Journey wants to help you track your life and everything that’s happening in it using maps, notes, moods, and calendars. Get Journey Daylio wants to simplify the process by making it easier and faster with emojis to track moods and activities. Get Daylio Let’s begin.
User Interface
Journey has a clean layout and when you launch the app for the first time, it will ask you to create a passcode. You can sign in using your Google account. There is a menu at the bottom to quickly access Calendar, Atlas or map, Media where you add a photo to journey and Today tab. There is a big ‘+’ icon to jot down your first entry quickly. The sidebar menu houses settings, help pages, coach for journaling courses (more on that later), and add-ons. You can change the default blue theme too. Daylio only has a bottom bar with a ‘+’ icon to enter your experience, Calendar, Stats to identify trends, Entries, and More for settings as well as other things. No sidebar menu and the map feature is missing here altogether. Both the journaling apps are a joy to use.
Creating an Entry
Click on the ‘+’ icon in Journey, and you will see a blank canvas ready to be filled. Enter some text here and move to the bottom bar. That’s where you can add a picture/video/audio, a location where the event happened, the weather conditions in that location, activity, and finally, an emoji to denote your overall mood. You can change the date to create or update a past entry too. I like the tags feature because it allows you to easily group and search for particular events. These two are located at the top. Scroll the bottom bar left to reveal a plethora of formatting options. There are even H1 to H3 heading tags, so you can write an entire essay here if you like. Add links, highlight important parts, indent text, and create bullet or numbered list. It’s a joy to write on Journey journaling app. Journey is intelligent too. The moment I added an old photo, it asked me to change the date accordingly, making it easy to add old events. Coming to Daylio, tapping on the ‘+’ icon will give you three self-explanatory options. While this means an extra tap, it also gives you an option to add yesterday’s event today. Useful for people who tend to forget a lot. Pretty much all of us then. You begin by adding a date and choosing an emoji to denote your mood. There is an option to edit or create moods if you need more options. Moods are the central theme in Daylio as it wants to simplify the journaling process. You will then select an activity denoting what you were up to on that day. Editing or creating new activities is easy. You can add a note below that, but there is no formatting toolbar and no way to add location, files, or weather information. You can select multiple activities, though. Daylio has an achievements system to motivate you to maintain your journal more regularly. Gamification is known to work wonders. The Journey app takes a more detailed approach, while Daylio makes it quick, simple, and clutter-free.
Revisiting Events on Calendar and Map
Both Daylio and Journey journaling apps come with a calendar. You can use it to jump to dates and relive all those memories and emotions you felt that day. Dates with an entry in Journey are marked in blue for easy identification. You can open it to view notes, images, and other details. Star it to mark it as special, share it with friends, or print it. Tap on the menu icon to view it on a map. That will open it on Google Map. Tapping on the Atlas tab will open the map in-app with images you have uploaded plotted on it. Tap on the image to view details. You can easily zoom and pan around it. Daylio also comes with a calendar, but in addition to dates, you can also filter entries based on mood. That way you can check how many days you were feeling a particular mood while doing a particular activity. It gives you a bird’s eye view, and if you are honest to yourself, it can open your eyes.
Other Features
Head over to the Today tab in Journey to check stats on whether you are posting entries daily or not. You can also check your Mood Chart here. One cool mood metric is What Makes Me Feel. Depending on which activity you associate with which mood frequently, you will know what makes you happy or sad the most here. There are a few courses available on how to use Journey to track mood, personal development, identify patterns and use that data to your benefit, and more. You can change the underlying theme, unit, font, and choose night mode in the settings. Daylio wants you to never break the chain and shows Days in a Row metric first. They have gamified the process, as we noted earlier. You can set goals and work towards achieving them in this app. These goals could be anything.
Your Life’s Journal
Journey is more suitable if you want a more detailed approach to journaling. Daylio is more about tracking activities and mood but leaves out other features. Journey has a subscription model if you need to use it on multiple devices with cloud sync. Daylio comes with a one-time fee. Notably, Journey’s mobile app can be bought for a one-time fee too. Next up: Looking for a journaling app for Windows? Click on the link below to find out not one but five excellent options.
