Daylio Journal vs HRV
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Daylio Journal
This app helps you track your moods and activities to understand your well-being. It offers a private micro-diary experience without requiring extensive typing, allowing you to identify happiness triggers and build positive habits.
- Mood tracking with icons and emojis
- Activity logging
- Private journaling without typing
- Statistics and charts for habit analysis
- Goal setting and habit building
- Customizable themes and dark mode
- Secure data backup and PIN lock
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Self-Care Bullet Journal with Goals - Mood Diary & Happiness Tracker Daylio enables you to keep a private journal without having to type a single line. Try this beautifully designed & stunningly simple micro-diary app right now for FREE! ** WHAT IS DAYLIO ** Daylio is a very versatile app, and you can turn it in whatever you need to track. Your fitness goal pal. Your mental health coach. Your food log. Your gratitude diary. Mood tracker. Exercise, meditate, eat, and be grateful. Take care of your mental, emotional, and physical health. Good self-care is a key to improved mood and reduced anxiety. This is the time for your wellbeing, self-improvement, and self-care. Use Daylio as your daily bullet journal. We build it on three principles: 1.) Reach happiness and self-improvement by being mindful of your days. 2.) Validate your hunches. How does your new hobby influence your life? 3.) Form a new habit in an obstacle-free environment—no learning curve. Daylio is super simple to use, create your first entry in two steps. For anxiety and stress relief, make sure to include activities that help you to cope with negativity. Everybody can use a mood boost! You can measure their impact on your mood in stats. ** HOW DOES IT WORK ** Pick your mood and add activities you have been doing during the day. You can also add notes and keep an old school diary. Daylio is collecting recorded moods and activities in the statistics and calendar. This format will help you to understand your habits better. Keep track of your activities and create patterns to become more productive! You can review all entries in the statistics on charts or the calendar and share them with your friends. To make it even better, Daylio allows you: - Make reflection a daily habit - Discover what makes you happy - Use a big database of beautiful icons for your personalized activities - Mix and match your own moods using funny emojis - Explore exciting statistics about your life on weekly, monthly or yearly charts - Deep dive into advanced statistics for every mood, activity or group - Customize color themes - Enjoy nights with dark mode - See your whole year in 'Year in Pixels' - Create daily, weekly or monthly goals and motivate yourself - Build habits and collect achievements - Share statistics with your friends - Safely back up and restore your entries via your private Google Drive - Set reminders and never forget to create a memory - Turn on PIN lock and keep your diary safe - Export PDF and CSV documents to share or print your entries ** PRIVACY AND SECURITY ** We are a top private journal since we do not store or collect your data. At Daylio, we believe in transparency and honesty. Your data is stored locally on your phone. You can optionally schedule backups to your private cloud storage or take your backup file with you anywhere. Data are entirely under your control at all times. Data stored in the app's private directories are not accessible by any other apps or processes. Your backups are transferred to the iCloud Drive via the secure (encrypted) channels. Journaling has never been easier! --- Read our full Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy: Terms of Use: https://daylio.net/faq/terms-of-use/ Privacy Policy: https://daylio.net/faq/privacy-policy/
HRV
This app analyzes heart rate variability from Apple Health and Apple Watch to provide actionable insights into your daily stress, energy levels, sleep quality, and recovery. It uses scientific visualizations and dual HRV metrics to help you understand your autonomic nervous system activity.
- Dual HRV metrics (SDNN + RMSSD)
- All-day stress curve
- Energy (Body Resources) reserve tracking
- Nightly Sleep Score
- Personalized Recovery score
- Interactive trend charts
- Apple Watch complications
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HRV Tracker — private, on-device insights from your iPhone and Apple Watch. Turn heart-rate variability, heart rate, sleep and activity data from Apple Health into clear views of stress, recovery and energy. Track both SDNN and RMSSD, calculated from available beat-to-beat intervals. iPHONE APP • Home dashboard for HRV, Recovery, Sleep Score, Stress, Energy, Activity, heart rate and weight • Today view comparing your day so far with your usual pattern at the same hour • Detailed HRV, Sleep, Activity, Strain and Weight views • Behaviour logging for habits such as alcohol and caffeine • Daily and weekly coaching • Interactive daily, weekly, monthly and yearly charts PERSONAL INSIGHTS Explore which parts of your routine are associated with changes in HRV, sleep, stress and other measurements. • Influences screened against chance • Stronger findings separated from preliminary and descriptive patterns • Combined effects for pairs of behaviours • “Moving Together” comparisons between health metrics • U-shaped relationships • “Compare Everything” matrix and influence explorer • Personal experiments in Labs Insights describe associations; they do not prove cause and effect. TODAY & COACH Compare today’s readings with similar hours from your history. Coaching can consider sleep, recovery, stress, energy, activity and events such as workouts, late coffee or mindfulness. A separate note summarizes the previous seven days. AI-written coaching requires an Apple Intelligence-compatible iPhone running iOS 26 or later, with Apple Intelligence enabled and available for your device language. Other devices retain their scores, insights and standard app-written coaching summaries. Coaching is generated locally; health information is not sent to an external AI service. KEY SCORES Stress — A continuous 0–100 physiological-load score. When both signals are available, it combines 40% HRV with 60% heart rate. It continues with heart rate alone when no nearby RMSSD exists. The curve shades sleep, excludes workouts and identifies missing watch periods. Stress reflects physiological activation, not emotional stress. Energy — An all-day 0–100 estimate of how much you have “in the tank.” It recharges during sleep, taking Sleep Score and sleep stages into account, and responds to calm, stress and physical effort. Compare it with your usual reserve at the same time. Sleep Score — A nightly 0–100 score blending duration (35%), continuity (25%) and restfulness (40%). Restfulness considers overnight HRV, heart rate and physiological load. Scores personalize as your history grows. Recovery — Compares RMSSD with your history at a similar time of day. iPhone uses up to 30 previous days without including a reading in its own reference. Apple Watch uses a shorter local history, so its quick score may differ. Activity — Combines movement with sustained effort. Workout load uses heart rate when enough readings are available; otherwise it is estimated from workout type and duration, so yoga is not treated like intense cardio. The Activity page shows what contributed to the score. APPLE WATCH • Native Recovery and Stress views • SDNN and RMSSD at a glance • Stress and HRV charts • Complications and widgets • RMSSD from available heartbeat series • Support for dense chest-strap readings • Cached baseline for faster opening DATA & PRIVACY HRV Tracker analyzes Apple Health data on your devices. Your health history is not uploaded to an HRV Tracker server. AFib History on a compatible Apple Watch greatly increases beat-to-beat sampling and is strongly recommended for complete RMSSD, Stress, Energy and Recovery views. With infrequent measurements, some curves and insights may remain incomplete. HRV Tracker is intended for personal information and wellness. It is not a medical device and does not diagnose or treat any condition.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is monetization model: HRV at free against Daylio Journal's free with in-app purchases. HRV also leads on review sentiment (100% vs 92%). Daylio Journal's advantage is ratings volume (62K vs 4) and update cadence (every 9 days vs every 6 weeks). On price, rating, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Daylio Journal sells 7 in-app purchases, starting at $4.99 per month and HRV sells 5 one-off in-app purchases. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.8 for Daylio Journal against 4.8 for HRV. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Daylio Journal has 62K ratings behind it against 4, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews are what separate them: 92% of Daylio Journal's written reviews are positive against 100% of HRV's.
Daylio Journal ships an update every 9 days, HRV every 6 weeks. The most recent releases landed on September 25, 2026 and September 21, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Daylio Journal | HRV |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.8 (62K ratings) | 4.8 (4 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 91.6% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 62K — better | 4 |
| Update frequency | Every 9 days — better | Every 6 weeks |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free — better |
| Best chart rank | #159 — better | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod | iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 — better | 18.6 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 215 MB | 13 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Relaxio s.r.o. | Philippe Gerin |
Customer experience
Daylio Journal
HRV
Bugs and requests
Daylio Journal
Reported bugs
2 issues- Occasional app freezing and notification issues
- Difficulty restoring data after device change
Requested features
5 requests- Add ability to log voice recordings
- Implement color-coding for activity groups
- Allow syncing across multiple devices
- Provide more detailed mood/emotion tracking options
- Add option to schedule future activities
HRV
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Daylio Journal
- Daylio Premium$4.991 Month
- Daylio Premium7 Days trial$4.991 Month
- Daylio Premium7 Days trial$17.991 Year
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- Daylio Premium$17.991 Year
- Daylio Premium$23.991 Year
- Daylio Premium7 Days trial$35.991 Year
- PREMIUM$59.99
HRV
- Bronze Supporter$1.99
- Bronze Supporter Tier$1.99
- Silver Supporter2 variants$4.99
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- Gold Supporter2 variants$11.99
- Platinum Supporter2 variants$44.99









