Luci vs Bearable
Two trackers that both want to know what is behind your harder days. One is built around symptoms and the body. The other is built around mood and the days you live it in. Let's go over the various categories to see which one is stronger for each category.
Bearable was built by someone who needed it. Its founder lives with chronic migraines and wanted a way to see what made them better or worse. The app that grew out of that, made by Bearable Ltd in the United Kingdom, now has a large following among people managing chronic illness, pain, migraines and their mental health. If you have ever searched for a symptom tracker, you have very likely seen it already.
Luci starts from the same question, what actually affects how you feel, and comes at it from the other side. Bearable starts with the body: symptoms, medication, sleep, energy and dozens of factors, with mood as one of the things it tracks. Luci starts with the mood and the day around it, the people, places, activities and thoughts, and reads them back to you in plain words. It is also a real journal, with free writing and over 550 guided prompts, and it keeps your entries on your phone.
These two are less alike than the apps in our other comparisons, and that matters. If you are tracking a health condition, Bearable covers ground Luci does not try to cover. This page compares them as mood trackers, which is how many people use Bearable too. Each of the nine sections below looks at one category, gives both apps a fair hearing, and names a winner. The table at the foot collects the verdicts, and the conclusion says who should pick which.
Version 4.2.1
A mood tracker and guided journal that finds the patterns behind how you feel, and keeps everything on your device.
Luci logs a mood in one drag, lets you tag what was going on around it, and turns those entries into plain-language observations about what moves your mood. It doubles as a journal, with free writing and over 550 guided prompts. It is made by a small independent team, needs no account, and does its analysis on your phone.
By Bearable Ltd · Version 1.0.614
A highly customizable health tracker for symptoms, mood, medication and sleep, built to find what makes you feel better or worse.
Bearable is made by Bearable Ltd, a small company in the United Kingdom founded by someone living with chronic migraines. A check-in is a homepage of sections you switch on and arrange yourself: mood on a 1 to 10 scale with feelings and a note, energy, symptoms rated from none to unbearable, sleep, medication and a long list of other factors. Around that sit correlation reports, goals, experiments and reminders. It needs an account, runs on iPhone and Android, and is available in English only.
How the app looks, how it feels to use, and how fast an entry is on a day when you have no patience for it.
Luci opens on a slider. You drag it to where your mood sits, on a simple, standard or detailed scale shown as numbers, smileys or one of the illustrated icon packs, and that drag on its own is a complete entry. Everything else is optional: the activity, emotion, people and place chips underneath, a photo, a note. The screen is warm and unhurried, with a lot of white space, and the mood is always the first thing you see.
The cost of that depth is a busier interface once you start using it fully. Chips are grouped by kind, so the entry screen grows as you add things to track, and the statistics tab is a stack of cards that rewards a scroll. The order never changes. Mood comes first, and the rest is there as options if you have the time.
Bearable is a working tool and looks like one. The homepage is a week strip above a column of sections, from mood and symptoms to sleep and health measurements, with a progress bar for the day's check-in and a switch to mark the day complete. Each section opens into its own controls: a 1 to 10 mood rating, a severity scale for every symptom, a toggle for every factor. It follows your phone into dark mode, and once it is set up for you it is quick to fill in.
The trade is that it is busy, and it asks a lot of you. Onboarding is a long run of questions before you log anything, and a fully set up check-in can run to dozens of taps. On iPhone it does not feel native either. The headers, buttons and sheets are Bearable's own, where most apps use the ones iOS provides. In our testing, an entry's time was a tap away but moving it to a different day was not, and the app stopped us to ask what we thought of it, then showed a rating request in a dialog we could not close or skip.
Luci. Its check-in puts the mood first and can be a single drag. Bearable is clean once it is set up, and it is also busy, does not feel at home on iPhone, and interrupts you more than a journal should.
What you can learn from your own entries once you have a few weeks of them: charts, correlations, trends, and how clearly they are explained.
This is the category Luci is built around. Every entry can carry a lot of information, from people, places, activities and emotions to sleep and the thoughts you had. Luci reads across all of your entries and says, in a sentence, what tracks with your better and worse days. It ranks each thing you tag by how far it shifts your average, so you can see that a particular meeting costs you more than a short night does. Each observation says how many entries it rests on, so five weeks of evidence carries more weight than five days.
Under the plain-language patterns are the charts: mood trend over any period, averages you can compare month against month, mood steadiness, time of day, day of the week, weather, location, steps and a word cloud drawn from your notes. There is also a period in pixels view that stretches from a single month to your whole history. It all runs on your phone, with no connection or account required, and the pattern discovery is part of the free app.
Correlations are what Bearable is known for, and they are good. The Impacts tab shows which factors tend to come with better or worse scores for your mood, energy, sleep or any symptom you track, and the correlation grid compares one factor across several outcomes at once. Trends reports chart your scores over time, and weekly reports sum up what you logged. Because you can track so much, these reports can draw on a very wide range of data.
None of that is free. The Impacts tab, where Bearable shows what affects your mood, is Premium from top to bottom, and on the free tier the list sits behind a lock. In a mood tracker that is the screen that matters most. The free tier keeps the trends reports and a comparison graph, limited to the past thirty days. Even on Premium the reports are mostly charts and lists, so working out what they mean is left to you.
Luci. Bearable's correlation reports are powerful and can draw on more health data than any other app we compare, and the Impacts tab that holds them is Premium only. Luci explains its findings in sentences, ranks what moves your mood by size, and keeps pattern discovery free.
What you can change: the mood scale, the things you track, the icons, the colors, the layout.
Luci lets you choose the mood scale itself: simple, standard or detailed, shown as numbers, Roman numerals, smileys, or one of five illustrated packs with cats, dogs, frogs, ghosts and glimmers. Everything you track is a chip you can add, rename, remove or pin, across activities, emotions, people, places, nutrition, physical state and thought patterns. The cards on the home screen and the statistics screen can be added, removed and reordered.
Looks are covered too. There are eight color themes, each in light and dark, and the extra themes and icon packs are unlocked with Sparks, which you earn simply by logging. Where Luci does less is the shape of what you track. Most things are a chip you select, while Bearable lets you rate symptoms and factors on scales of their own and split a day into time blocks.
Bearable is about as customizable as a tracker gets. Every section of the homepage can be switched off and reordered. Symptoms, feelings, factors, sleep factors and medications can all be added, renamed, hidden or reordered, with your own names and emoji. A factor can be a simple yes or no or rated low, medium and high, and symptoms and factors can be split across four time blocks in a day.
Premium adds custom health measurements and unlimited goals and experiments. What changes very little is the look. The mood scale is always 1 to 10, the app follows your phone's light or dark setting, and there are no color themes or icon sets to choose from. Bearable lets you shape what it tracks in great detail and keeps how it looks fixed.
Bearable. No other app we compare lets you shape what you track so precisely, down to time blocks and rating styles. Luci gives you more say in how the app looks, from the mood scale and icons to eight themes.
How good it is as a journal, for people who write more than a line. Formatting, prompts, photos, voice, and reading it back.
Luci is a journal as much as a tracker. A note can use headings, bold and italics, and carry photos and voice notes. When the blank page is the obstacle, there are over 550 guided prompts across twenty topics, from stress and grief to money and motivation, each with optional guidance on how to approach it and a short tip drawn from cognitive behavioral therapy at the end of a session. You choose the topic, or take the daily prompt.
Because prompts repeat, Luci can show what you wrote last time the same question came round, which is the clearest evidence of change most people ever get. Your notes also feed the statistics: the word cloud and the journal moments card read them back to you. And on the days you want no prompt at all, the page is blank and yours.
Bearable lets you add a note to a mood rating, a symptom or an energy entry, and those notes are free and unlimited. A gratitude entry joined the check-in in October 2026. For people who mostly want to explain a rating in a line or two, that is enough, and each note sits right beside the number it explains.
It is not a journal, and it does not try to be one. There are no guided prompts to start you off, the longer extra notes are a Premium feature, and so are unlimited gratitude entries. Bearable's own page promises mood journal entries without having to type, which says a lot about its priorities. Writing about your day happens around the edges of the tracking.
Luci, by a distance. Over 550 guided prompts, formatting, photos and voice notes, against short notes attached to a rating. Bearable's notes do sit right beside the data they explain, which is useful.
Everything outside the core loop: goals and habits, reminders, widgets, articles, achievements, watch apps.
Outside the core loop Luci has a period and year in pixels, home screen and lock screen widgets, an Apple Watch app with its own complications, reminders, and a set of mental health articles on topics like thinking traps and CBT that cite their sources at the foot of each piece. Logging earns Sparks, which unlock themes and icon packs, and there are achievements for keeping at it.
What Luci does not have is anything built around a treatment routine. There are no medication schedules, no dose reminders and no structured experiments. A habit or a medication can be a chip whose effect on your mood you can see, and that is as far as it goes.
Bearable's extras are built for managing your health day to day. Medications and supplements come with schedules and reminders, and a dose can be logged outside its schedule. Goals and experiments let you test whether a change to your routine actually makes a difference. There are widgets, a calendar and timeline for finding a past day before an appointment, CSV export, and a community on Discord.
There is no Apple Watch app, no year in pixels and no reading library, and the free tier limits how many goals and experiments you can set up. Bearable spends its effort on tracking and reporting, and its extras follow that.
A tie. Bearable has medication reminders, goals and experiments, which matter a great deal if you are managing a condition. Luci has a watch app, the year in pixels, articles, achievements and Sparks. Which set is better depends on what you are tracking for.
How much of the world around an entry the app can capture, by hand or from your phone: sleep, steps, weather, places, people, health data.
An entry in Luci can carry a lot of the world around it. People, places and activities are chips. Sleep and steps come in from Apple Health on iPhone once you allow it, so they sit beside a mood without being typed. A geotag attaches your location and the weather at the moment of writing, and a place can be pinned to a chip so it is selected automatically when you write from there. Nutrition, energy, rest and tension have their own sets, and so do recurring thought patterns like worry or self-judgement.
All of that becomes something the statistics can use. The steps card, the weather card, the location card and the people card each show how your mood moves with that input, and the impact ranking puts them all on one list. Health data read this way stays on your device. The limits are real, though. Luci reads sleep and steps only, and on Android the health connection is not currently available.
This is Bearable's home ground. Beyond mood, an entry can hold symptoms and their severity, energy, sleep time and quality, medication, nutrition, bowel movements, the menstrual cycle and any factor you add. Through Apple Health on iPhone and Google Fit on Android it brings in steps, sleep, heart rate, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, body temperature, basal body temperature, weight and blood pressure, and Fitbit data arrives through Apple Health.
What it does not do is fill anything in from the world around you. Weather cannot be synced and has to be logged by hand as a factor, and there is no geotag. People and places can be tracked, but only as factors you create and tick yourself.
Bearable. Far more kinds of health data, on iPhone and Android alike, plus symptoms, medication and the cycle. Luci fills in the weather and your location for you and treats people and places as data of their own.
Where your entries live, who can read them, whether an account is required, and how easily you can leave with your data.
Luci needs no account and no email address. Entries live on the device you wrote them on, and every statistic is calculated there too, so the app works in full with no connection. Sync is off until you turn it on. Switch it on and your journal follows you between phone, tablet and watch, encrypted, tied to an account you create at that point and not before. Nothing you write is used to train anything, and nothing is sent to a model to be read.
Leaving is a two-tap operation: export the lot as a readable PDF or as a backup file you can import again later. If you never turned sync on, there was never anything on our side to delete; if you did, there is a page in the footer that explains exactly how to remove it. Purchases go through Apple or Google, and crash reports are optional and carry no journal content.
Bearable needs an account, made with an email address or a Google, Apple or Facebook sign-in. Your health data is stored on its servers, in Google's Firestore in Frankfurt, and encrypted in transit and at rest. Your email address is kept apart from your health data, and the app never asks for your name, age or gender. Bearable says it does not sell data, and you can export or delete everything from inside the app.
That encryption happens on the server, so it is not end-to-end. The privacy policy lists Mixpanel, Google Analytics and Segment for analytics, and the Facebook SDK for measuring and targeting its ad campaigns, and the App Store label lists contact info and identifiers as data used to track you. Bearable is more careful than most subscription apps, and it explains its choices plainly. It is still a different model from a journal that never leaves your phone.
Luci. No account, entries and statistics on the device, and sync only if you choose it. Bearable keeps your data in the EU and explains itself clearly, and it still needs an account and uses third-party analytics.
Where the app runs: iPhone, Android, iPad, watch, desktop, and whether your entries follow you between them.
iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch with its own app and complications, Mac with Apple silicon, Apple Vision, and Android. With sync on, one journal across all of them. Widgets on iOS and Android home screens, and the app in eleven languages.
iPhone and Android. There is no iPad version, no Apple Watch app and no Mac or web version. Your data follows your account between devices. English only.
Luci. Both cover iPhone and Android. Luci adds iPad, a watch app, Mac, Apple Vision and ten more languages.
What is free, what is paid, and roughly what the paid tier costs. Prices vary by country, so these are the options and a rough figure, not a quote.
Free, with no account and no time limit: mood logging, journaling, photos and voice notes, the statistics and pattern discovery, six of the twenty prompt topics, widgets and the watch app. Luci Pro adds sync across devices, the remaining guided prompt topics and the advanced statistics.
Pro is a subscription at roughly $6 a month or $35 a year, or a one-off lifetime purchase at roughly $200. A subscription bought on one platform works on the other once you sign in. There are also optional tips, which buy nothing and simply support a small team.
Free to use with no time limit, and generous with it: unlimited mood, symptom, factor, medication and sleep tracking, notes, reminders, widgets, CSV export, and trends reports over the past thirty days. Premium adds the correlation reports, longer report periods, custom health measurements, extra notes, unlimited gratitude entries, and unlimited goals and experiments.
Premium is a subscription at roughly $7 a month or $35 a year in the US, with a seven-day free trial, and discounts on the yearly price are common. There is no lifetime purchase. Bearable also sponsors Premium for people who cannot afford it, which is a generous thing for a small company to do.
A tie. The yearly prices are the same. Bearable's free tier tracks more, and it sponsors Premium for those who need it. Luci's free tier includes pattern discovery, and it offers a lifetime purchase.
Every category from the page above, in one table. Stars are our rating on a five-point scale; platforms and pricing are listed as they are.
| Category | Luci | Bearable | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Look and feel | Slider entry, warm and roomy, busier once fully set up | Busy, not iOS-native, intrusive rating prompts | Luci |
| Insights | Plain-language patterns, ranked influences, trends, free | Strong correlation reports, Impacts tab Premium only | Luci |
| Customization | Three scales, eight icon sets, eight themes, custom chips, movable cards | Every section, symptom and factor editable, time blocks, rating styles | Bearable |
| Journaling | Rich text, photos, voice, 550+ prompts, compare past answers | Short notes on ratings and gratitude; extra notes Premium; no prompts | Luci |
| Other features | Watch app, widgets, year in pixels, articles, Sparks | Medication reminders, goals, experiments, widgets, community | Tie |
| Context and integrations | Apple Health sleep and steps, weather, geotag, people, places | Symptoms, meds, cycle; Apple Health, Google Fit and Fitbit data | Bearable |
| Privacy | On device, no account, on-device analysis, opt-in encrypted sync | Account required, EU servers, encrypted, analytics SDKs | Luci |
| Platforms | iOS, iPadOS, Android, Apple Watch, Mac, Vision | iOS (iPhone only), Android | Luci |
| Pricing | Free core; Pro ~$6/mo, ~$35/yr, ~$200 lifetime | Free tracking, 30-day reports; Premium ~$7/mo, ~$35/yr | Tie |
On the count, Luci takes five categories, Bearable takes two, and two are tied. The count hides how different these apps are. Bearable is a health tracker that handles mood very well. Luci is a mood journal that handles health lightly. Which is better for you depends mostly on which of those you need.
A fair way to decide is to ask what you want to understand. If the answer is "my symptoms, my medication and how my body is doing", Bearable is the better tool, and Luci is not trying to replace it. If the answer is "my moods, and what in my days is behind them", Luci will do more with less effort, and keep the answers on your phone. Both are free to try, and a week of your own entries in each is a better test than any page.
Yes, and it can make sense. Bearable for symptoms, medication and health measurements, Luci for the mood journal and the patterns in your days. It is two check-ins instead of one, which is the real cost, so most people settle on whichever answers the question they actually have.
Luci does not import Bearable entries directly. Bearable exports your data as a CSV file on the free tier, so your history is easy to keep. If you would like Luci to import it, tell us at [email protected], because requests are how features get prioritized.
For tracking, yes. Mood, symptoms, medication, sleep and factors are free and unlimited, with trends reports over the past thirty days. The Impacts tab with its correlation reports, longer report periods, extra notes, and unlimited goals and experiments are part of Bearable Premium. Luci is free to use as well, with pattern discovery included and an optional Pro tier for sync, the full set of prompt topics and the advanced statistics.
Neither is a medical device, and neither diagnoses or treats anything. Bearable is designed for logging symptoms, medication and health measurements over time, and many people use it to prepare for appointments. Luci focuses on mood and the day around it, and its PDF export gives you something readable to bring to a professional. If you are working with one, ask what they would find most useful.
The date and version numbers at the top are the honest answer. Apps change, and a category can change with one update. If you spot something that is no longer true, we would rather hear about it than have you rely on it.
The categories above in more depth, one page each.
Free, works offline, no account needed. The fairest comparison is a week of your own entries.
