Best mood tracker apps (2026)

Joel Dean, Founder of Joyful
Last updated October 30, 2026 · Facts checked October 30, 2026

Quick picks

• Daylio: a daily check-in in seconds, no writing.
• How We Feel: free, and good at finding the word for a feeling.
• Apple Health State of Mind: already on your iPhone.
• Bearable: mood next to sleep, symptoms and medication.
• eMoods: highs and lows, charted for a doctor.
• Moodfit: mood tracking with CBT tools attached.
• Joyful: feelings tracked from how you talk about your day. Joyful is ours.

How we chose

The table

The "What you log" column is the real choice here: a tap, a word, or a whole account of the day. Figures are from each company's pages and US App Store listing on October 30, 2026 (Sources has the links). Joyful is ours. Prices change, so check before you pay.

Daylio

Two taps, a mood and a few activities, and the day is logged. Daylio's pitch is a diary "without writing down a single word."¹ The payoff comes later, in charts, a "Year in Pixels" view of your whole year, and exports to PDF and CSV.²

It's also one of the quietest apps here on data. Daylio says it doesn't send your data to its servers, with backups going to your own Google Drive or iCloud, and its App Store label lists no data linked to you.^1,2

A tap is not a word, though. To understand why Tuesday went badly you'll need its optional notes, or a different app. Premium runs from $4.99 to $59.99 on its App Store list, which doesn't say which options are monthly and which yearly.²

How We Feel

How We Feel is free, comes from a nonprofit, and was "conceived in conjunction with Yale University's Center for Emotional Intelligence."³ Its strength is vocabulary. It asks you to find the word for what you feel, then pairs your check-ins with sleep and exercise from HealthKit and offers short video strategies such as "Change Your Thinking."³

The privacy picture has two halves. The company says your data stays on your device unless you opt in to share an anonymized version for research, yet its App Store label still lists contact info, identifiers and "other data" as linked to you.³

There's a friends feature for sharing how you feel in real time.³ Check what it shares before you turn it on.

Apple Health State of Mind

If you have an iPhone, you already have a mood tracker. Since iOS 17, the Health app lets you log "momentary emotions and daily moods" on a scale from Very Pleasant to Very Unpleasant.⁴ It shows what might be contributing, and it offers "the same depression and anxiety assessments often used in clinics."⁴

It stops at logging. No prompts, no tools for working through a hard day, and nothing off iPhone and Apple Watch.

Bearable

Bearable is for people whose mood is tangled up with a body: sleep, symptoms, food, weather, stress, medication. It tracks unlimited symptoms and moods for free, it says, and looks for the links between them.^5,6 Its site promises it "does not and will never sell any personal data."⁵

The links are the paid part. Correlation reports and full history sit on Premium, $34.99 with a 7-day trial on its site.⁵ Separately, its App Store label lists contact info and identifiers as data that may be used to track you.⁶

eMoods

eMoods is built for bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety, and for one job in particular: charting highs, lows, sleep and medication changes, then emailing a printable monthly PDF to your doctor or therapist.⁷ It's also cheap. Pro costs $1.99 a month or $9.99 a year.⁷

Its two pages describe it differently. The App Store listing says it never stores your data in the cloud, and its privacy label says no data is collected.⁷ Its website describes a version that runs in a desktop browser with a password-protected account.⁸ Check which one you're installing.

Moodfit

Moodfit adds tools to the tracking: a mood journal, CBT tools for unhelpful thoughts, breathwork and a gratitude journal.⁹ It also includes the PHQ-9 and GAD-7, two questionnaires clinicians use for depression and anxiety, so you can track them over time.⁹

Its App Store label lists health, location and contact info as linked to you.⁹ Premium options run from $9.99 to $39.99, and again the list doesn't say monthly or yearly.⁹

Joyful (ours)

We built Joyful, so weigh this entry accordingly. It doesn't ask you to pick a face or a number. You talk with Joy, or write, about the day, and each entry comes back with a summary of the emotions, themes and thinking patterns in what you said, with a weekly summary pulling the week together. Gratitude and a Thought Record are among the guided entries.

That takes longer than two taps, and it costs more than every app above: 10 free entries, and after that $13.99 a month or $118.99 a year, following a 7-day trial.¹⁰

Where your mood data lives

Mood data is health data, which is why, in this category, the table above matters more than the price column.

The middle columns are each developer's own App Store label as of October 30, 2026, beside what the company says on its own pages.^{1,2,3,5,6,7,9,10,11} Apple notes on every listing that labels have "not been verified by Apple," and we did not audit them either.

What a mood log can show you, and what it can't

Putting a feeling into words seems to quiet the brain's alarm a little; our list of emotions covers the lab study behind that.¹² The phone evidence is more direct. Among 114 young people seeing their GP, tracking mood, stress and coping on a phone for 2 to 4 weeks raised emotional self-awareness, and that rise went with fewer depression symptoms.¹³

Seeing a pattern on a chart is a different thing from doing something about it, and the chart is where most mood apps stop.

A review of 32 mood tracking apps found most of them helped people log and look back, and few helped them act on what they saw.¹⁴

If your moods swing hard or stay low for weeks, take the log to a doctor; that is what it's best at. Our depression test is a free screening check-in, not a diagnosis.

Which one is best for you

• You want it to take seconds: Daylio.
• You want free with no catch: How We Feel, or Apple Health on an iPhone.
• You live with a health condition and want to see what affects your mood: Bearable.
• You track highs and lows with a psychiatrist: eMoods.
• You want tools as well as tracking: Moodfit.
• A number on a scale doesn't capture it, and you'd rather talk: Joyful (ours).
• You don't know what to call the feeling: start with our list of emotions.

Questions people ask

What is the best app for tracking moods?

Decide how much you'll give it each day. Two seconds: Daylio.¹ A minute to find the right word, for free: How We Feel.³ A few minutes of talking: Joyful, which is ours.

Is a mood tracker the same as a mood journal?

Not quite. A tracker turns each day into a point you can chart, like Daylio's mood and activities or Apple's pleasant-to-unpleasant scale.^2,4 A journal keeps the reasons. Charts show when; words show why, and several apps here (Daylio's notes, Moodfit's journal) let you do a bit of both.^2,9

How do people track bipolar moods?

By charting highs, lows, sleep and medication every day and bringing the chart to a psychiatrist. eMoods does exactly that and emails the monthly report as a PDF.⁷ For a diagnosis or a medication change, talk to your doctor; no app makes that call.

Is mood tracking good for you?

The best evidence here is one trial, in young people, where tracking raised emotional self-awareness and that went with fewer depression symptoms.¹³ Logging alone rarely changes anything, so decide in advance what you'll do when the chart dips.¹⁴