Wirecutter has covered journaling in several ways over the years, including publishing articles about journaling in Day One and in a paper notebook, as well as speaking with The Isolation Journals creator Suleika Jaouad to discuss journaling on The Wirecutter Show.

I write about personal-productivity software, such as transcription tools and website builders. And I have a long, on-again, off-again relationship with journaling that encompasses both half-filled paper journals and digital journals in everything from Evernote to an early Day One account from 2011.

For this guide:

• I spent over 20 hours testing 14 journaling apps, creating daily journal entries with text, integrations, photos, and audio.
• I interviewed New York Times editor and Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer Glenn Kramon via email about his experiences with journaling over 60 years.
• I read, among other sources, the “Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing” study on journaling, by Karen A. Baikie, clinical psychologist at University of New South Wales, and St. Vincent’s Hospital Sydney consultant psychologist Kay Wilhelm.
• Like all Wirecutter journalists, I review and test products with complete editorial independence. I’m never made aware of any business implications of my editorial recommendations. Read more about our editorial standards.

When the days blur together, journals trace the path of how you got to where you are today. Journaling apps are for anyone who wants to write a digital diary on their smartphone or computer, with both plain text writing and features that only apps can enable, such as photos, videos, audio recordings, and app integrations to log activities.

Introspection and reflection don’t require much tech. All you need is a place to quickly start each day’s entry without having to think about where to file it, a log of previous entries to peruse later, security to hide entries from prying eyes, and syncing and exports to keep your diary safe.

When New York Times editor Glenn Kramon switched to digital journaling (in a Microsoft Word document, no less) after 45 years of writing longhand journal entries, he found that it offered two key benefits over paper diaries.

“First, it’s much easier to rewrite, to sharpen what you say and mean. That’s how you improve your writing,” Kramon said in an email interview. “Second, it’s much easier to search for a name or place when reading back.”

Kramon’s journal still lives in a Microsoft Word document, out of habit and inertia as much as anything. (“I envy those journalers who’ve switched to apps,” he said.) If you’re starting today, dedicated journaling apps can help you build and maintain a journaling habit with reminders, prompts, and cross-platform availability to ensure that your journal is at hand when you’re ready to write.

The best journaling apps make journaling as simple as possible on the devices you use most.

Notes apps cover the basics, but they’re not specifically designed for journals; they make you think about where to save new entries and what to call them. Journaling apps, in contrast, typically require a single tap or click to create a new journal entry, automatically file it under that day’s date, and sync it across your devices.

They then build on that base with journaling-focused features. They allow you to type, scribble, or record thoughts in audio, as well as to attach other, relevant events from your day to add color to your memories. They invite reflection with prompts, build journaling habits with reminders, and resurface the past with peeks at older journal entries. And they increasingly include AI features to ask follow-up questions and create personalized prompts for future reflection.

For this guide, we looked for journaling apps that include the following features:

• Quick journaling in a couple of taps: The best journal apps require only one or two taps or clicks to create a journal entry — including opening the keyboard to start typing. They should create new entries with the current date, with the option for you to change the date if you want to journal about a previous day. And they should allow you to start with either a blank page or a prompt.
• Multiple view choices: Journal apps typically show entries in a reverse-chronological list by default, and they often let you swipe between entries to read through them one day after another. The best ones also offer calendar, map, and other views, along with search, for you to rediscover older entries.
• Pen, audio, and other input options: Journaling apps should let you go beyond typing and allow you to write on a tablet with a stylus or record audio and video if you wish.
• Integrations with calendars, fitness trackers, and other apps: Whereas paper notebooks and notes apps are limited to written entries, journaling apps let you log more details about your day. On Apple devices, that includes support for Apple Journaling Suggestions, with workouts recorded, locations visited, music streamed, and more ready to pull into your journal.
• Multiple journals and entries per day: You might want to journal about your work but keep it separate from your personal thoughts. Or you might want to write a more reflective entry, plus a separate life-log entry for the same day.
• Prompts to jump-start writing: These should include questions about your day (like “What do you want to achieve today?”), as well as introspective questions (like “What am I grateful for today?”). The prompts give you a starting point for writing when you don’t know what to put on a blank page.
• Export functionality: Software doesn’t last forever. The best journaling apps let you easily take your entries with you, in the form of PDF exports to flip back through later (as you can with a paper notebook) and CSV spreadsheet or JSON data exports to import your diary into another journaling app.
• Clear, affordable pricing: Most journaling apps include a basic free version to journal on a single device. Paid journaling apps cost on average around $4 per month, and AI-focused journaling apps are often priced higher, at around $10 per month.

With the above criteria in mind, we researched 25 journaling apps, picking the 14 most promising to test. We signed up for new accounts and created daily journal entries with text, images, locations, moods, weather, and app integrations.

We counted how many steps it took to create a new journal entry, and we wrote both with prompts and from scratch. We added backdated entries and set up multiple journals, and we used handwriting and transcribed audio when possible. And we exported journal entries to see which archival options were available.

For the apps that included generative-AI features, we also used AI to start journal entries with personalized prompts, dig deeper into entries with follow-up questions, and summarize entries with tags and takeaways.

Top pick

Top pick, The best journaling app Day One

Day One

With its extensive journaling features, apps for every major platform, deep integrations, and a generous free plan, this app is the best way for most people to keep a digital diary.

Buying options: Buy from Day One, opens in a new tab

Day One is the best journaling app for most people. It works on every device, and it includes every journaling feature you might expect, with prompts and integrations to add details to your journal.

It’s also simple to use: A single tap is all that’s needed for you to start writing a new journal entry, something that requires two or more taps in most of the other journaling apps we tested.

Getting started is extremely easy. You can start journaling in Day One for free, without signing up for an account. Creating an account is worth it, though, as your entries are automatically synced to Day One’s servers, and you can journal both on one personal device and in Day One’s web app. If, for example, you decide that you’d rather journal on your computer than on your phone, you can move your Day One account to the other device for free.

With a $3 monthly subscription, however, Day One supports journaling on all of your devices, and it allows unlimited photos, videos, audio recordings, and integrations.

It automatically logs details about your day. Every time you create a journal entry, Day One takes note of the context, saving information such as the current weather and temperature, the location, the song that’s playing on your phone, the number of steps you’ve taken that day, and even the altitude and the phase of the moon.

Day One records both the time of your entry and when you last updated it. And the app shows a preview of photos you took on that day, from your photo library, even if you don’t add them to your journal entry.

If all of that sounds like a bit much, it is. And yet it’s interesting to look back at an entry and see how the data adds color to the entry — if, say, it was cloudy out, you were listening to a sad song, and (surprise!) your journal entry was more introspective than normal.

It can help you rediscover memories. Day One shows journal entries in a reverse-chronological list by default. You can view each individual journal on their own (a work diary and a personal diary, perhaps), or you can scroll through a unified view. Alternatively, you can switch to a calendar view or a map that lists every location where you’ve journaled. It also offers a media view that lets you scroll through photos, videos, audio recordings, and PDF files in journal entries.

And if you’re something of a time traveler, Day One’s More tab shows entries on this day from the past three years, an implicit promise that your journaling habit will pay off over time.

Audio journal entries include transcripts by default. Although Day One is built for written journal entries, in our tests it also ranked among the best in audio support. It immediately starts recording when you tap the microphone button, it shows how much time has passed along with a word count, and it can record up to 10 minutes of audio per journal entry.

As soon as you stop recording, it adds a transcript to your journal to review later — no extra taps required.

It has the widest variety of prompts. They include reflection questions like “What have I learned about myself recently?” plus fitness questions like “What discomfort am I experiencing during workouts?”

Day One logs every prompt that you’ve already answered, so you can review all of your answers from each category at once, or you can see how your answers to the same questions have changed over time.

Integrations allow you to journal from anywhere. Day One has more integrations than other journaling apps we tested, including Apple Journaling Suggestions on iPhone and beta support for tracking Strava workouts. With a paid account, it also includes email-to-journal and SMS-to-journal features, with a unique email address per journal and an optional daily text-message reminder.

You can even use the automation platform IFTTT to create journal entries automatically from other apps, turning social media updates, liked videos, saved songs, completed tasks, read articles, and more into journal entries for a fuller record of your day.

It can turn your journal into a book. Day One also provides the most extensive export options among the apps we tested. You can export your journal in JSON and CSV formats to access it in other journaling apps or to migrate it to a new Day One account. You can also share any individual journal entry as a print-ready PDF to send a favorite bit to a friend.

In addition, Day One can export your entire journal into a PDF ebook. The company offers a print service, as well, if you’d like a paper copy of your journal. The PDF and book versions don’t include everything — most of the extra data is omitted, which leaves you with the raw journal entries, prompts, and photos — but they make your digital journal feel more real.

AI features are coming soon. If you’re journaling on an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, Day One can optionally use Apple’s on-device AI to suggest titles for journal entries and offer writing prompts based on your previous writing. Or, if you enable the optional AI features in the app’s Labs settings, it can generate images based on journal entries, summarize entries for past dates, and get AI-powered prompts and questions based on what you’ve written.

Its AI features aren’t as detailed or insightful today as those in dedicated AI journaling apps, but they are extras that help round out an already feature-packed journaling app.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Journal entries open to edit mode by default. Whenever you open a journal entry to relive your memories, or swipe left or right on the mobile app to scroll between days, Day One puts the entry in editing mode by default. As a result, tapping anywhere in the text opens the keyboard, which makes it too easy to change an entry accidentally.

It doesn’t track moods. You can manually add mood-focused tags to journal entries, or you could add a new journal to your library with a mood-tracker template, as Day One suggests. But there’s no built-in way to quickly track moods alongside standard journal entries.

Passcodes are limited to four digits. Day One uses a unique, four-digit passcode to lock the app, for an additional layer of security on top of face or fingerprint authentication. It also uses end-to-end encryption to further protect your journal. You cannot, however, set a longer PIN or an alphanumeric password, nor can you set a custom password per journal (a feature that we expected to be more common but that was supported by only a single app in our tests).

Best for...

Best for..., Best for a free journal on Apple devices Apple Journal

Apple Journal

This journaling app comes bundled for free with iPhones, iPads, and Macs, and it has handwriting support and detailed mood tracking.

Buying options: Buy from Apple App Store, opens in a new tab

Apple Journal is the best free journaling app for people who live in the Apple ecosystem. It’s a free app bundled with the latest versions of Apple’s operating systems for iPhones, iPads, and Macs. It includes most core journaling features, syncs between Apple devices for free, and has better handwriting and mood-tracking features than most other journaling apps.

You can write entries in digital ink. Apple Journal supports adding a drawing to journal entries from any device, though the feature works best on an iPad with an Apple Pencil or other stylus. You can start writing with the pencil anywhere on a page, and the app automatically turns handwriting into typed text. Or, you can tap the pen icon and write free-form notes and sketch any memories you want to include in your notes.

Apple Notes automatically recognizes handwritten text in supported languages, so you can copy your scribbles and paste them as typed text, or you can search through handwritten copy along with text from other journal entries.

It starts journal entries with Journaling Suggestions. iOS has a built-in Journaling Suggestions framework that other journaling apps — including Day One, Journey, and Everlog — can tap into. Unsurprisingly, it features most prominently in Apple Journal.

Suggestions include workouts, recent songs you’ve played from services like Spotify and Apple Music, locations you’ve navigated to (with both Apple Maps and Google Maps), recent photos, and memories with photos from the past. These suggestions pop up whenever you create a new journal entry. They’re also included in journaling notifications that prompt you to write about an activity later in the day.

Once you’ve added a suggestion to an entry, Apple Journal shows a question based on that activity, such as “How was your workout today?” The question isn’t saved as part of your journal entry, and it disappears once you start writing, so you can either answer that prompt or write anything else on your mind.

Its mood tracking is detailed. Many journaling apps include at least basic mood tracking, but Apple Journal goes further. First, you select how you’re feeling on a grade of one to seven, corresponding to a range from Very Unpleasant to Neutral to Very Pleasant. Then, you select descriptors for the feeling; three popular choices show up at first (Amazed, Excited, and Surprised for Pleasant, for example), and you can scroll up for a wider assortment of keywords. Finally, you choose a word to describe what’s impacting your mood most, from options such as Fitness, Health, Work, and Travel.

Apple Journal logs those moods to the Apple Health app and tracks your journaling time as mindfulness minutes. If you track workouts with an iPhone or Apple Watch, you can then see correlations between your exercise minutes and your mental well-being.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

It lacks a library of journaling prompts. Apple Journal shows recommended Journaling Suggestions when you create a new journal entry, and they sometimes include prompts such as “Take a photo of a keepsake you cherish and write about it” alongside activity-driven suggestions. It doesn’t, however, include a bank of prompts that you can browse, with questions to help you ponder life’s bigger questions.

You can’t set a custom journal passcode. You can protect the entire app with Face ID, Touch ID, and your device’s passcode. That keeps your entries away from most prying eyes but can leave your journal accessible to anyone who knows your device passcode. This is a particular concern if you’re using the app on shared family devices.

It works only on Apple devices. This is obvious, but Apple Journal is worth considering only if you plan to journal solely on Apple devices. If you ever need to switch to another platform, its HTML and PDF exports at least give you a fully formatted snapshot of your journal that you can read anytime in the future on any device.

Best for...

Best for..., Best for AI-enhanced journaling Rosebud

Rosebud

This journaling app lets you write your thoughts in a free-form journal, or you can talk them through with AI-powered follow-up questions that dig deeper into your experiences.

Buying options: Buy from Rosebud, opens in a new tab

Rosebud is an AI-focused journaling app that challenges you to think more deeply about your memories than any other app we tried. You can use it as a traditional journaling app, writing plain-text entries each day to record your thoughts, or, with its Dig Deeper tool, you can let AI ask probing questions about what you’ve written. We prefer its open-ended prompts over the guided, question-driven routine in other AI journaling apps.

It prompts you to journal twice a day. Rosebud opens to its Today page, which has two prominent blocks at the top: Morning Intention and Evening Reflection. The former opens to a question about how you’re feeling and what you want to achieve today; the latter, to a question about how your day went and any challenges you want to reflect on. You can then write anything you wish, adhering to the question or simply journaling whatever’s on your mind.

Rosebud is focused on your words. You can add up to five images to each entry, but it offers no options to format text or add activities. Instead, you can type, dictate to your device, or — with a paid plan — use Rosebud’s unique voice mode to talk to the app in a conversational format.

Its AI helps you dig deeper into your memories. AI conversations are Rosebud’s differentiating feature. Once you’re done writing, you can either tap “Finish entry” to save a traditional journal entry or tap “Go deeper” to prompt Rosebud’s AI to ask follow-up questions based on what you’ve written.

One example: When I mentioned having a productive day after going for a morning run, Rosebud asked what prevented me from having a consistent running routine. When I said time, it then asked what adjustments could be made to free up time for a run.

The insights were not profound, nor were they ideas I couldn’t have come up with on my own. They did, however, prompt further reflection, and they typically felt worth the additional few minutes of journaling. Free plans let you dig deeper up to nine times per session; paid plans remove that restriction and allow Rosebud to learn from interactions.

It creates goals and takeaways from your journal entries. After you write a journal entry, Rosebud analyzes what you’ve written and summarizes it in a reflection, with a key insight that it derives from your words. It also adds emojis and tags for your mood, as well as for people and activities you mentioned in the update. And it can suggest goals based on what went well in your journal entry or areas where you came up short.

In one entry, I mentioned that I hadn’t gotten to an errand, and Rosebud suggested adding that as a task. Another time, after I wrote about feeling good after a run, it suggested adding a goal to run three times a week.

Any goal you save then shows up as a task in future journal pages, encouraging you to track well-being tasks and to journal about them when you hit the goals.

Its prompts and routine-driven journals go beyond the basics. Rosebud’s default prompts are broad enough that you don’t feel boxed into talking about the same things each day. Whereas Stoic, another AI journaling app, asks how you’re feeling, how you slept, and what your core focus areas are for the day before prompting you to start writing about today’s plans, Rosebud’s more open-ended prompt gives you space to write about anything. It does include more reflective prompts, though, if you’d like more inspiration.

Each day brings unique prompts, including holiday-focused ones like “If you could shapeshift into anything for a day, what would it be?” during the week before Halloween. It also shows prompts based on your previous entries, asking about tasks from the day before and so on.

Rosebud provides a range of prompt-based journals that you can add to your account, including gratitude and dream journals, mindset and positivity-focused prompts, and more. These start a new Rosebud session with a leading question and the standard AI-powered conversation to help you dig deeper.

It keeps your thoughts private. Rosebud’s AI is powered by a mixture of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Groq. And its interactions are anonymized, with zero data retention and full HIPAA compliance, according to its privacy policy.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

You can’t create a custom passcode. Rosebud’s free plan offers no options for you to secure your journal. Its paid plan enables biometrics to require face or fingerprint verification, but you cannot set a custom passcode for your journal.

You have to sign up for an account. Rosebud requires onboarding before you can start journaling. The account setup asks for your age and your purpose for journaling, as many apps do, but also more personal details such as your marital status and religion. It then turns that information into a GPT-style prompt like “I’m 35-44, male, professional, and married,” which you can edit later if you’d like.

Export options are limited. You can copy individual journal entries in plain text. Or, you can export a Markdown-formatted text file with every entry in your journal, including Rosebud’s questions and your responses, along with auto-added tags and reflection takeaways. You can’t export a print-ready, formatted PDF of your journal, though.

Journaling is a meditative practice that can help preserve memories. It pays off over time, with cumulative results similar to those of “other psychological interventions,” found researchers Karen Baikie and Kay Wilhelm.

But building that routine can be difficult. That’s partly because the process of writing down memories — especially those of difficult experiences — can be more overwhelming than clarifying, at least at first.

“The immediate impact of expressive writing is usually a short-term increase in distress, negative mood and physical symptoms,” the researchers note, and the benefits come only with repetition.

“How do you start, and build the habit? Just as you would if jogging or learning the piano,” Glenn Kramon told me in our email interview. Here are some specific tips:

• Start small. “A few sentences will do,” writes Kramon. “You’ll know when you need to write more.”
• Pick a time. “Mornings and evenings are often best,” writes author Sarah Durn. Most journaling apps adhere to such a schedule. Or, as James Clear suggests in Atomic Habits, pair journaling with an existing routine, perhaps your morning coffee or workout.
• Choose a time frame. Journals don’t have to be daily. “You can use a journal to decide if you want to measure time by a day or week or month,” says actress and writer Tavi Gevinson.
• Commit to a schedule. Don’t set out to journal forever; start with a shorter goal. “I love the 100-day container,” says journaling author Suleika Jaouad. “But maybe start with 10, maybe start with 30 [days],” enough time to form a habit.
• Try prompts. They help you start when the blank page feels daunting. “Sometimes I love the prompt, and it immediately sparks an idea,” says Jaouad. “Sometimes I hate the prompt, and that’s interesting in and of itself, and I write about that.”
• Focus on writing. Pictures, songs, and workouts can enhance your journal entries. Just “don’t transform your journal into social media, where you’re writing for the world, not yourself,” said Kramon in our interview. “You tend to be less honest.”
• Be honest. Journals show how each moment adds up to the present. That requires honest reflection. “I feel like I am made of chaos until I put pen to paper,” says Jaouad. The goal is to find that same clarity, one entry at a time.

Grid Diary (iOS, Android, macOS) asks you to answer the same six prompts, arranged in a grid, each day, with a similar space to reflect on the year as a whole. That design can help you reflect on personal growth in the same areas over time. It can also feel restrictive, with less space for open-ended reflection.

Dabble Me (web) sends an email every day asking how your day went, and you reply to record a journal entry. That simplicity can aid you in building a journaling habit but also leaves little to differentiate the experience from journaling in a notebook or emailing a message to yourself.

Journey (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux, web) checks all the boxes, with a wide range of journaling features including support for Apple Journaling Suggestions on iPhone. It’s more limited than our top picks, though. Mood tracking is limited to five emojis, and you cannot add activities or prompts to entries once you start writing. And while having multiple storage services to sync entries seems nice, it adds complexity to the process.

Reflectly (iOS, Android) guides you to log your mood and then reflect on what lies behind those feelings. It reminds you to do so, by default, five times a day, with notifications that are designed to be motivational but in our experience often fell short and felt distracting.

Diarium (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows) covers the journaling basics and defaults to a calendar view that features a picture from each entry on its date. The interface otherwise is sparse, and this app includes fewer journaling features than most competitors.

Moleskine Journal (iOS, Android) makes your diary feel like art, with an auto-selected photo and quote at the top of each day’s entry. It embeds the day’s weather, as well, and it can optionally list the day’s activities on each entry. It requires more taps for you to add an entry than most other journaling apps, however, and it includes fewer journaling features overall.

Everlog (iOS, macOS) covers the journaling basics, including support for Apple Journaling Suggestions, and the way it combines the calendar and list view simplifies scrubbing through entries. It’s limited to Apple devices, though, and it has few differentiating features.

Penjo (iOS, macOS, visionOS) is built for handwritten journal entries, and it uniquely works on Apple’s Vision Pro VR headset. But VR aside, it’s similar to other writing-focused notebook apps, and it doesn’t track moods or activities. It also lacks prompts and other journaling-focused features.

Clearful (iOS, Android, macOS, web) is a minimal journaling app with AI-powered reviews of your week and month, plus a dashboard showing how much you’ve written. It has a wide range of prompts but offers fewer views and features than other journaling apps.

Reflection (iOS, Android, web) is an AI-focused journaling app that lets you write entries and then get AI-powered summaries and coaching based on your notes. It uniquely includes an option for you to add passcodes to protect individual journal entries. Unfortunately, it crashed occasionally in testing, and its custom text editor made selecting and copying text difficult.

Stoic (iOS, Android, macOS, web) was initially designed to help you reflect on your mental state by answering questions each morning and evening. Today, that process is aided by AI that summarizes your mood and digs deeper with questions. Answering similar questions every time can feel tedious, though, and its focus on what you plan to do each day makes it better for planning than for reflective journaling.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.