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Best Journaling Apps For Mac

Best Journaling Apps For Mac Rating: 3,5/5 2608 votes

Journaling might seem silly on the surface, but a journal is extremely useful as both a permanent record of your thoughts and as a cathartic release. Regardless of how you plan to use a journal, our favorite on the iPhone is Day One.

Journaly is among the best full-fledged journaling apps Keep a Digital Diary with Day One for Mac OS X and iOS Keep a Digital Diary with Day One for Mac OS X and iOS Everyone has a story to tell. It's not always a story in need of an audience, sometimes a story just needs to be told. If you’re looking for the best journaling app, or a great app for logging and recording various events and milestones of your life, then by far and away the best journaling app is Day One. Day One has outstanding apps for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad that all sync.

Day One

Journal or Diary apps for Windows 10 offer an easy way to document the events of the day on a personal level. There are plenty of options in the Store worth considering and these are the best. MacJournal is a slightly older journaling application built by long-time Mac developers Mariner Software. The user interface might look a little dated. Even so, it offers many of the same features as other journaling applications on this list. (iOS, Mac, Android, Web) This app has been praised as the premiere journal app for IOS. It stands out with its beautiful design and strong feature set. To create entries on the desktop requires purchasing the companion Mac app. If you’re an IOS / Mac user you should seriously consider Day One. Journaling Apps for the iPad Day One is the rare app that lives up to its hype. The award-winning app’s simplicity and elegance has made it the standard to which all other journal apps are compared.

Platform: iPhone (iPad and Mac)
Price: $9.99
Download Page

Features

  • Support for multiple journals
  • Inline photos
  • Map and Calendar views
  • Customizable reminders
  • Tagging
  • Timeline filters to change views and sort notes in a variety of ways
  • Passcode and Touch ID protection
  • Exportable backups with support for plain text and PDF exports
  • Apple Watch support
  • Share extensions
  • Markdown support
  • Automated metadata, including location, weather, motion activity, step count, and currently playing music
  • Day One syncing with Mac App
  • TextExpander support
  • Support for If This Then That

Where It Excels

Day One was one of the first great journaling apps for the iPhone and over the years since its initial launch, it has remained firmly at the top. It strikes the perfect balance between features, usability, and design.

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Day One knows that journals aren’t always just about text, they’re often about capturing a whole moment. When you create a new journal entry, Day One automatically pulls in a bunch of metadata, including your location, the music you’re listening to, how far you’ve walked, the weather, and more. From there, you can add in up to 10 photos per entry or just start writing. What’s nice about Day One is that while you can add in a ton of extra data, it’s still perfectly usable as a text editor. None of the extra features get in the way of what it’s supposed to be, a journal.

Best Apps For Mac

Day One is packed with features if you want them. First off, it supports multiple journals, which means you can create up to 10 journals, each with their own set of entries. You can also set up custom reminders to help you fill that journal with text every day, filter your journals by a variety of different metrics, and passcode protect them to keep your notes away from prying eyes.

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Day One supports IFTTT, which means you can automate journal journal entries from any other service that IFTTT supports, like saving the tweets you like to Day One or cataloging every article you favorite in Pocket. It’s also really nice that Day One doesn’t lock you into their system. You can easily leave the service and export your notes at anytime as PDFs or plain text files.

Where It Falls Short

Day One doesn’t have many downsides when it comes to features, but it’s impossible not to talk about the asking price of $10. If you want to sync up with the Mac app, you’ll also need to shell out another $40, which is a lot, but we don’t think the Mac app is necessary for most people. We also think that considering the amount of features and ongoing support, Day One is well worth $10.

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The only major complaint we have is that Day One only works with its own syncing engine and you cannot backup with Dropbox or iCloud. The custom sync engine is a benefit since it means faster syncing, reliable backups, and your notes are fully encrypted, but if you prefer to use another service, you’re out of luck.

The Competition

Diaro (Free/$3.99) is the best alternative to Day One for anyone who doesn’t need Day One’s more advanced features. Best gaming mice for mac. In fact, Diaro looks a lot like early-era Day One. With it, you get one notebook filled with all your entries, a powerful search, and the ability to access your notes from a browser. The free version of Diaro also includes ads, so you’ll probably want to shell out $4 for the Pro version if you actually plan on using it. If you’re just looking for a simple journal app without good organization and not a lot of fluff, start with Diaro.

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Momento (Free/$3.99 per year), is all about automating your journal. You can hook it into a variety of different social networks and Momento pulls data to create journal entries. Of course, you can manually add notes too, but the main focus is on automation. If you keep a journal to capture specific moments, Momento is a good choice, but it’s not great for longer form writing.

Of course, you don’t necessarily need a journal-specific app. Though it’s nice to have an app made specifically for journaling because it makes organization much easier, any other notes options, like Simplenote (Free), Bear(Free), Evernote (Free), or OneNote (Free) will work perfectly fine. Most of these apps sort files by modified date as opposed to creation date, so they don’t really work well as a journal by default. Still, they’re fine and if you don’t mind bending them a bit to fit your needs, they can do the job of a journal.

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For a long time, Android and PC users have had to look on jealously while Mac and iOS users get beautiful journaling apps like Day One. Journey, a new app for Android and Chrome, ends the forlorn looks.

A Brief Introduction To Journaling

Journals are basically digital diaries. It’s a healthy habit you can adopt in 30 daysStart A Digital Journaling Habit With A 30-Day ChallengeStart A Digital Journaling Habit With A 30-Day ChallengeOne useful path to personal self-improvement is through keeping a journal. But this approach requires journal writing to become a habit. A journaling challenge could be the push you need to just begin.Read More, and it will serve you well for the rest of your life. Journaling has been shown to have several benefits, including helping you track your moods and to finally stop procrastinatingHow To Stop Procrastinating: The Only New Year Resolution You Should SetHow To Stop Procrastinating: The Only New Year Resolution You Should SetKick the habit of procrastination and start taking action without waiting for the right time. Stopping procrastination is the only new year resolution you need. Here's why.Read More.

Our own Bakari Chavanu has written extensively about the practice and regularly hosts Twitter chats around the topic. In fact, if you are new to this, his beginner’s guide to digital journalingThe Beginner's Guide to Digital Journaling The Beginner's Guide to Digital Journaling Maintaining a private journal is a great way to build your writing skills, spill out your thoughts, desires, worries, and reflections on paper. The very act of writing itself can often help you think through..Read More is the best place to start.

Bakari is a fan of Day One to power up your journal writingPower Up Your Journal Writing With These Day One TipsPower Up Your Journal Writing With These Day One TipsJournal or diary writing is a great way to exercise and improve your writing skills, document what is going on in your life, and to stay in tune with your thoughts and feelings.Read More, and rightly so. That is arguably the finest journaling app around and definitely the most beautiful. When it comes to maintaining a digital diary, design matters; good design keeps making you want to go back to an app. Android has been particularly unlucky not to have a beautiful journal app, although the basic functionality can be emulated by writing a digital diary in DiaroKeep A Beautiful, Orderly, and Private Journal Of Your Thoughts and Days With Diaro For AndroidKeep A Beautiful, Orderly, and Private Journal Of Your Thoughts and Days With Diaro For AndroidKeeping a personal journal can often help us make sense of the difficult times in our lives, or better remember the good times. If you're carrying around a smartphone, you already have a powerful and..Read More and others.

Meet Journey

Journey is an exciting addition to the Google Play Store. Here’s what you need to know about it:

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  • Price: It’s free for the things you really need, including importing an existing journal. The $5.99 premium package gives you markdown support, removes PDF watermark, lets you export and backup the journal, and has Night Mode.
  • Cross-platform: It’s available as a Chrome app, so you can use it on Windows, Mac, Linux or Chromebook.
  • Design: It’s gorgeous. No really, just try it out. The flat design, the well-spaced breathing room, the beautiful fonts (you can choose between five), the easy-to-use UI—and most of it is customisable. It’s flawless.
  • Reminders: In the Android app, you can set a daily reminder (or choose the days of the week) to update your journal at a selected time.
  • Security: You can password-protect your journal with a PIN, so no one else can “accidentally” look at your private thoughts.
  • Calendar: The calendar view is a nice way to see which days you have updated your journal on, and get a quick preview.
  • Tags: You can browse your journal by tags, which is also a neat way to see a chronological list of entries.
  • Photos: You can add one photo to any entry, but only one. This is unnecessarily limiting, hopefully it will be lifted.
  • Inspiration: Journey gives you a new inspiring thought every day, to make your writing and your life a little easier. You could also try some of thse websites for unique journal writing ideas5 Useful Sites For Journal Writing Ideas And Techniques5 Useful Sites For Journal Writing Ideas And TechniquesJournal writing has a strong tradition of not only helping writers improve their writing skills, but the process of writing your thoughts, worries, and challenges can also be useful. if you're stuck for ideas or..Read More.
  • Atlas: All your notes can be geo-tagged to view a map of where you have been and what you have written there. Quite cool.
  • Weather: Journey will automatically record the weather each day as well.
  • Offline: You can use both the Chrome and the Android apps offline. Journey will sync the data to its servers when you next go online.

What Is Journey Missing?

Best Journaling Apps For Mac

For all the goods it brings to the table, Journey still has a few things missing. The Chrome app still doesn’t have reminders, which is a big miss. Not even a daily email reminder, like what some services offer.

Journey also does not support video and audio, and allows only one photo per entry.

Should You Get Journey?

Despite the few flaws, Journey is by far the best journaling app I have used on Android or Chrome. It’s actually an app that can make you keep writing journal entries for a whole yearHow To Keep Writing Daily Journal Or Diary Entries For A YearHow To Keep Writing Daily Journal Or Diary Entries For A YearThe start of a new year is a great time to begin keeping a journal or diary, but the challenge lies in keeping up your new daily journal writing habit.Read More. If you use Google Chrome or Android, and especially if you use both, it’s worth going on a journey with Journey:

Download: Journey for Chrome (Free) [No Longer Available]

Download:Journey for Android (Free)

Your Thoughts About App Design

How much does design affect your decision in using an app? Would you be willing to give up a few non-essential features for great design, or do you want functionality over form at all costs?