Top pick
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.
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 to 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 other journaling apps or to migrate 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).
