Daylio alternative when you want habits, not moods
Daylio is a mood journal that tags activities. That is a different question from did I do it.
Quick verdict
Daylio is the best micro-journal on either app store: two taps for a mood and a handful of activity tags, and after a few months the correlation stats tell you things about yourself that you would not have guessed. miniHabits is the better tool when the activities are the point, when they have targets and units, and when you want a streak that means something.
What Daylio does better
Entry speed. Mood, tags, done. Under five seconds, no typing required, which is why people keep it up for years where longer journals die in week two.
Mood tracking with correlations. The statistics screen showing which activities appear on your good days is the killer feature and nothing in a pure habit tracker replaces it.
A genuinely useful free tier, with the paid version removing limits rather than gating the core.
Cross platform and easy backup. iOS, Android, a proper export, and a local backup file you control.
Where it stops being a good fit
Tags are binary. “Exercise” is either on the day or not. There is no target of eight glasses, no 90 minute timer, no kilometres, no steps pulled from Health. If your habit has a number, Daylio stores the fact you did something and drops the amount.
Habits are a secondary feature. There are goals with streaks, and they work, but the app is a mood journal first, so the habit views are shallower: no year heatmap per habit, no weekday bias across habits, no shield mechanic when you miss.
Retroactive editing is possible but the flow is journal shaped, which makes backfilling a week of habits slower than it should be.
How miniHabits handles the same job
Habits are the whole product. Five tracking modes: checkbox, counter with a target, timer that runs as a Live Activity on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, quantity with any unit, and HealthKit for steps, sleep and workouts that fill themselves.
The correlation idea survives, pointed at habits instead of moods. The statistics view shows which habits raise the odds of others: reading is 34% more likely on days that started with meditation, 21% more likely on days over 8 000 steps, and 18% less likely at weekends. Same instinct as Daylio, different axis.
Plus the parts a journal does not carry: a year heatmap, weekday bias, time-of-day distribution, retroactive entry that keeps the completion maths correct, and streak shields so a missed day spends a shield rather than the chain.
What you lose is the mood. There is no five-face picker and no journal text, and there are no plans to add one.
Pricing compared
| Daylio | miniHabits | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | generous | 10 habits, all 5 modes |
| Paid | subscription or one-off | 25 € a year, or 34,99 € once |
| Mood tracking | yes, the core | no |
| Numeric habits | no | counter, timer, quantity, Health |
| Habit statistics | light | heatmap, bias, correlations |
Running both
This is one of the few pairs that genuinely complements. Daylio answers how the day felt. miniHabits answers what you actually did and how much. Two apps, two questions, five extra seconds a day.
If you only want one, decide by which question you have been asking. People who already know their habits and want to understand their mood should keep Daylio. People who already know how they feel and want to fix the routine should move.
Migrating your data
Daylio exports CSV, and the export includes dates and activity tags. Map one tag to one habit and each row becomes a date with a value of 1, which is exactly what the miniHabits importer reads. Mood values do not translate and are best left in the Daylio backup.
If you would rather not touch the CSV, screenshots plus our migration prompt in any LLM produce importable JSON.
FAQ
Will miniHabits ever track mood? No. It stores values with units, and a mood is not one.
Can I import years of Daylio history? Yes, through the CSV, one habit per tag.
Is there an Android version? Not yet. Web app August 2026, then Android, then Watch.
The honest recommendation
Keep Daylio if the mood chart is what you open the app for. It is a better journal than anything I am building and the correlation screen has earned its reputation.
Move, or add miniHabits, when the activity tags start feeling too coarse: when you want the number attached, the streak protected, and the weekday pattern explained. This post is what that analysis looks like on real data.