Daylio vs Bearable (2026): Full Comparison, Plus a Third Option

Daylio vs Bearable is the most argued matchup in mood tracking, and the loudest voice in the debate has a horse in the race: Bearable wrote its own comparison and, shockingly, Bearable won. This page tries to be more useful than that. Dated facts, linked sources, and a clear frame: these apps optimize for opposite things, so the “winner” is decided by your life, not their feature lists.

One disclosure up front. We build MoodKit, a third app in this space. It gets exactly one section, at the end, where it honestly belongs.

The one-paragraph answer: Daylio wins on speed, streaks, and its free tier. Bearable wins on depth: symptoms, medications, sleep, and cross-domain correlations. And if your actual question is “what drives my mood?”, both leave a gap that neither’s fans like to talk about.

Daylio vs Bearable at a glance

	Daylio	Bearable
Built for	Fast daily mood journaling	Whole-health & symptom tracking
Platforms	iPhone, iPad, Android	iPhone, Android
Check-in time	~5 seconds	Minutes, if you track thoroughly
Mood scale	5 faces	1–10, plus descriptive words
Time precision	Timestamped entries	Day split into 4 six-hour blocks
Symptoms & meds	Custom tags only	Structured, with severity and reports
Account needed	No	Yes
Free tier	Generous, usable forever	Good, but chart history is capped
Health sync	Limited	Apple Health, Google Fit, Fitbit
Rating (US App Store, Aug 2026)	4.8 (~61k ratings)	4.8 (~6k ratings)
Premium (US)	$4.99/mo · $35.99/yr · $59.99 lifetime	$6.99/mo · $34.99/yr · no lifetime

Facts checked August 2026. US App Store pricing. Bearable runs frequent deep discounts, so treat its list price as a ceiling.

Five seconds or five minutes

Daylio is a micro-diary. Tap a face, tap a few activity icons, done. The whole design exists to kill friction, and it works: that’s how you get a 4.8-star average across sixty-one thousand reviews and streaks that survive busy weeks.

Bearable asks more and returns more. A full check-in can cover mood on a 10-point scale, symptoms with severity, meds, sleep, energy, and your own custom factors. For people managing chronic conditions, it’s often the first app that takes the whole picture seriously.

The costs are mirror images. Daylio feels shallow once you start wanting answers. Bearable feels like homework once the novelty fades. Spend an evening on r/Daylio and r/BearableApp and you’ll find both complaints on repeat.

The insight problem they share

Now the uncomfortable part.

Daylio’s most famous App Store review (“Wonderful yet lacking”) praises everything about the logging, then lands the punch: “Am I learning anything from recording all of this?” Daylio’s stats are counts and charts, and its correlations sometimes flag innocent activities that merely co-occurred with bad days.

Bearable generates thirty-plus correlation reports, which sounds like the cure. Except reviewers keep noting the grids don’t show the values behind their verdicts, so you can’t tell a strong signal from noise. And those six-hour time blocks blur exactly the cause-and-effect timing you’d want the reports to capture.

If you want a record, none of this matters much. If you want explanations, it matters a lot.

Money

Subscriptions are nearly identical, around $35 a year. Three real differences:

1. Free Daylio is livable indefinitely. Free Bearable is generous with tracking but caps your history until you pay.
2. Daylio sells a $59.99 one-time unlock. Bearable has no lifetime at all.
3. Bearable’s discounts are frequent and steep. Never pay its list price without checking first.

Accounts and data

Daylio works without an account and stores data locally, with optional backups to your own cloud drive. Bearable requires an account and syncs through its servers — a fair trade for cross-device access, but a trade. Neither app shows ads.

Pick by persona

The habit builder who wants a two-tap diary that’s still alive in December: Daylio, easily.

The patient tracking symptoms, meds, and energy for themselves or a doctor: Bearable, easily.

The self-analyst who logs faithfully and wants to know what it all means: keep reading.

The third option (yes, ours)

If the insight section above described your exact frustration, that’s the gap MoodKit was built for. It keeps Daylio-style one-tap logging, then ranks your activities by measured mood impact with the day counts shown, finds activity combinations, pulls Apple Health sleep, exercise, and steps in as ranked factors, and runs week-long self-experiments: try a habit, skip a habit, or test next-day effects. Everything is computed on your device. No AI, no account.

Full candor: it’s iPhone/iPad only, it has no symptom or medication tracking, and after its free trial it’s a paid app ($39.99/year or a one-time $79.99 Lifetime, US pricing). It doesn’t replace Bearable’s job, and Daylio still beats it on price. But for the “what actually drives my mood?” question, it’s the specialist in the room. The full Daylio comparison is here.