Daylio is a good app. That is worth saying first, because most "alternatives" lists are written by people trying to sell you the replacement, and they start by explaining why the thing you already like is secretly terrible.
It is not. Daylio got a lot right, and it is the reason a whole category exists. People leave it for three specific reasons, and which one applies to you decides where you should go next.
The subscription. The free tier is genuinely usable, but the things you want after a few months, more custom entries, the export, the themes, sit behind a recurring payment. For an app you intend to use for years, a subscription on a personal diary feels different than a subscription on a work tool.
The account and the cloud. Backup means your mood history, and often your written notes, sit on a server. Plenty of people are fine with that. Plenty are not, particularly once the diary starts holding medication, symptoms, or therapy notes.
Mood is not what they wanted to track. This is the quiet one, and in our experience the most common. Daylio is mood-first by design: you pick a face, then optionally add activities. If what you actually want is "how many coffees, how long did I read, how bad was the headache", you are using a mood app to do something it was not built for.
Four questions, and they cut cleaner than feature lists:
The closest thing to a direct Daylio upgrade if you are tracking health. Mood, energy, sleep, symptoms, medication, nutrition. The free tier is unusually generous.
Account: yes. Cost: free tier plus subscription. Best for: chronic illness and symptom tracking, where the breadth is the point.
Self-care framed as looking after a small bird. Sounds twee, works remarkably well for people who bounce off clinical-looking trackers.
Account: yes. Cost: free plus subscription. Best for: people who need the app to be gentle rather than analytical.
Mood-first like Daylio, with good charts and a lighter feel.
Best for: staying in the mood-tracking category but wanting a different flavour.
Habit tracking as a tile grid, visually excellent, one-time purchase available.
Best for: binary habits, did it or did not. Less good for: anything with a quantity or a duration, and it is a habit tracker rather than a diary.
Ours, so weigh this accordingly.
Account: none, for anything. Data: on your device, in a local database, no sync. Cost: free, with a paid upgrade for reminders and export.
The design difference is that it is not mood-first. It is tag-first: you log moments as taps, and a tag can be a simple one (it happened), a quantity (how many), a duration (how long), or an intensity (how strong). Mood is just one tag among them, if you want it at all.
That matters if what you want to track has a number attached. "Coffee, 3" and "Reading, 45 minutes" and "Headache, severe" are three different shapes of data, and an app that only records a face and a list of activities cannot hold them properly.
Where it is not the right pick: if you want your diary synced across a phone and a tablet, we do not do that, and it is not on the roadmap because the whole point is that the data never leaves. If you want guided prompts or an AI that asks you questions, this is the wrong app. And if you genuinely want mood-first tracking with a face per day, Daylio already does that well.
| App | Account | Data lives | Cost model | Records |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Daylio | Optional, needed for backup | Device and cloud | Subscription | Mood, activities |
| Bearable | Yes | Cloud | Subscription | Mood, symptoms, meds, sleep |
| Finch | Yes | Cloud | Subscription | Mood, self-care tasks |
| HabitKit | No | Device | One-time available | Binary habits |
| Menikki | No | Device only | Free plus paid upgrade | Simple, quantity, duration, intensity |
Worth stating rather than glossing over: data that only lives on one device can be lost with that device. No account means no server-side recovery. If you are keeping something you would be upset to lose, use the export, and put the file somewhere you actually back up.
That is the real cost of the privacy position. Anyone selling you local-first storage without mentioning it is selling.
The mistake is trying to recreate two years of Daylio history in a new app. You will not, and the attempt is usually where the new habit dies.
Export your Daylio data and keep the file. Then start the new app clean, with five to ten tags, not thirty. The old data is archived and readable; the new data is the one that has to be easy enough to keep up. After a month you will have something worth reading in the heatmaps, and by then the habit is the thing carrying it, not the novelty.
Leaving over the subscription, and you want the same shape of app: HabitKit for habits, Moodflow for moods. Leaving because you track health in detail: Bearable. Leaving because the account and the cloud are the problem, or because mood was never what you wanted to record: that is the gap Menikki was built for.
And if none of the three reasons apply to you, staying with Daylio is a perfectly good answer.