Finch vs deariary: a pet to care for vs a day to read
Most self-care apps fail for the same reason journaling apps fail: on the day you need them, you do not open them. Finch solves this with a move that sounds trivial and is not. It gives you a bird.
You hatch it, you name it, and from then on the daily exercises are not for you. They are for the bird. Complete a breathing exercise or a check-in and it grows, earns rainbow stones, gains outfits, goes on adventures, evolves from baby to teen to adult. Skip a day and nothing punishes you, but the bird was waiting.
Transferring the obligation onto something that seems to depend on you is one of the more effective pieces of behavioural design in consumer software, and the numbers reflect it. Finch is a Health & Fitness app from Finch Care Public Benefit Corporation, rated 4.9 from 731,000 ratings on the App Store and 4.9 from 452,000 reviews with over 10 million downloads on Google Play.
Finch also contains a journal, which is why it turns up when people compare journaling apps. That journal is the part worth looking at closely, because it is a different object from what deariary produces, and the difference is not quality. It is subject matter.
What Finch does well
The accountability transfer actually works. The core problem in self-care apps is that the person who most needs to open the app is the person least able to. Finch routes around it. Doing the exercise is framed as caring for something else, which is a motivational channel that stays open on days when caring for yourself does not. Nothing in a mood tracker or a journaling prompt does this.
The tools are real, not decorative. Guided breathing, a focus timer with soundscapes, gentle stretches, mood check-ins on a five-point scale with trends over time, and themed multi-step journeys for goals like reducing stress or building focus. This is a genuine wellbeing toolkit, not a pet game with a wellness label attached.
Reflection is attached to the moment. After finishing a goal, Finch asks how it went, right then. That is better timing than a blank page at 11pm, and it produces short, specific entries about a specific action. There is also a free-form journal with prompts for longer writing.
The core is free. The main self-care tools, journaling, mood and goal tracking are available without paying. Finch Plus adds outfits, adventures, soundscapes and other extras. Reviewers consistently describe the paid tier as largely cosmetic and content-based rather than a paywall across the useful parts.
Both platforms, properly. iOS and Android are both maintained and both carry a 4.9 rating with hundreds of thousands of ratings each. This is not the usual situation where one platform is a year behind.
It is structured as a public benefit corporation. Finch Care PBC is legally organised to weigh a stated public benefit alongside shareholder return. That is not a guarantee of anything, but in a category full of engagement-maximising wellness apps it is a meaningful signal about intent.
The overall impression is of a carefully built product with a clear theory of behaviour change, aimed at people who want to establish a self-care practice and need help showing up for it.
Where the model has limits as a diary
None of the following is a criticism of Finch at what it does. It is a description of what its record contains.
The entry is about the practice, not the day. Finch’s reflections are attached to goals you completed inside Finch. Read six months of them back and you have a record of your self-care practice: which exercises you did, how they went, how you rated your mood, which journeys you worked through. What you will not find is the meeting that ran long on the Tuesday, the person you had lunch with, the thing you shipped, the film you watched that night. Those were not Finch’s business.
It still requires you to show up. The bird lowers the cost of showing up. It does not remove it. If a week disappears, the exercises were not done, the reflections were not written, and that week has no entry. The design is gentler about this than a streak counter would be, but the dependency is the same one every manual journal has.
Mood ratings are not events. A five-point scale, tracked daily, produces a trend line. A trend line tells you something real about a period and almost nothing about a day. Six months later, “3 out of 5 on a Thursday in March” does not reopen the Thursday. We wrote about what a mood button can and cannot hold separately.
Nothing arrives from outside. Finch has no integrations with your calendar, your task manager, your messages, or anything else. Everything in it was typed into it. That is a coherent design decision for a wellbeing app, and it means the record’s coverage is exactly equal to your input.
Gamification cuts both ways. The pet, the stones, the outfits, the evolution stages are what make the loop work. They also mean the app has a state that reflects your engagement, and for some people a neglected bird after a bad month is not a neutral thing to look at. Reactions to this vary a lot, and it is worth knowing about yourself before starting.
Plus pricing is hard to pin down. The App Store lists Finch Plus at a spread of price points from $5.99 to $69.99, plus a separate $7.99 Guardian Program, and reported prices differ between iOS and Android and across regions and sales. Check the current price in your own store rather than trusting any figure in an article, including this one.
What deariary does differently
deariary is not a wellbeing app and has no exercises, no breathing timer, no mood scale, and no pet. It does one thing: it writes down what your day contained.
You connect services you already use, currently thirteen of them (GitHub, Google Calendar, Slack, Todoist, Bluesky, Discord, Steam, Trakt, Last.fm, Toggl Track, Swarm, Linear, and a generic webhook), and each morning there is an entry for the day before, generated overnight from what those services logged. Nothing to open, nothing to complete, no reflection prompt.
An entry reads like an account of a day: the 9:30 with two names on it, the pull request that went out before lunch, the long afternoon on one problem, four tasks closed, a cafe at three, the same album twice. Below it, images that came in through connected accounts and a short list of the day’s structured signals.
The contrast with Finch is cleanest at the six-month mark. Finch gives you back your practice: the exercises you did, the moods you logged, the reflections you wrote about them. deariary gives you back the Thursday, including the parts you never thought about again. Neither of those is the other one’s failure. They are different records.
Two limits worth stating. deariary knows nothing about how a day felt beyond what your activity implies, so a hard day and an easy day can produce similar-looking entries. And it is web only, with no mobile app, which is the opposite of Finch’s situation.
At a glance
| Finch | deariary | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Self-care app built around a virtual pet | Automatic diary generated from your services |
| How entries are created | You write a reflection after completing a goal, or open the journal | Generated overnight from connected services |
| What the record is about | Your self-care practice and mood ratings | What your day contained |
| Daily requirement | Open the app, do at least one exercise | None |
| Missed week | No exercises, no reflections, no entries | Entries still appear |
| Integrations | None | 13 services plus webhook |
| Wellbeing tools | Breathing, focus timer, soundscapes, stretches, guided journeys | None |
| Mood tracking | 1 to 5 daily check-in with trends | No mood scale; tone comes from activity |
| Gamification | Pet growth, rainbow stones, outfits, evolution stages | None |
| Social | Send and receive positive vibes with friends | None |
| Platforms | iOS and Android | Web |
| Pricing | Free core; Finch Plus in-app purchases listed $5.99 to $69.99, Guardian Program $7.99 (varies by platform and region) | Free for one integration, paid plans above that |
Two different problems wearing the same word
Finch’s premise is that the hard part is doing the self-care, so the product exists to get you to do it, and the journal is a byproduct of the doing.
deariary’s premise is that the hard part is having any record of an ordinary day at all, so the product exists to produce one, and there is nothing to do.
Put that way, these barely compete. The reason they end up in the same searches is that “journal” now covers both a wellbeing practice and a record of your life, and people looking for one keep landing on the other.
If what is missing from your week is a self-care practice you can actually sustain, a mood trend, or a way to get yourself to breathe for two minutes on a bad afternoon, Finch is one of the best-executed products in that category and the bird is not a gimmick.
If what is missing is the answer to “what did I actually do in March,” Finch will not tell you, because it was never asked.
Who should use which
Use Finch if you want structure and encouragement around self-care, you respond to gentle accountability, and you want breathing exercises, mood tracking and guided journeys in one place with a design that makes you want to return. The free tier is enough to know within a week whether the pet mechanic works on you.
Use deariary if you have stopped trying to keep a diary and what you actually want is to be able to read back an ordinary Tuesday in six months. No exercises, no prompts, no bird. The entry exists whether or not you engage with anything.
Use both if the two gaps are both real, which is common. Finch handles the practice. deariary handles the record. They do not overlap enough to conflict, and Finch’s mood ratings plus deariary’s factual entries end up being a more complete picture of a period than either alone.
Starting
Finch is free on the App Store and Google Play. Check current Finch Plus pricing in your own store; the listed range is wide and varies.
deariary is free for one integration at deariary.com. Connect a service you already use and read tomorrow morning’s entry.
One of these gives you something to take care of. The other gives you something to read.
