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. If you want the behavioral case for why this works, the social habit tracking post covers the research. This post is about mechanics: how group competitions and one-on-one duels work in Notion Habit Heroes, what Notion alone cannot do here, and how to get started.
How group competitions work
A competition in Notion Habit Heroes is a time-windowed challenge. One person creates it, gives it a name and a duration, and shares the join link with friends. Everyone who joins keeps their own Notion habit database in their own workspace; there is no shared workspace required. NH2 syncs each participant's habit checkboxes nightly and turns them into points. Every checked habit earns points, and completing all your habits on a given day earns a bonus on top.
Those points feed a shared leaderboard that updates each morning with the previous night's data. When the competition closes, a podium records the final standings and the result goes into history. 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. Neither format requires any extra setup; the leaderboard runs for whatever window you set and closes on its own.
Creating a competition requires a Pro plan (€3.99/month or €39.99/year, with a 14-day free trial). Joining one that someone else created is free.
How one-on-one duels work
A duel is a two-person version of the same idea. You challenge one person and the question is simple: who earns more points? You invite your opponent by sharing a link or by entering their email address directly; NH2 sends the invite. The first person to accept is your opponent.
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 the current one before starting a new challenge.
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.
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 available 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, which is what NH2 is.
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. NH2 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. NH2 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. NH2 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. Completing every habit in a single day earns a day-completion bonus on top. 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, and two people with different streak histories can compete fairly on the same point totals. Points reset at the start of each competition, so everyone starts from zero regardless of prior history.
Getting started
If your habits already live in Notion, connecting NH2 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 NH2 template gives you the right structure to start. For a full walkthrough of the setup, see how it works.