How We Feel Review: 2026 Overview

The app suits people who want a focused tool for emotional self-awareness and nothing else. If you are already using a habit app, a journaling app, or a meditation app, this slots in without overlap. It is also a strong choice for anyone sceptical about paying for a mood tracker when the core act — pausing to notice how you feel — costs nothing.

Students, people on tight budgets, and anyone who has had a frustrating experience cancelling a wellness subscription will find the no-subscription model quietly refreshing. The app does not suit people who want coaching, guided programs, or a single tool that covers their whole wellbeing practice.

Setup is minimal: pick a name, set a reminder frequency, done. No quiz, no goal-setting sequence, no onboarding funnel. The first check-in is available within about thirty seconds of install — a time-to-first-value score of 5 out of 5 in our rubric.

You indicate energy level (low to high) and valence (unpleasant to pleasant), and the emotion wheel narrows to a cluster of specific emotions. Pick one, add an optional note, and you are finished. The whole flow takes under two minutes once you know it.

This is the centrepiece of the app. Where Daylio gives you five mood faces, How We Feel gives you a structured taxonomy: 'anxious', 'overwhelmed', 'stressed', 'worried', and 'scared' are all distinct options rather than collapsed into one colour. That specificity changes how you use the log — you end up thinking more carefully about what you are actually feeling.

The wheel is grounded in circumplex models of emotion from affective science, mapping feelings onto axes of arousal and valence rather than just positive/negative. The app explains this briefly without being didactic. In day-to-day use it stays quick: under a minute once you have the pattern down, with the optional note field available but never required.

Beyond logging, How We Feel surfaces short skill tips and brief exercises — breathing techniques, grounding prompts, simple reframes — linked loosely to what you have logged. These are closer to reference cards than a course, and they will feel thin if you are coming from Wysa or Youper, which layer proper guided sequences around similar content.

Journaling is limited to brief notes attached to check-ins, not freeform writing. If you want a proper journal alongside your mood log, Day One or Rosebud fill that gap without conflict.

After a few weeks of consistent logging, How We Feel surfaces time-of-day trends, weekly summaries, and activity-mood correlations. The charts are clean and readable, and data export is available — better than many paid apps manage. Health sync and offline mode work smoothly.

This is where the stickiness question becomes honest. Our stickiness score is 3 out of 5. The emotion wheel is engaging at first — many people log several times a day early on. By week six, logging tends to settle into once-daily or less, and the insights plateau because the app has no mechanism to respond to your patterns. It tracks; it does not adapt.

Our evidence score for How We Feel is 4.2 out of 5 — the third-highest in our current ranking, behind only Headspace and Wysa. That reflects one specific strength: the app names its researchers, cites the conceptual model it uses, and does not make inflated claims about outcomes. That is a higher bar of transparency than most apps in this space clear.

What the score does not claim is that the app delivers structured therapy. It tracks emotions using a credible vocabulary but does not guide you through CBT, DBT, or any named therapeutic framework in depth. The evidence backing is for the taxonomy, not for a treatment approach. If clinical credibility is what you need, Wysa or Youper are better suited.

There is nothing to price. The app is entirely no-cost — no subscription, no in-app purchases, no premium features hidden behind a paywall. This is a nonprofit project, so the model is not 'no-cost tier that converts'. Our value score is 4.9 out of 5, the joint-highest in our ranking.

The only honest caveat on value is the obvious one: you get what you pay for in terms of scope. The no-cost model means no team of content writers producing courses, no AI team building a companion, no coaching tier. If you need that breadth, you will be paying for a different app. But for mood tracking specifically, the cost-per-feature calculation is unambiguous.

Daylio is the other strong contender in the low-cost mood-tracking space, and the two apps suit slightly different people. Daylio's emoji system is faster to log and easier to build into a reflex. How We Feel's emotion wheel takes slightly more thought but produces richer data. Daylio has better habit and activity tracking; How We Feel has better emotion vocabulary and a clearer science story.

Daylio costs around $2.99/month or about $23.99/year for Premium (figures from our facts file; verify current prices in the App Store or Google Play). How We Feel costs nothing. If price is the deciding factor, the choice is clear. If you want activity tracking alongside your mood log, Daylio is worth the modest cost.

Liven is our current number-one pick, and the gap in scope is significant. Liven includes mood tracking, journaling, courses, guided programs, an AI companion, and habit tools, all behind a subscription starting at around $59.99 per year. How We Feel does mood tracking at no cost.

There is a real case for running both. Liven's built-in mood check-in is functional but not as nuanced as How We Feel's emotion wheel. If you are already a Liven subscriber who cares about emotional granularity, using How We Feel for mood logs and Liven for everything else is a sensible setup. If you want growth across multiple areas of your life and are comfortable paying for it, Liven is the better call. If mood tracking alone is the goal and budget matters, How We Feel beats everything on this list.

How We Feel is a nonprofit project, and its relationship with user data appears oriented around research rather than advertising. The app does not run ads. Emotional data collected is described as being used to improve understanding of emotional wellbeing at a population level, with individual data anonymised.

That framing is more reassuring than many commercial apps, but 'anonymised research data' is a category worth understanding before you start logging sensitive emotional states. Read the current privacy policy on the How We Feel website — the specifics matter here, and they can change.

How We Feel earns a 4.0 out of 5 from us — the same score as Day One and Youper, and higher than Daylio despite being entirely no-cost. The score reflects what it does well: an outstanding emotion vocabulary, solid science backing, data export, and a first-run experience measured in seconds.

The ceiling is real. No AI companion, no habit tools, no guided programs, no meaningful journaling. Stickiness is moderate — engaging at first, then settling into a background habit. Get it if you want the best standalone mood tracker at no cost. Look elsewhere if you want your mood data to connect to growth programs, coaching, or an AI that responds to what you find.