Disclosure: we make Goodnight Journal, one of the apps reviewed below. We have tried to be fair and concrete about what each app does well, but please weigh our recommendation knowing that.
Everyone carries memories worth keeping — the good ones and the hard ones. A journal is how you hold on to them, and how you make sense of them while they are still fresh.
For a long time journaling meant pen and paper. That still works beautifully, but a personal journal app gives you things a notebook cannot: it is with you wherever your phone is, it can hold photos alongside your words, it searches years of entries in a second, and it cannot be lost in a move or read by someone who finds it in a drawer.
We have spent a lot of time with the journal apps available this year. Here are the ones worth your attention.
Goodnight Journal
Goodnight Journal takes our first place again this year, and the reason is the same as always: it does the simple thing extremely well, and then adds something nobody else offers.
The writing experience is quiet and uncluttered. You open it, you write, it saves. Your entries are private by default, and they stay private unless you decide otherwise. There is no feed demanding your attention before you have had a chance to think.
What sets it apart is the community. If you want to, you can publish an entry and find that other people have felt exactly what you are feeling. That is a genuinely different experience from writing into a locked box, and for a lot of writers it is the thing that turns journaling from a chore into a habit. You choose, entry by entry, whether something stays yours alone or goes out into the world.
It also works the same way on every screen. Start an entry on your laptop at work, finish it on your phone in bed, read it back on a tablet — it is the same journal, in the same place, laid out the same way.
Day One
Day One is the polished, media-rich option, and it has been refined over many years. Entries can hold text, photos, video, voice memos and location data, and the app is good at surfacing what you wrote on this day in previous years. It is strongest in the Apple ecosystem, though Android and web versions exist.
If your journaling instinct is closer to scrapbooking — you want the photo, the place and the moment all captured together — this is the one to try first.
Daylio
Daylio is for anyone who likes the idea of journaling but genuinely does not have time for it. Instead of a blank page, it asks you to pick your mood and tag what you were doing. That is a complete entry. You can add a note if you want to, but you do not have to.
Do it for a few months and the charts become the point: you start to see which activities reliably lift your mood and which ones drain it. It is less a diary than a record of how your life actually feels, and it is the easiest habit on this list to keep.
Grid Diary
If the blank page is what stops you, Grid Diary removes it. The app lays out a grid of prompts — questions about your day, your mood, what you are grateful for — and you answer the ones that speak to you. Each answer becomes part of the entry.
It is a good on-ramp. Many people use the prompts for a few weeks, find their voice, and then write freely from there. You can add photos, search your entries by keyword, and sync across devices.
Penzu
Penzu is the closest thing on this list to a traditional private diary that happens to live online. The writing view is deliberately plain, the focus is on security, and it has been around long enough to have a loyal base of long-term users. If your main requirement is “somewhere private to write, nothing clever”, it fits.
How to pick one
The best journal app is the one you will still be opening in three months. That usually comes down to a single question: what gets in your way?
If it is time, use Daylio. If it is the blank page, use Grid Diary. If you want your photos and places woven in, use Day One. If you want privacy with the option of being heard, use Goodnight Journal.
Most of them let you start writing without committing to anything, so try two or three for a week each. The one you reach for without thinking is your answer.
If you are still deciding what kind of journal you want to keep, our guides to the gratitude journal, the reflective journal and the dream journal are a good place to start.
What is your favourite personal journal app? Let us know.