One journal, holding every part of your life at once. Or a notebook for each chapter.

What each one is built around

Day One is built around the timeline: one long record of your life, with everything a modern phone can attach to a moment. Photographs, video, audio, location, weather, step count, the song you were playing. It has been made for over a decade, it is very good at what it does, and it belongs on the phone in your pocket.

Innerholm is built around the chapter. Instead of one journal holding your grief, your work and your pregnancy in the same stream, you keep a separate notebook for each, and each one arrives already knowing what it is for: its own paper, its own prompts on the empty page, its own quiet furniture. Twenty-three editions on the shelf, eight of them free, and a builder for one of your own. The privacy is a consequence of the same idea: a journal you keep for one thing should not be readable by everything else, so encryption, the AI companion and every capture practice are decided per journal rather than per account.

Side by side

Day One tiers and prices checked 5 September 2026, from Day One's own pricing page. Their prices and tiers are theirs to change, and they have changed, so treat any figure here as of that date and check theirs before you decide. Where a row says "see their current policy", that is deliberate: we will not paraphrase somebody else's privacy terms. Innerholm's rows are checkable against the pricing page and the privacy page on the day you read this.

Where Day One is better

Five places, and none of them is close. If any one of them is what you need, Day One is the answer and you can stop reading here.

• Native apps, especially on iPhone and Mac Innerholm is a web app. It installs to a home screen and opens like an app, but it is not native, it is not in the App Store, and it does not have a share sheet, a widget, or a watch app. If most of your journaling happens on a phone in the ten minutes before sleep, Day One is built for that and Innerholm is not.
• Offline, completely An installed Innerholm keeps working on a bad connection, and an on-device journal needs no network at all. But a native app that has never depended on a browser is a stronger promise than a service worker, and Day One has one.
• Audio and video entries Innerholm has voice entries on Plus, transcribed on your own device, and no video at all. Day One records both and keeps them as media rather than as text.
• A printed book they make and post Day One sells printed journals, discounted on their paid tiers, and the whole thing happens inside the app. Innerholm sets your journal as a print-ready A5 PDF and hands you the file; we do not print, bind, or post anything, and there is no partner behind a button. If you want a book to arrive at your door without arranging it yourself, that is Day One and not us.
• Ten years of finish Day One has been made, tested and used for over a decade by a company. Innerholm is made by one person and is younger. There are corners of Day One that are simply more finished, and pretending otherwise would be the first thing on this page you could not trust.

Where Innerholm is better

• A journal for the chapter you are actually in Grief, sobriety, postpartum, caregiving, a pregnancy, a first year with a child, a trip, a garden, a therapy year. Twenty-three editions, each arriving with its own paper and its own prompts, and the ones for the hard seasons are free. A template is a document; an edition is a notebook.
• Sync and photographs, on the free account Day One's free tier is generous with entries and journals, and both apps put end-to-end encryption on the free side of the line, so that is a tie and we would rather say so than claim a difference. Where the free tiers actually part is the ordinary daily stuff: syncing between your devices is a Silver feature there and free here, and Basic allows one photograph per entry where Innerholm allows as many as the entry needs.
• A journal that never reaches a server at all An on-device journal lives in your browser, needs no account to start, and is never sent anywhere, ours included. It is not encryption on a server; it is the absence of a server. Day One has no equivalent, and it is the one privacy claim on this page that is a real difference rather than a tie.
• Nothing on that you did not turn on Mood, weather, place, on this day, the AI companion: all off, all decided per journal, all enforced on the server rather than hidden in the interface. A journal you keep for one thing is not readable by everything else, including by us.
• No streak to lose There is no run of days to break and no badge to protect. Rhythm is a quiet count and it is off by default. A journal that scores you gives you something to lose on the evening you most need to write.
• The price, and the way out The whole journal is free, with no credit card and no trial that ends. Export is free too, in Markdown and in a Day One archive with the photographs, so leaving costs nothing and the format is published in full.

Who each one is for

Trying both, and moving between them

Nothing here is a one-way door. Innerholm reads a Day One JSON export directly, keeping entry text, tags, starred entries, weather and dates, with a preview of the first entries before anything is saved; photographs in the ZIP are preserved in the archive but are not linked into entries yet. Going the other way, a Day One compatible archive is a free export from every Innerholm account, photographs included.

So the honest advice is to try. Start a free Innerholm journal for one thing (the chapter you are actually in), leave Day One where it is, and see which one you open. That is a better answer than any comparison table, this one included.

How to move a Day One archive across, step by step · If you have already decided to leave Day One