Free Mood Tracker Apps for iPhone: What's Actually Free (2026)

Search “mood tracker” in the App Store and the word you’ll see most is free. It’s on the icon, in the subtitle, in the first screenshot. Then you open the app, tap your third mood, and a paywall slides up. Free was the download, not the app.

This list is the antidote. Seven mood trackers you can genuinely use without paying, each with the exact line where the free tier stops, so you know what you’re getting before you build a streak on it. Two are free with no catch at all. Four are freemium with a livable free tier. One is ours. (Disclosure: we build MoodKit, which as of September 2026 has free logging for everyone; details and limits below, same as for the others. Prices are US App Store, at the time of writing.)

App	What’s free	Where free stops	Paid unlock
How We Feel	Everything	Nowhere (nonprofit, no paywall)	None
Apple State of Mind	Everything	Nowhere (built into Health, iOS 17+)	None
Daylio	Logging, activities, basic stats	Deeper charts, extras	$4.99/mo · $35.99/yr · $59.99 once
Pixels	Year-in-Pixels logging	Plus features	~$4.99 once (cloud sub optional)
Finch	Pet, check-ins, core habits	Cosmetics, extra content	$9.99/mo · $69.99/yr
Bearable	A lot of logging	History depth, reports	$6.99/mo · $34.99/yr
MoodKit	All logging, no entry cap	The deeper insight cards	Trial · $39.99/yr · $79.99 once

Facts checked September 2026.

Two apps with no paywall at all

How We Feel (4.9★, ~30k ratings) is the one to install if you want to pay nothing, ever. It was built with Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, it’s run as a nonprofit, and there’s no ads, no upsell, no account wall. Its strength is vocabulary: a color quadrant of emotion words that makes “fine” impossible to hide behind. Its weakness is analysis. You get a timeline and some sleep and exercise overlays from HealthKit, and that’s about where it ends. It also needs iOS 17. The alternatives round-up is for when you outgrow it.

Apple State of Mind ships inside the Health app on every iPhone running iOS 17 or later. Valence slider, emotion words, a few life-factor tags, and a chart. It’s private, it’s free, and it’s genuinely fine for a lightweight record. It won’t tell you why Tuesday was bad, and it can’t learn your own activity list. The Apple Health guide shows how far it stretches.

Four freemium apps where free is livable

Daylio (4.8★, ~62k ratings) has the most generous free tier of the paid apps. Mood, activities, streaks, and basic stats all work without paying; Premium is where the deeper charts and the extras live. If you want the classic micro-diary and don’t mind that even Premium mostly shows rather than explains, free Daylio is a safe default. Daylio versus MoodKit is the head-to-head.

Pixels is the indie Year-in-Pixels app: one tap colors your day, and the year becomes a mosaic. The core is free, the plus unlock is a small one-time purchase, and only the optional cloud backup is a subscription. Stats are descriptive, and there are no widgets or Apple Health. Fair pricing is the whole pitch, and it delivers.

Finch (4.9★, ~757k ratings) is a self-care pet that grows when you check in. The free tier includes the bird, daily check-ins, and the core habit loop; Finch Plus adds extra content and customization. It’s the best free option if what you need is motivation rather than data, and the worst if you want a chart. Finch alternatives covers the data side.

Bearable (4.8★, ~6k ratings) lets you track a startling amount for free: mood, symptoms, medications, sleep, and factors. The free cap is mostly history depth and the reports. It needs an account, logging is slower than the others, and its correlations come without the numbers behind them, but for symptom-heavy tracking it’s the most capable free tier here.

MoodKit: free logging, paid insight

As of September 2026, logging in MoodKit is free for everyone. That means unlimited check-ins, the five built-in moods plus any custom ones you create, 24 activities plus your own, short notes, reminders, and no account or sign-up, ever. Nothing you record ever leaves your device; analytics covers app usage and crashes only.

What’s Premium is the insight layer, which is the reason the app exists: the Life Intelligence tiers beyond the first, the Impact Leaderboard that ranks your activities by measured effect on your mood, Hidden Patterns, and next-day effects. A free trial opens all of it, then it’s $39.99 a year or a one-time $79.99 Lifetime. So the free version is a real mood tracker you can keep forever; it just doesn’t tell you what’s driving the numbers. Whether that’s the part you need is the whole question, and our guide to whether mood tracking works argues it usually is.

Our limits, for the record: iPhone and iPad only, no Apple Watch app, no photo attachments, no dark mode, and it’s a young app next to Daylio’s decade.

The “free” apps to be careful with

Three patterns to check on any free mood tracker from a publisher you don’t recognize:

• Account-gated free. If the free tier needs an email before the first entry, your moods now live on someone’s server. Ask what happens to them.
• AI-processed free. Free apps that “analyze your journal with AI” are sending your entries to a model, and some terms allow training on them. The no-AI round-up explains what to look for.
• The third-entry paywall. Some apps count a few entries as the trial. It’s legal; it’s just not free. Read the App Store page’s in-app-purchase list before you start a streak.

Which free tracker to pick

Pay nothing, ever, and want words for feelings: How We Feel. Pay nothing and want the least possible friction: Apple’s State of Mind. The classic diary with a free tier you can live in: Daylio. Free logging with the option of real answers later: MoodKit, and you don’t have to decide about the answers until the data makes them interesting.