Daylio Review: 2026 Overview

Daylio (developed by Reletech) is a mood diary and micro-journal available on iOS and Android. At its core it is a logging tool: you record how you feel several times a day using a five-point mood scale, attach activity tags, and optionally write a short note. That is the entire loop.

It suits people who want a low-friction record of their emotional patterns but not a guided programme. Students, busy workers, and people who have tried journaling apps and found them too demanding tend to get on well with it. It does not suit anyone who wants coaching, structured content, or a framework to work through — there is nothing like that on offer.

There is no lengthy onboarding quiz. You download the app, choose your mood icons (or keep the defaults), set a reminder if you want one, and log your first entry. Our time-to-first-value score here is a 5 out of 5 — about as fast as any app on our list.

The activity library ships with sensible defaults — sport, food, family, work, sleep — and you can add your own in seconds. The customisation is genuine: emoji, colour, grouping. You can have your setup match exactly how you think about your day, which matters more than it sounds for a daily logging habit.

Logging is a tap sequence: open the app, choose a mood level, tap the activities that apply, optionally type a note, save. Nothing loads, nothing asks follow-up questions. You can log multiple entries per day, which is useful if your mood shifts significantly between morning and evening.

The widget is worth enabling. A single tap from your home screen opens the mood picker directly, which removes almost all friction from the daily habit. Daylio's stickiness score — 4 out of 5 in our rubric — reflects how well this design choice works in practice over weeks and months.

This is where Daylio earns its keep. The stats screen shows mood averages over time, breakdowns by activity, and a calendar heat-map of your entries. After a month of logging you can see correlations that would be invisible otherwise — which days, activities, or contexts tend to go alongside better or worse moods.

The app does not interpret these patterns for you. There are no nudges, no AI summary, no coach reading your data and suggesting changes. You do that thinking yourself. For some people that is exactly right; others will want more scaffolding and should look elsewhere.

Daylio includes a goals section where you can set targets for how often you want to log certain activities — exercise three times a week, for instance. It is not a full habit builder; there are no streaks attached to goals, no accountability features, no reward mechanics. Think of it as a gentle nudge rather than a system.

If you need proper habit infrastructure, you will want to run Daylio alongside something like Finch or Habitica, or look at Liven if you want a single app that handles habits, journaling, and mood together under one subscription.

The no-cost tier in Daylio is genuinely usable. You can log entries, add activities, and see basic stats without paying anything. The main limits are a cap on the number of custom moods and activities, plus restricted access to advanced charts.

Premium, at around 2.99/month or about 23.99/year at the time of writing, removes those limits, adds more detailed stats, and enables export to a spreadsheet. That is among the lowest prices for a mood-tracking premium tier on the market — verify current pricing in your App Store or Google Play before subscribing. You can cancel through your app store at any time and revert to the no-cost version without losing your data.

Daylio does not claim to be built on CBT, ACT, or any named framework. The concept of mood logging as a route to self-awareness has a solid general basis in psychology, but the app itself is a tracking tool, not a therapeutic intervention. Our method score reflects that honestly — 3.4 out of 5.

That is not a criticism of what the app sets out to do. It just means you should go in with clear expectations: Daylio is a mirror, not a coach. The data it surfaces is only as useful as the intention you bring to reading it.

Against How We Feel — a nonprofit no-cost mood tracker with science backing — Daylio has richer stats and the activity-tagging system, but How We Feel has deeper emotion vocabulary and more explicit psychological grounding. Both are worth trying; Daylio edges ahead on long-term usability and data depth.

Against Liven — our current top-ranked app at 4.5 out of 5 — the gap is wide in scope. Liven combines mood tracking with journaling, a full course library, an AI companion, and guided frameworks (CBT, ACT, DBT). It is also significantly more expensive: premium from around 59.99/year versus Daylio's roughly 23.99. If you need a single-tool growth platform, Liven wins. If you want lean mood data without committing to a costlier subscription, Daylio is the smarter buy.

Against Stoic or Reflectly — journaling-forward apps with mood components — Daylio is faster and cheaper but offers far less guided content. The right choice depends on whether you want to write or just to log.

There is no content beyond the logging and stats. No meditations, no courses, no breathing exercises, no evidence-based programmes. If you are going through a difficult period and need more active support, Daylio will not provide it — and the app has no crisis resources at all.

There is also no health platform sync — your Daylio data does not talk to Apple Health or Google Fit. For a mood and wellness app in 2026 that feels like a gap, especially given how much useful context step-count or sleep data could add to mood correlations.

Support is lean. This is a small developer product, and response times can be slow. The community on Reddit is helpful for tips, but do not expect enterprise-level customer service if something goes wrong.

By default your entries stay on your device. Cloud backup requires opting in. Export is available under Premium, giving you a CSV of your full history — which is more than many larger apps offer, and means you are never locked in.

Always review the current privacy policy on the developer's website, especially if you use cloud backup. Data handling terms can evolve, and mood data is sensitive personal information worth protecting.

Daylio scores highest on everyday experience (4.8) and value (4.9) — it nails the fundamentals of a daily tool and asks very little for what it delivers. It scores lower on depth (3.5), personalisation (3.3), and method (3.4) because it does not try to be a personal development programme.

That is an honest profile, not a failure. A lean, well-built tracker that costs almost nothing and actually gets used is worth more than a fully-featured app you abandon after a fortnight. Just be honest with yourself about whether a data layer alone is what you need right now.