Daylio tracks how you feel. deariary shows you what you did.
You tap “rad” on a Wednesday in January. Add the activity tags: work, gym, cooking. That is your Daylio entry for the day. Fifteen seconds, done.
Three months later you scroll back to that Wednesday. You know you felt good. You know you worked, went to the gym, and cooked. But you cannot remember what happened. Which meeting ran long? What did you cook? Why was it a rad day and not just a good one? The emoji tells you the color of the day. It does not tell you the story.
That gap is not a flaw in Daylio. It is a design choice. Daylio tracks how you feel. deariary records what you did. They answer different questions about the same day, and understanding that difference is the point of this comparison.
What Daylio does well
Daylio has been around since 2015. Over 20 million people use it. It has a 4.8 rating on iOS (59,000+ reviews) and a 4.5 on Android (451,000+ reviews). Those are not inflated numbers. People genuinely love this app, and the reasons are clear.
Mood tracking in two taps. You pick a mood (from “awful” to “rad”), select the activities you did, and you are done. No blank page. No prompt. No pressure to be articulate. The entire entry takes less than thirty seconds.
Year in Pixels. A full year of moods displayed as a single grid of colored dots. You can see seasonal patterns, weekly rhythms, and long stretches of good or bad days at a glance. It is one of the most satisfying data visualizations in any personal app.
Correlation statistics. Daylio crunches your mood and activity data to show which activities correlate with better (or worse) moods. “You feel better on days you exercise” is the kind of obvious-in-retrospect insight that is surprisingly hard to see without data.
Goals and habits. You can set goals tied to activities and track streaks. Daylio is as much a habit tracker as it is a journal.
Privacy. All data is stored locally on your device. Daylio does not send your entries to their servers. Backups go to your personal Google Drive or iCloud, encrypted in transit.
Pricing. Free to start. Premium runs $4.99/month, $17.99-35.99/year, or $59.99 for a lifetime purchase. The free tier is genuinely usable.
Daylio earned its user base. It solved a real problem (journaling is too much work) with a real solution (reduce it to taps). For mood tracking and self-care, it is one of the best apps available.
What Daylio captures, and what it does not
Daylio excels at structured, categorical data. Your mood on a scale. The activities you tagged. Patterns over time.
What it does not capture is context. The activities in Daylio are labels you select from a list: “work,” “gym,” “reading.” They tell you what category the day fell into, not what actually happened within those categories. You know you worked. You do not know that you shipped a feature, had a tough code review, or spent two hours debugging a deployment issue.
This is intentional. Daylio keeps things fast by keeping things abstract. The trade-off is that when you read an entry months later, you get a mood and a handful of tags. You do not get the specific moments that made the day what it was.
If you want more detail in Daylio, you can write notes. But the moment you start writing, you are back to the problem Daylio was designed to solve: journaling takes effort, and effort kills consistency.
What deariary does differently
deariary takes a completely different approach. Instead of asking you to select moods and activities, it connects to the tools you already use (Google Calendar, GitHub, Slack, Todoist, and others) and collects your activity data automatically. Then it uses an LLM to turn that raw data into a readable diary entry.
You do not tap anything. You do not write anything. At the end of the day, the entry is already there.
The result reads like prose, not a data table. A deariary entry might say: “You had three meetings in the morning, including a sprint review where the team decided to push the launch to Thursday. After lunch you merged two pull requests on the payments service. In the evening you completed four Todoist tasks, mostly errands.” The specifics are there because the source apps had the specifics.
What deariary does not track is how you felt about any of it. There is no mood selector. The diary records events, not emotions. If you want to know whether pushing the launch felt stressful or relieving, deariary will not tell you. You would have to add that yourself, or remember it when you re-read the entry.
Side by side
| Daylio | deariary | |
|---|---|---|
| What it records | Mood + activity tags | Events from connected apps |
| Input method | Manual taps (mood scale + activity selection) | Automatic (syncs from your tools) |
| Time per entry | ~15-30 seconds | None (generated automatically) |
| Output format | Mood score, activity tags, optional notes | Prose diary entry |
| Best for | Spotting mood patterns, habit tracking | Remembering what you actually did |
| Re-reading value | ”I felt good that day" | "This is what happened that day” |
| Privacy model | Local-only storage, no server-side data | Cloud-based (encrypted), processes data server-side |
| Platforms | iOS, Android (no web) | Web app |
| Free tier | Yes, generous | Yes, one integration |
| Paid plans | $4.99/mo, $17.99-35.99/yr, $59.99 lifetime | See pricing |
Who should use which
Use Daylio if you want to understand your emotional patterns. If you are tracking mental health, working with a therapist, monitoring medication effects, or simply trying to figure out which habits make you feel better, Daylio is purpose-built for that. Its decade of development shows in the statistics, the correlation engine, and the Year in Pixels visualization.
Use deariary if you want a record of your days that you can re-read and actually remember what happened. If you are the kind of person who thinks “what did I even do last Tuesday?” and wants a real answer, not a mood score, deariary fills that gap without asking you to write.
Use both if you want the complete picture. Daylio captures the subjective layer (how you felt). deariary captures the objective layer (what happened). They do not overlap. One takes fifteen seconds of manual input; the other takes none. Running both is less effort than maintaining a traditional journal.
There is no reason to choose one or the other unless you only care about one of those questions. If you want both “how did I feel?” and “what did I do?”, the two apps sit next to each other cleanly.
The question they each answer
Every journaling tool answers a question. Traditional journals answer “what do I want to say?” Daylio answers “how did I feel?” deariary answers “what happened?”
The best choice depends on which question matters to you. For many people, the answer is more than one.
You can start with deariary’s free plan (one integration) at deariary.com and see what your days look like when the details are captured for you.
