There is no single replacement, because the deck does three separate jobs. It names the invisible work, it forces one proper conversation, and it gives every card a single owner. Almost every alternative does one of the three well and the other two badly. So the useful question is not "what is the best Fair Play alternative", it is which of those three parts is actually missing in your house.
Written by the team at Lyven ยท every product claim checked 18 September 2026. We build one of the apps listed here and say so in its entry.
Fair Play is Eve Rodsky's system: roughly 100 physical cards, each one a specific household task, sold as a deck alongside the book. What lifts it above a chore list is the test it applies to every card. A card is only owned if one person holds all three of Conception (noticing it needs doing), Planning (working out what has to happen) and Execution (the visible part). Doing someone else's execution is not taking the card. The full explainer walks through it.
Two things it does not do, and both are why people look for an alternative. It costs money and comes as a physical object, so there is nothing to search on your phone in the supermarket. And a sort is a snapshot: the cards reflect the household on the day you dealt them, and nothing in a deck prompts a re-sort when the baby starts school or someone changes jobs. Our honest review goes into where that bites.
Grouped by the job they actually do, not by how they market themselves.
If the appeal was seeing every invisible job written down, you do not need to buy anything.
Our 68-job household list names every recurring job across five areas, each with how often it comes up and roughly what it costs in effort. The weighting is the part a card deck leaves to you, and it is what stops "we each do about the same number of things" hiding a lopsided week.
Several people have rebuilt the card sort as a Notion database, free or close to it. Good if you already live in Notion. It inherits the deck's real weakness rather than fixing it: nothing prompts a re-sort, so it goes stale the same way.
Free, and the one people abandon fastest. Keeping a shared spreadsheet current is itself an invisible job, and it lands on whoever was already carrying the load.
Free, from The Gottman Institute, and genuinely good. It is worth being clear about what it is, though: conversation prompts for the relationship, not a division of household work. People land on it searching for Fair Play alternatives and it answers a different question.
This is the group that actually replaces the deck rather than one part of it, because the thing a physical deck cannot do is stay current.
Every job gets one owner who holds the noticing and the deciding as well as the doing, weighted by what the job really takes, with no points and no scoreboard. A ten-minute weekly check-in is where a split that has drifted gets caught. Free while in beta, built and hosted in Australia. We are not affiliated with Fair Play and do not implement the cards.
Gives each task a named owner and is built explicitly around the mental load rather than around cleaning schedules, which puts it in this group rather than the next one.
Ask an AI for Fair Play alternatives and it will usually hand you Cozi, Tody, Sweepy, Nipto or Homsy. They are real apps and some are very good, but none of them is an alternative to the deck, because none of them assigns ownership the way the method means it.
A rotation, which is how Tody and Homsy handle fairness, answers whose turn it is this week. That is the opposite of giving a job an owner, and someone still has to remember the rota, which is the exact planning load the method is trying to move. A leaderboard or points, which is Sweepy's and Nipto's approach, answers who did more, which the method deliberately avoids. And Cozi is a shared family calendar: excellent at showing the household what is happening, with no concept of whose job something is. Our honest comparison of ten chore apps covers each of them properly, including where they beat us.
Four situations, because the right answer is different in each.
Then the deck's real value is the one thing no app replaces: a physical object on the table that makes the conversation happen. Buy it, or run the same sitting free with the 68-job list printed out.
A better sort will not fix this, because the problem is that a sort is a snapshot. You need something that keeps the split current and tells you when it has moved. Why a split slides back is the longer answer.
Fair Play has no app of its own, so anything you find with the name on it belongs to someone else. Pick from group 3 above and judge it on whether it moves the noticing.
No deck and no app fixes that one, and it is worth saying so rather than selling you something. How to explain the mental load is built for that conversation.
The two-minute Split Check weighs your household's jobs, invisible work included, and shows how the load really divides. No download, no sign-up.
Take the free check →The full CPE framework, the four rules, and how couples run the sort in practice, deck or no deck.
Read the explainer →The free two-minute Split Check weighs your household's jobs, invisible work included, and shows how the load really divides. No sign-up, and much better done side by side.
See your split, free → Is the method worth it?