's exactly what you need.
AccountyCat never hard-locks you out. It goes by what you're doing and nudges you when you've drifted; if you keep drifting it follows up with a gentle full-screen check-in that asks whether the detour is really helping — which you can wave off or explain, and it learns from that. The trade-off is real: there's no wall to stop you on a weak-willpower day, by design.
Another way to put it: a blocker works by making the interesting thing impossible. AccountyCat works more like a partner in your corner — something that notices you've wandered off and motivates you back, rather than locking the door. Removing the choice can be effective, but being nudged by something that's paying attention is a different, and for a lot of people more sustainable, kind of help.
We think a wall trains avoidance more than focus, but that's a philosophy, not a fact — for some people the hard lockout genuinely works better. Pick honestly based on which failure mode is yours.