Journal
Kept vs Day One
Day One is a journal for your own life, with photos, audio and On This Day, on every device. Kept is a journal about other people, and each note is filed under a person.
What Day One is
Day One describes itself as "Your journal for life". Entries hold text, photos, videos, drawings and audio, and you can dictate with voice transcription. It has templates, tags, a calendar view, a map view and several journals in one app.
It runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Android, Windows and the web, with end-to-end encryption, passcode and biometric locks, and automatic backups to its own servers. It is part of Automattic.
On This Day brings back what you wrote on the same date in earlier years, and it will print your journal as a book. It also has journaling reminders and streaks to keep you writing.
Side by side
Who the entry is about
Kept
Someone else. Every note is filed against the people in it.
Day One
You, and your days.
How it is organised
Kept
By person: each one has a page of facts and a thread of notes.
Day One
By date, with journals, tags, a calendar and a map.
Getting it back
Kept
Before you see the person, with what they told you last time.
Day One
On This Day, on the anniversary of the entry.
Streaks
Kept
A weekly streak for the journal as a whole. Nothing is counted per person.
Day One
Journal streaks and custom journaling reminders.
Where it lives
Kept
On your phone. Notes are not synced to our servers.
Day One
Synced across devices, end-to-end encrypted, backed up to their servers.
Platforms
Kept
Android today. iPhone in App Store review.
Day One
iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Android, Windows and web.
Day One details checked on 3 October 2026 against their own site. Everything on this page about the other product was read off their own site on the date shown. We don’t list prices, because they change and a stale one would be misleading.
The difference that matters
The axis is different. Day One files by date, because the question it answers is "what was my life like then?". Kept files by person, because the question it answers is "what did she tell me last time?". You can write about a friend in Day One, and it will be in there, under a Tuesday in March.
That decides when a note comes back. On This Day returns an entry a year later, which is right for a journal of your own life. A note about someone else is needed sooner and at a less regular moment: the morning you are about to see them.
It also decides what a note is for. A Day One entry is worth having in itself. A Kept note is instrumental; it exists to be handed back, and one that never comes back has done nothing.
Where Day One beats Kept
Day One is a far better journal than Kept in every way a journal is usually judged: photos, video, drawings, templates, printed books, end-to-end encrypted sync and an app on every device you own. If you want a record of your own life that you will read in ten years, that is the one to use, and plenty of people will want both.
Don’t pick Kept if: You want to write about your own days, keep photos and video in a journal, or read it on a laptop. Kept does none of that well.
Why we built it this way
The design choices above aren’t preferences. Each one traces to published research, and each of these has its own page with the finding, the method and what it doesn’t show.
Recording everything produced huge archives and nothing useful
Sellen & Whittaker (2010) · Communications of the ACM
Reviewing a partial capture cues recall months later
Hodges, Berry, Wood et al. · SenseCam autobiographical memory research
Measuring an activity makes people enjoy it less
Etkin (2016) · Journal of Consumer Research
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If Kept is the one you want
Nine seconds of talking after you see someone. Kept files it against the right person and hands it back the day before it matters. Free for 14 days, no card needed.