Mood tracking only works if you have a question. Tracking for its own sake produces a wall of coloured squares and a vague sense that you should be learning something from it, which is how most people quit in month three. Tracking to find out whether a new medication is doing anything, whether the bad weeks follow short sleep, or whether the last month was genuinely worse than the one before, produces an answer. So the right app is the one that can answer your particular question, and they differ more than the app store screenshots suggest.
Decide what you are asking first
Four questions cover nearly everyone, and each one points at a different app.
Is this treatment working? You need medication logging, a long enough record, and an export you can hand to a clinician.
What is driving the bad days? You need more than mood. Sleep, symptoms, activities, cycle, whatever you suspect, with correlations between them.
Is it actually getting worse, or does it just feel that way? You need very low friction and several months of data. Nothing else matters, because the value is entirely in having stuck with it.
Why was today like this? Strictly speaking you do not need a tracker at all. You need to write a sentence, because the cause is never in the number.
The eight, by the question they answer
What you log each day is the column that decides, in our view, whether you will still be doing this in March. Features and exports are as each app lists them, as of October 2026.
| App | Answers | What you log | Export, as listed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daylio | Is it getting worse, and what correlates | Two taps: a mood and activities | PDF and CSV |
| Bearable | Medication, sleep and symptom effects | Mood, symptoms, medication, sleep and more | Several data and report exports |
| Apple Health | Mood against sleep and activity | A mood, and what is affecting it | All Health data, as XML |
| Moodflow | How factors relate to your mood | A 1 to 5 rating, emotions, a note | |
| DailyBean | What affects your mood, more gently | A mood bean and activity icons | Backup only, no export listed |
| Finch | Whether you are doing any self-care | Mood checks, goals, reflections | No export listed |
| Stoic | Mood with a reason attached | Check-ins with prompts | JSON backup or plain text |
| Reflectize | Why, not just what | A few lines about your day | Yes |
1. Daylio, the default and usually the right one
Daylio's own site calls an entry two taps: a mood and a few activities. After a couple of months its statistics show which activities tend to go with better days, and even how you felt the day before and after them (as of October 2026).
In our view it is the default for a boring and correct reason: it asks so little that it is easy to keep using. A perfect tracker you abandon in week three answers nothing.
It exports PDF and CSV files, which makes it safe to commit to.
2. Bearable, the one a doctor can use
The serious option. Mood alongside medication, sleep, energy, symptoms and custom factors, with correlations between them and several ways to export data and reports, as of October 2026.
If you are titrating a dose, trialling a new medication or trying to prove that the fatigue is not in your head, to us this is the app here best built to produce evidence rather than an impression.
It asks for more input and the interface carries that weight. On bad days, log the mood and skip the rest.
3. Apple Health, if you want one fewer app
State of Mind logging in the Health app takes a few taps, and Apple shows it next to lifestyle factors like exercise, sleep and time in daylight, which is exactly the comparison most people want. Health data is encrypted on the device and end to end in iCloud (as of October 2026).
It is simpler than a dedicated tracker. You can tag what is having the biggest impact on you, add a little context and set reminders, but there is no diary around it. A good baseline, a weak practice, in our view.
4. Moodflow, for a record you will look at
Moodflow asks for a daily rating, a few emotions and, if you like, a note and activities, and it spends its effort on charts and a calendar coloured by your mood. It also has a journal mode, a photo album and a PDF export (as of October 2026), so it sits a step above pure tapping.
Pick it if your last tracker died of boredom rather than of effort.
5. DailyBean, the gentlest version
DailyBean has you pick a mood bean, tap icons for activities, routines and meals, and add a short note or a photo, with a monthly mood calendar and charts (as of October 2026). Functionally close to Daylio, tonally lighter.
Worth choosing over Daylio only if Daylio started to feel clinical. In our view there is no more depth here.
6. Finch, if the tracking is really about self-care
Finch is a self-care app first, with quick mood checks and mood trends on the side (as of October 2026). It is here because some people who search for a tracker are really looking for a reason to do one small thing a day.
To us Finch is much better at that than any chart. Its store listing describes no export, so the mood data stays in the app.
7. Stoic, for mood with a reason attached
A mood score records the weather. Stoic asks you to say something about it, which is the only way the record becomes explanatory rather than descriptive.
Thinner health data than Bearable. It starts you with morning and evening check-ins that you can change, plus optional AI prompts, as of October 2026. A real upgrade on pure tapping if you have five minutes.
8. Reflectize, if the chart stopped telling you anything
The ceiling on every tracker above is that a mood is a symptom. You can chart symptoms for a year and still not know the cause, because the cause was in a sentence you never wrote down.
Reflectize takes the sentence. You say what happened, and the app keeps track of the people, events and threads inside it, so a low stretch traces back to something specific rather than correlating with a Tuesday.
Unreleased. Daylio for low effort or Bearable for a medical question are the live answers.
Is mood tracking bad for you?
It can be, and this is worth saying on a page recommending eight of them. Attaching a number to every day gives you something to optimise, and for people prone to rumination, grading the day can quietly become another thing to worry about.
Two warning signs. If you find yourself adjusting the score because the chart looks bad, the record has stopped being honest. If a low day now feels like a failure rather than a fact, stop tracking and write instead.
The healthier pattern for most people is to track for a defined period with a specific question, get the answer, and stop. Permanent tracking with no question is where it goes wrong.
How long before mood tracking tells you anything?
Six to eight weeks for anything you can trust. Below a month you are looking at noise, and the temptation to read meaning into two bad Tuesdays is strong.
For a medication question, give it the full period your clinician suggests and do not draw conclusions at week two. For a general pattern, three months is when the chart starts being more reliable than your memory, which is the entire point of doing it.
Sources
- DaylioDaylio
- Activity and mood statisticsDaylio FAQ
- BearableBearable
- Log your state of mind in Health on iPhoneApple Support
- Health app and privacyApple
- iCloud data security overviewApple Support
- Share your data in Health on iPhoneApple Support
- Moodflow: Symptom & Mood Tracker, DiaryApp Store
- DailyBean - simplest journalApp Store
- Finch: Self-Care PetApp Store
- stoic.Stoic
- Journaling and customizationStoic Help Center
- Using AI features in the appStoic Help Center
This piece is part of how to start journaling. Everything you need to begin: what to write about on day one, how long an entry should be, how to pick between paper and an app, and how to keep going after the first week.