How We Feel vs Daylio: Which Mood App Fits?

How We Feel and Daylio are two of the most recommended mood apps on both iPhone and Android, and they often end up on the same shortlist. Both ask you to check in with yourself, both help you notice patterns, and both can be used without paying. Underneath that overlap, though, they are designed for different questions. Daylio wants to show you what affects your mood. How We Feel wants to help you understand what the feeling actually is and what to do with it.

This comparison walks through how each app works, what is free and what is paid, how each handles your data, and who each one suits. It is based on the apps' store listings, official help pages, and their makers' public statements. Features and prices change, so confirm current details in the App Store or Google Play. And because both apps sit close to mental health: they are self-reflection tools, not a replacement for care from a doctor or licensed professional.

The Core Difference in One Line

Daylio is a fast mood and activity tracker that turns quick taps into charts. How We Feel is an emotion check-in app that helps you name a specific feeling and then offers a short strategy for it. Daylio is closer to a fitness tracker for your moods. How We Feel is closer to a pocket guide for your emotions.

How Daylio Works

Daylio's pitch is that you can keep a journal without typing a single line. Each entry starts with choosing your mood and tapping the activities that filled your day, such as work, exercise, or time with friends. You can add notes and photos if you want more detail, but the core entry takes seconds.

Over time, Daylio turns those entries into weekly, monthly, and yearly statistics, a calendar view, and a "Year in Pixels" map that colors every day by mood. You can also set goals and track habits, use reminders, lock the app, and export your entries. The goal is to help you see which activities tend to line up with your better and worse days.

Daylio is free to download, and its help center says the free version remains unlimited for basic use. Daylio Premium adds advanced statistics, unlimited moods and goals, more than 2,000 extra icons, custom note templates, unlimited reminders, automatic backups, PDF export, extra color themes, and a PIN lock on iOS. A free 7-day trial is available. The App Store lists several Premium price points, so check the current price in your region before upgrading.

How the How We Feel App Works

How We Feel is a free app from The How We Feel Project, Inc., a nonprofit funded by donations. Its makers say it was conceived with Yale University's Center for Emotional Intelligence and based on the work of Dr. Marc Brackett. The app was recognized in Apple's 2022 App Store Awards.

A check-in begins with a color grid that sorts feelings by energy and pleasantness. You choose the quadrant that matches your state, then narrow it down to a specific feeling word, so a vague "bad" can become something more specific. You can tag what was happening around the feeling and add a short note. The app can also track sleep, exercise, and health trends to help you spot patterns over time.

Where Daylio stops at insight, How We Feel adds a next step. It includes short video strategies, some as brief as a minute, in four themes: Change Your Thinking, Move Your Body, Be Mindful, and Reach Out. A friends feature lets you share check-ins with people you trust. Neither store listing shows a paid tier.

Side-by-Side: How We Feel vs Daylio

Privacy: Both Start From Your Device

Privacy is a fair concern with any app that records how you feel, and both apps address it directly. Daylio says entries are stored locally on your device and that backups are optional, going to your own cloud storage. How We Feel says data is stored on your device unless you choose another storage option, is only visible to you unless you share it, and is only used for research if you opt in to contribute an anonymized version. As always, read each app's current privacy policy and store privacy label before deciding, since policies can change.

Which One Fits You

Pick Daylio if you want data with almost no effort. If you are curious whether sleep, exercise, or social time lines up with better days, Daylio's activity tags and statistics are built for exactly that. It suits people who like seeing numbers and streaks, who want habit tracking in the same place as mood, and who prefer a private log over anything social. If Daylio is close but not quite right, the list of Daylio alternatives covers trackers with different strengths.

Pick How We Feel if the feeling itself is the puzzle. If you often know something is off but cannot say what, the emotion grid and the wide vocabulary of feeling words can help you be more specific, and the short strategies give you something to try right away. It also suits anyone who wants a capable mood app without any subscription. For apps that take a similar emotion-first approach, see the roundup of How We Feel app alternatives.

A quick tiebreaker: if you want to answer "what affects your mood?", start with Daylio. If you want to answer "what is this feeling, and what can help?", start with How We Feel.

Add a two-minute gratitude habit to your mood tracking with Gratitude Genie, free on iOS and Android.

Where Both Apps Leave a Gap

Both apps are strongest at capturing the present moment. Daylio records the shape of a day, and How We Feel records the texture of a feeling. Neither is built around a gratitude practice, where you regularly write down a few specific good things and revisit them later. Mood data tells you that Tuesday was hard. A gratitude habit works on a different lever by steadily training attention toward what is going right. Many people find it useful to pair a tracker with a short daily reflection, and the wider roundup of the best mood tracker apps shows how different apps divide up that work.

That is the space Gratitude Genie is built for. It is a free gratitude journaling app for iOS and Android with guided prompts, quick mood check-ins, an AI companion called Gratina for talking through your day, and memories that bring past entries back to you. It is not a substitute for Daylio's statistics or How We Feel's emotion strategies, and it does not try to be. It simply covers the reflective, positive-focus side that both trackers leave to you.

Can You Use How We Feel and Daylio Together?

You can, but the overlap is bigger than it looks. Both apps want a daily mood entry, and logging the same mood twice quickly turns into a chore. If you do use both, give each a distinct job. For example, Daylio could be the once-a-day log for moods and activities, while How We Feel is the app you open only when a strong feeling shows up and you want to name it and find a strategy.

For most people, though, one mood app is enough. Choose the one whose main question matches yours, use it consistently for a few weeks, and only add a second tool if it does something clearly different, such as a gratitude journal or a habit app.

The Bottom Line

Daylio is the better pick for effortless tracking and detailed statistics, with a solid free version and an optional Premium tier for power users. How We Feel is the better pick for understanding and responding to emotions, with a precise feeling vocabulary and short strategies, all free. Both put privacy first, and both are reflection tools rather than treatment. Pick the one that answers the question you actually have, and give it a few weeks before judging whether it helps.