Free vs Paid Journal Apps of 2021

After surveying the journaling apps landscape to find out which were most popular and get a range of different styles, I began the testing process. I explored each app, checking out the different features, and thought about the best way to integrate each into my life. In many cases, that meant setting notifications to make an entry one or more times a day. 

There are so many different ways to use a journal: capturing thoughts and ideas, remembering moments, planning for the future, processing the past, building habits, tracking progress, and more. Many apps shine at one or more of these, but Day One does them all and does them beautifully. The seamless interface allows you to quickly capture moments and thoughts in any medium you want, while powerful metadata and sorting tools help you make use of what you've chosen to remember.

For a feature-rich app, Day One has a surprisingly simple layout. To make an entry, simply hit the plus sign and select the medium you want to use. Basic users can choose between text and photo, and the upgrade adds voice notes, PDF uploads, Apple pencil (or finger) "handwriting," and video support. Then you just type/click/speak away. This frictionless process means that capturing all the little details of your day can be done effortlessly. And that means you'll make more entries. The more you add to Day One, the more powerful a tool it becomes, so the ease of use really counts here. 

For better and worse, our phones track a lot of our behavior. Day One puts that information to use by automatically tagging entries with metadata from the time they were posted: location, time of day, weather, number of steps taken, etc. This information would be arduous to add on your own but can be useful to have. You might want to know the location of a photo, the date of an event, or track the relationship between your mood and the number of steps you've taken in a day. 

Since Day One makes it so easy to add posts, it would quickly become overwhelming without ways to sort them. Fortunately, Day One has powerful organizational tools that let your entries work for you, rather than just disappearing into the void. You can tag your entries and then filter by whatever criteria you need. With the premium upgrade, you can also create multiple journals, perhaps using one for business ideas and one for personal journaling. 

While One Day will serve you well as a basic journal, it's powerful enough to be used as a primary organization system for your life. You could use it to capture all the moments of your day and then use tags or multiple journals to plan meals, make to-do lists, brainstorm new ideas, and anything else you can imagine. Because the app syncs with a web app, you can make longer entries on a normal-sized keyboard. There is also a library of templates, and you can create your own as well.

The basic version of Day One has a lot to offer, but the premium features, particularly voice notes and multiple journals, add a ton of value. This is one I'll be continuing to subscribe to, and I recommend at least trying the free trial of the upgrade. 

There's a lot to One Day -- enough that there are countless YouTube tutorials and even an 8-session course. So for maximum effectiveness, there is a learning curve.

That said, without using any of the tutorials, I found it quite easy to jump in and start making entries. So you can get quite a bit of use out of the app just by making photo and text notes throughout your day, then learn new features as they seem useful/necessary. 

As with many feature-rich apps, using just what you need is a good way to begin. And Day One would be useful even if you never used anything beyond the basic journal entry functions.

I'm a lifelong paper journaler. I handwrite long entries to process my feelings and dream about the future. This is time-consuming, and although I feel it improves my life, it's difficult to quantify how. I'm likely to continue journaling in this way, but a week with the simple framework of the Five Minute Journal definitely showed me the value of a fast and structured approach. Even after a few days, I felt happier and more focused. If more traditional diary-keeping doesn't appeal to you, check out the fast, structured, and data-driven approach of the Five Minute Diary.

While some of the apps on this list have more features than I could mention, I can tell you everything Five Minute Journal does in a single paragraph that will take you less than five minutes to read. In the morning, the app gives you three prompts: three things I'm grateful for, three things to make the day great, and a daily affirmation ("I am ..."). At the end of the day, you fill in two more prompts: three amazing things that happened today and how could I have made the day even better. At some point during the day, you add an image. Aside from an inspirational quote or weekly challenge when you open the app, that's it. 

But the power of the app lies in its simplicity. You don't have to think too much about how to use it or spend too much time on it. Resistance to journaling apps develops when you don't know what to do with them, and this one is completely clear. 

Using principles from positive psychology, the Five Minute Journal works by bringing your focus to goodness and gratitude in the morning and reflection in the evening. This simple routine increases happiness by calling your attention to the good things in your life and helps you improve by moments of evening reflection.

While most of the other apps I tested were free with a subscription upgrade, the Five Minute Journal is a one-time purchase of $4.99. This app is not for everyone. If you already keep a journal or want to write at more length, have more flexibility, or record more information, this is not for you. But if you're curious about journaling and want a structured approach that doesn't take much time, the cost is well worth it. 

Like Day One, Journey is a full-featured journaling app that you can customize to your needs. The name is apt — you can choose your own journaling journey. If you want to make free-form entries, you can add them easily, whether you want to make quick notes on your phone or more extensive entries via the web app or tablet. You can add photos as well. In the evening, the Journey automatically takes you through a series of reflection questions about your day, although you can turn this off if you don’t like it.

What really sets Journey apart is its Coach feature, an extensive library of guided prompts to expand your journaling practice. These are generally a series of themed prompts that you do for about a week. To ring in the new year, Journey offered some guides to start the year off on the right foot, including starting a positive self-care routine and tips for letting go. There are series on the foundations of journaling, overcoming anxiety, self-discover, empowerment, and more.

You can keep track of your progress through these coaching guides via the Today tab, which also charts your mood over the course of the week and notes what activities make you feel happy. Once you’ve been using the app for awhile, you’ll also see a “throwback entry” from past days, a nice touch that helps you remember the past.

The premium upgrade gives you access to more of these guides, and you can browse them before deciding to upgrade. If you like the structure of guided journaling, but also appreciate trying new things, Journey’s upgrade could be worth it for you. If you have wellness goals for this year, Journey could help you on your way to many of them.

The premium upgrade also allows you to make entries via email, which could be handy if you don’t have access to your device. It also lets you back up your journal to Microsoft Word or convert it to a PDF. And it includes additional color themes, which allow for more customization -- not worth the price on their own, but a nice bonus if you want the other premium features.

The biggest stumbling block to successfully journaling on a smartphone is the small keyboard. Despite all the texts and tweets most of us make from our phones, writing long blocks of text is still difficult (and probably bad for our thumb joints). Moreover, not everyone wants to write long journal entries. If you’d rather take a non-text-based snapshot of your daily moods and activities, no keyboard of any size required, Daylio is the app for you. As often as you want throughout the day, you can make an entry in Daylio by selecting the emoji that represents your mood (rad, good, meh, bad) and the emoji that represents what activities you’ve been doing. These are sorted into categories: social, hobbies, sleep, food, health, better me, and chores. And you can customize the options according to what applies to your life.

At first, I did this just at the end of the day, and it was useful to see how my mood did relate to my activities. But since the app was so quick (and fun!) to use, I wanted to get a more granular look at my day, especially since I know my mood tends to be better in the evening than at some other times of the day. So I set the app to notify me five times during the day to make an entry. Let me tell you, I do not have a great track record with responding to notifications, especially if they are numerous. But I really enjoyed visiting Daylio, with its cute little faces, and I really got a good sense of how my mood changes throughout the day.

The app helps you understand this data, too, with a mood chart that shows you the rise and fall of your moods over the course of however long you want to see. You can also see a count of how many times you experienced each mood, how often you did each activity, and what your average daily mood was. Daylio also awards badges for continued use.

There is a premium upgrade available for $2.99/month or $23.99/year. The upgrade gives you access to a larger library of emoji for mood and activities. I don’t think that really adds enough functionality to the app to make it worth paying for, and I will probably cancel my premium subscription after the free trial. However, the extra emoji and additional themes and styles really made me smile.

1SE is a video diary, but you don’t record yourself talking about your day or take video of important moments in all their (typically more than one second) glory. With 1SE, you record exactly one second of every day.

I will be honest: I was skeptical. It seemed like it would be impossible to make anything meaningful in that amount of time. And in a single day, it is. But even over the course of a week of testing, I was moved and delighted by the series of images of my week, and I think I would be even more so with a longer string of videos.

Cesar Kuriyama, the app’s creator, began taking daily video snippets while taking a year off work, and found it effective at efficiently capturing his experience. Watching his TED talk about the experience of creating the video — a year in six minutes — gives you a good sense of the power of this practice. His images are a bit more exciting than mine, which were almost exclusively from dog walks, but I did feel my week of seconds captured my pandemic life.

You can record directly in the app, or import a video from your library (Apple Live photos work well here because they record a second automatically). You can work from a longer video and select the second that you want, and can add filters and other editing features. I found this a little tricky at first, especially since I kept trying to narrate and could never say anything short enough. But as I embraced the idea of just a single image, it became easier.

1SE has a premium upgrade that allows you to collaborate with others, record 1.5 second videos, and make more projects beyond your diary. For example, I added a project called “Dogs” with video clips of my dogs. Never mind that my diary project also consisted entirely of dog clips. (As does my phone library, for that matter.) For me, these features are not worth the upgrade price, but someone who likes to play around more with video or wants to collaborate on a project may find the price well worth it. 

A simple journaling app that consists of notebooks that you make unprompted entries in, Penzu is a good app but has fewer features than most of the other apps we tested. The $4.99/month upgrade has no free trial and only offers more notebooks. It also crashed multiple times while I was testing. 

However, if you're looking for a straightforward way of journaling in multiple notebooks, it's worth checking out the free version. The notebooks are presented like composition books with attractive covers, in a simple and appealing interface. You can add a passcode lock for added security. 

This journaling app sorts entries into multiple categories, which seems useful but I found really counterintuitive. It was awkward to use and a struggle to return to each day. Folders include business, entertainment, friends, love, and more, with tags for dreams, ideas, and more. For me, these were not natural journal categories. Many other apps I tested include prompts that help the process but also serve as tutorials that get you going with the app. That might have been helpful here, or perhaps this one just isn't for me. For a very reasonable $7.99/year, Diaro adds PDF exports and Cloud sync. This could be worth checking out as a cheaper alternative to Day One.

Daybook is a great journaling app with lots of features. It has lots of prompt templates and allows you to journal both freely and with assistance. It's not on our list because it's quite similar to Journey, and we preferred that app.

A $29.99 per year premium upgrade adds custom templates, Alexa/Google Assistant support, printing, and more. Like Daybook, they have a lot of fun and useful guided journaling options, so this is another great one to check out. 

Grid Diary uses a highly structured journal format, although you can change what the prompts are from a large library. The grid in the title refers to the journal format, a grid of questions that help you reflect on your day. These can generally be answered in a few words and provide a great way to check in on how things are going and how they might go better. This works really well as a smartphone app, as you don't need to answer at length. Not for you if you're looking for flexibility, but a great structured option.

Elisi is a good looking app with too many features that don't integrate that well with each other. Elisi has lists, a planner, a habit tracker, and more, so if you want all this in one place, it's a good one to check out. But I found it confusing to use, and often ended up putting the same information in multiple places and not tracking items.