Tracking habits alone works until it doesn't. The streak counter in your Notion database has no audience; a missed day costs you nothing but private guilt, and private guilt fades fast. Competing with someone else changes the math: when another person's score is two points ahead of yours on a shared leaderboard, Tuesday morning gets a different kind of pull. Competitions are the reason Notion Habit Heroes exists. We built it because tracking alone was not enough and we wanted to compete with friends; the story behind it is here. If you want the behavioral case, the social habit tracking post covers the research. This post is about mechanics: how group competitions and one-on-one duels work, what Notion alone cannot do here, and how to get started.
How group competitions work
A competition is a time-windowed challenge. One person creates it, gives it a name and a duration, and shares the join link. Everyone who joins keeps their own Notion habit database in their own workspace; there is no shared workspace required. Notion Habit Heroes syncs each participant's checkboxes nightly and turns them into points. Every checked habit earns points, and a day when you complete every habit due that day counts as a perfect day.
The leaderboard updates each morning with the previous night's data. When the competition closes, a podium records three kinds of winners: most total points, best average completion percentage, and most perfect days. That last category matters: someone tracking three habits carefully can beat a habit hoarder on perfect days. Competitions do not recur automatically; you create a new one when you want another round.
You set the window when you create the competition. A shorter window creates more urgency since every missed day is a larger share of the total. A longer competition gives everyone time to build a rhythm and recover from a bad week.
Creating and joining a competition both require a Pro plan (€3.99/month or €39.99/year, with a 14-day free trial on both). Each person can start their own trial, so a friend who has not paid yet can use theirs to join. If you want to pull in someone who does not want a subscription at all, a duel is the better fit: accepting a duel invite is always free.
How one-on-one duels work
A duel is two people, one question: who earns more points before it ends? You invite your opponent in one of two ways. You can share a link anywhere (a group chat, for example) and whoever accepts first becomes your opponent. Or you can enter one person's email address and Notion Habit Heroes sends the invite directly to them.
The winner is whoever accumulates more points when the duel ends. If you want to concede early, you can forfeit at any time; forfeiting hands the win to your opponent immediately. You can only have one active duel at a time, so you need to finish or forfeit before starting a new one.
Starting a duel requires Pro; accepting someone else's invite is free. Both competition standings and active duel state are visible in the embeddable widget, which you can add to any Notion page, so you can check where things stand without leaving your workspace.
| Competitions | Duels | |
|---|---|---|
| Participants | Groups, any size | Exactly two |
| How it starts | Create one and share the join link; everyone needs Pro | Shared link (first to accept) or direct email invite to one person; accepting is free |
| Scoring | Nightly points on a shared leaderboard | Same nightly points, head to head |
| Active at once | You can be in several competitions | One duel at a time |
Why Notion alone cannot run a competition
Notion organizes data by workspace. Your habit database lives in yours; your friend's lives in theirs. There is no built-in way to query data across separate workspaces, so a shared cross-workspace leaderboard is not something you can build with Notion formulas alone.
You can push formulas surprisingly far within a single workspace: count rows, compute ratios, build a streak counter by hand. But formulas only see the data in their own workspace. They cannot pull checkbox completions from a different workspace and put two people on one scoreboard. That requires a server that both participants have granted access to.
There is also the timezone problem. Notion does not know what time zone each user is in. A midnight streak reset that is fair for someone in Berlin is mid-afternoon for someone in California. Notion Habit Heroes runs each user's nightly sync in their own local time zone, so the rules are consistent regardless of where participants live.
What changes in your daily routine
When you are in a competition or a duel, your day-to-day habits do not change. You open Notion, check the habits you completed, and close it. Notion Habit Heroes reads those checkboxes each night and posts updated totals to the leaderboard by morning. No separate app to manage alongside your Notion database.
Each participant's habit data stays private in their own workspace. Notion Habit Heroes reads only the database you connect and only the habit columns you designate. The shared leaderboard shows names and points; it does not expose individual habit entries to other participants.
How points work
Every habit you complete earns points. When every habit due that day is completed, that day registers as a perfect day, and perfect days appear on the leaderboard as their own score next to points and average completion percentage.
Streaks are a separate measure: a long streak shows consistency across your full history, while competition points measure what you put in during a specific window. You can have a long streak without being in any competition. A competition counts only the points you earn while it runs, from the day you join, so your competition total starts at zero regardless of your lifetime score.
Getting started
If your habits already live in Notion, connecting takes a few minutes. Create a free account, connect your habit database, and your checkboxes start generating streaks and points overnight. The free plan handles everything a solo tracker needs: nightly sync, streaks, points, and an embeddable widget. When you are ready to bring in other people, Pro adds competitions and duels. The 14-day trial means you can test the full social layer before deciding.
If you do not have a habit database yet, the free Notion habit tracker template gives you the right structure to start. For a full walkthrough of the setup, see how it works. For the points-and-leaderboard mechanics that competitions build on, see the gamified Notion habit tracker setup.
How do Notion habit competitions work?
You create a competition, give it a name and a time window, and share the join link. Each person connects their own Notion habit database; Notion Habit Heroes syncs checkboxes nightly and updates a shared leaderboard. When the competition closes, a podium records three kinds of winners: most total points, best average completion percentage, and most perfect days. Everyone's competition total starts at zero on the day they join, regardless of their lifetime points.
What's the difference between a competition and a duel?
A competition is for groups: everyone joins with their own Notion database, and the leaderboard runs for the window you set. Both creating and joining require Pro. A duel is two people: share a link and whoever accepts first becomes your opponent, or send a direct email invite to one specific person. Starting a duel requires Pro; accepting is free. Both formats use the same nightly points; duels are the head-to-head version with no podium at the end.