Inner Journal vs other digital diaries

Hi! I’m Rick 🤍, and I’ve built this app for you 👇🏽

I’ve been keeping a digital journal for almost five years now. It started as a simple way to dump my thoughts after a long day, but it quickly became my external brain; a place for travel memories, mood tracking, and random late-night epiphanies.

But over the last year, I hit a wall with journaling apps. The market has changed. My old favorite apps started locking too many features behind steep monthly subscriptions, and with the rise of cloud AI, I started getting seriously paranoid about where my deeply personal data was actually going. Who is reading my diary to train their cloud servers? No thank you.

So, I spent the last few weeks testing the biggest journaling apps on the market to see if any of them still respect the user. Here is my honest, human review of the heavyweights, and why I eventually decided to build the perfect indie app myself to fill the massive gap I saw in the market.

I keep asking myself: why are journaling apps so expensive?

1. Day One: The "Apple" of Journaling Apps

The Vibe: Premium, polished, and beautifully designed. Day One is the undisputed heavyweight champion of journaling. The interface is gorgeous, throwing in photos and location data is seamless, and it "just works."

The Catch: The price. Day One is heavily subscription-based. If you want to use it on more than one device, sync your data, or add more than one photo per entry, you are locked into a recurring premium fee forever. Plus, it has historically favored iOS users, leaving Android and Web users feeling like an afterthought.

Verdict: Beautiful, but too premium-oriented.

2. Journey: The Cross-Platform Contender

The Vibe: The best alternative to Day One for Android and Windows users. Journey does a fantastic job of bridging the gap across different ecosystems. It has a great calendar view, solid mood tracking, and lets you pull in weather and location data automatically.

The Catch: Subscription fatigue. Like Day One, Journey has moved aggressively towards a subscription model. Furthermore, its interface, while functional, feels a bit more corporate and less like a "personal sanctuary" compared to others.

Verdict: A solid workhorse, but getting too expensive for what it offers. Not modern anymore

3. Notion: The DIY Approach

The Vibe: Infinite possibilities. A lot of productivity nerds (myself included) tried to build their journals in Notion. You can create custom databases, tag everything, and build complex mood-tracking dashboards.

The Catch: Too much friction. Notion is a workspace, more than a diary. Opening Notion to write a quick emotional thought feels like opening Microsoft Excel to write a love letter. More importantly, Notion is kinda limited offline. If you’re on a plane or out in the woods, you can’t add work with most features, and in mobile its quite laggy and hard to use.

Verdict: Great for project management, terrible for capturing in-the-moment thoughts.

4. Inner Journal: The Pretender (The App I Built 🩵)

Just when I was continuing to write my personal diary in a Word document, I realized that if I wanted a journal that truly gave data ownership to users so, as a programmer and UX/UI designer, I started to build it myself.

Let me be transparent: I made Inner Journal because I want users to not worry about data lock-in or unknown AI data training. I tried to merge all the frustrations people have with current journaling apps and solve them.

And here is what are the core guidelines on which I built Inner Journal, to be your new daily driver:

🎨 Insane Customization (Hello, Glass UI)

Most apps give you a light mode and a dark mode. Inner Journal gives you over 100 colors, 16 different fonts, and beautiful background texture patterns. I even created a stunning transparent "Glass UI" aesthetic (only available to “Plus” subscribers, in order to experience something “extra”). You can customize the calendar, day card style, and much much more!

It actually feels like your personal space.

✍️ Frictionless Writing & Markdown Support

The editor is an absolute joy. You can use standard Markdown to format your text, but some extended features were added to be able to spend more time working on this app. Some paid features include:

• “Day Blocks": lets you write your day in multiple parts

• “Emoji”: pick one emoji per day, beautifully visualized in the card and calendar

• “Tabs”: add up to 10 tags to a day, easily viewable and searchable in your diary

• “Text Editor Toolbar”: manage tables, heading, text transformations (bold, italic, quotes, …) while writing!

• and other new features that keep coming!

The app was build to allow everyone to use most of its features for free, FOREVER! Including:

• Mood 😊 (stressed, tired, joyful, …)

• Images 🏞️ (with carousels and gallery)

• Audios 🎤 (up to 3 minutes per day)

• Graphs and Statistics 📈

• Full Interface Customization 🎨

and more…

🔒 True Privacy & Offline AI

This was the biggest priority for me. Inner Journal operates on a strict Privacy First philosophy, with local device data first. Your diary has never been so private and secure.

With emerging small Local Offline AI models that can fit in your smartphone, it makes sense to have some features available to everyone, without any worry. I think journaling doesn’t necessarily need an AI assistant, but - if integrated well - can actually give some hints about who you are (or to prompt you about your day 😌). You get cool modern features like automatic mood detection and monthly summaries, all running on your device.

💰 A Fair, Flexible Pricing Model

Finally, an app that respects your wallet. Inner Journal is completely ad-free. Unlike the others, Inner Journal gives you limited cloud-sync for free (you can keep one active diary synced across your phone and the web companion app at a time). If you want to sync multiple diaries across all your devices and unlock all future features, we have a fair subscription, but we also offer one-time purchases for specific premium features if you hate subscriptions. It’s incredibly flexible.

📊 The Final Comparison

If you are currently paying what you consider “too much” for a journaling app just to sync your text, or if you are worried about cloud AI reading your deepest secrets, here is how the top apps compare:

And, best of all:

The Verdict

Inner Journal strikes the perfect balance. It’s among the most beautiful and customizable journaling/diary apps, works across 18 different languages, and is fiercely protective of your data.

Ready to try it out? You can grab Inner Journal on the App Store or Google Play and finally take control of your memories.

Have any feedback? I’d love to hear your thought, please reach out from the app or via the contact email.

Built with love 🤍