Lamplit vs Slowburn
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Lamplit
This app helps book lovers track reading sessions, organize their library, and analyze reading habits with detailed stats and streaks. It offers customizable themes, social sharing features, and privacy-focused data management.
- Track reading sessions with live Dynamic Island updates
- Organize library with custom shelves and series tracking
- Detailed stats and charts for reading trends
- Build reading streaks and earn achievements
- Rate books with half-star precision and custom tags
- AI-powered vibe search for book discovery
- Shareable social cards for reading recaps
Read full descriptionHide full description
Lamplit is a reading tracker designed for people who love books. Track your reading sessions, organize your library, build streaks, and explore your stats — all in a warm, beautifully themed experience. TRACK YOUR READING Start a timed reading session and see it live on your Dynamic Island. Log pages for physical books, ebooks, or audiobooks. Pause, resume, and review session summaries with pages-per-minute stats. Focus mode with ambient reading sounds helps you stay in the zone — rain, fireplace, coffee shop, forest, ocean, or library. BUILD YOUR LIBRARY Organize books by status — currently reading, want to read, finished, paused, or did not finish. Create custom shelves, track series in order, and import your existing library via CSV. Scan barcodes to add books instantly, or search and enter them manually. STATS & STREAKS See your reading trends with charts: pages per month, genre breakdowns, reading speed over time, and more. Set annual reading goals and track your progress. Build reading streaks and earn achievements along the way. RATE, TAG & DISCOVER Rate books with half-star precision. Add spice ratings, content warnings, tropes, and mood tags. Track point of view, pacing, and genre-specific ratings like fluff, angst, and humor. Use AI-powered vibe search to find books in your library by feel — search "cozy autumn mystery" and get results that match. Or choose Clean & Simple mode and see only the essentials. READ TOGETHER Start a reading session with friends on FaceTime via SharePlay. See each other's progress in real time and keep each other accountable. Or create an async reading group where everyone reads at their own pace. SHARE YOUR HIGHLIGHTS Generate shareable social cards: your Top 4 books, Currently Reading spotlight, Year in Books recap, and Monthly Wrap — ready to share on social media. MAKE IT YOURS Choose from seven handcrafted color themes — Lamplit, Ember, Sage, Bloom, Cobalt, Aurora, and Inkwell — each with light and dark modes. Lamplit looks the way reading feels: warm, inviting, and personal. WIDGETS & SHORTCUTS Home Screen widgets show your current book and goal progress. Lock Screen widgets keep your reading stats at a glance. Control Center button to jump straight into a session. Siri Shortcuts let you log reading time hands-free. Works with Spotlight search across your entire library. PRIVACY FIRST No accounts required. No ads. No third-party SDKs. Your reading data syncs privately via iCloud and stays yours. Ratings and tags you add are shared anonymously. Export your full library as CSV at any time. MORE · Barcode scanner for quick book entry · Book notes and favorite quotes · Character tracker for complex series · Series tracking with reading order · OCR page scanning to update progress from a photo · Reading challenges with custom goals · Image Playground backgrounds for social cards · AI-powered vibe search — find books by feel, not just genre (iOS 26) · Control Center button to start reading instantly · CSV export of your full library with 18 data columns · Physical book, ebook, and audiobook format tracking · 7 color themes with dark mode support Free to use. No subscription required.
Slowburn
Read full descriptionHide full description
Some books ruin you. This is where you keep them. Slowburn is a reading journal built for romance readers, and for everything a five-star rating cannot hold. It records what a book did to you while you were still inside it, not just whether you finished. THE BURN One dial. Five levels, Cooling up to Ruined. Tap the one that matches how badly the book has you, whenever you pick it up. Slowburn keeps every reading and draws the curve: the slow build, the chapter that ruined you, the cooling after. When you finish, the curve is named. Slow burn, wildfire, flicker, steady, cooled. It becomes a card you can keep or share, and the card carries the shape. Never a word you wrote. A SHELF THAT LOOKS LIKE A SHELF Every book stands spine-out on a shelf that fills as you read, each one bound from its own cover. Ribbons hang from the books you are inside, tinted from wine to flame by the latest burn. Covers and List views are there when you want the analytical face of the same library. THE JOURNAL, IN YOUR WORDS Status, rating, spice, tropes, moods, the line you keep, the private note nobody else reads. Thirty-eight romance tropes and an Other for the ones there is no word for yet. A spice scale with its own vocabulary. DNF with a cause of death. Content notes: what you noticed was in a book, private, in your own words. Progress is a page or a percent. Not a timer. Not a streak. YOUR READING, READ BACK TO YOU Your mood profile, your trope profile, and the spice gap between what you say you want and what you actually finish. Reading Identity reads ten insights off your journal, each a plain function of what you logged, each saying how many books it rests on. No AI. No personality test. The Monthly Post-Mortem is a dossier rather than a dashboard: the body count, your type, the one that ruined you, the disappointment. Each section appears only when your month can support it. A FEW PEOPLE YOU CHOSE Circle is people you invited one at a time, and a feed of only what they chose to hand over. Nothing posts itself: finishing a book or changing a rating puts nothing anywhere. No public profiles, no followers, no ranking, nothing to discover. A handle separate from your journal. Buddy Reads are one person, one book, two positions, with notes sealed at the page you leave them until the other reader gets there. PRIVATE BY DEFAULT Your journal is a database on your phone. No account is required. Your library is not synced anywhere and the company cannot read it. None of it leaves unless you hand it over. Book searches go to Open Library. Anonymous usage counts and crash reports go to Google Firebase until you turn them off in Settings. Everything exports as one file, or your books as a spreadsheet, whenever you want it. Bring a Goodreads or StoryGraph export and Slowburn reads it on your phone. FREE AND PREMIUM The journal is free and not limited: shelf, rating, spice, tropes, moods, notes, the Burn, stats, Circle, Buddy Reads, and every privacy feature. Premium is the deeper reading: the full Reading Identity rather than one insight, Compare, the whole Monthly Post-Mortem, the premium card families, and a vote on what gets built next. $29.99 a year or $4.99 a month, with fourteen days free on the annual plan. Nothing about privacy or safety is behind the paywall. SUBSCRIPTION TERMS Slowburn Premium is an auto-renewing subscription: Slowburn Premium Annual at $29.99 a year with a fourteen day free trial, or Slowburn Premium Monthly at $4.99 a month. Payment is charged to your Apple ID at confirmation of purchase. It renews at the same price unless you turn off auto-renew at least 24 hours before the period ends, and you can manage or cancel it in your App Store settings at any time. Any unused part of a free trial is forfeited when you buy a subscription. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Our terms: https://myslowburn.com/terms Privacy policy: https://myslowburn.com/privacy
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Lamplit at none against Slowburn's 2. Slowburn's advantage is update cadence (monthly vs every 3 months) and iOS requirement (16.4 vs 18.2). On price, ads and device support 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. Slowburn sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $4.99 per month. Lamplit asks for nothing beyond the download.
Lamplit ships an update every 3 months, Slowburn monthly. The most recent releases landed on November 5, 2026 and October 31, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Lamplit | Slowburn |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better | — |
| Number of ratings | 1 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 3 months | Monthly — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 18.2 | 16.4 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 16 MB | 82 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 17+ |
| Developer | Adrian Stoyanov | Rolf Eriksen |
In-app purchases
Lamplit
No in-app purchases
Slowburn
- Slowburn Premium$4.991 Month
- Slowburn Premium14 Days trial$29.991 Year









