Luci vs Reflectly
Two journals that both start by asking how your day was. One answers with a question and a kind word. The other finds out what your days add up to. Here is where each one is stronger, category by category.
Reflectly was one of the first journaling apps that felt like a friendly conversation. It launched in 2017 from a small team in Copenhagen, its colorful, animated design was good enough that Google used it to show off Flutter, and it has collected tens of thousands of five-star ratings since. If you have ever searched the App Store for a journal, you have very likely seen it.
Luci starts from the same belief, that a short daily check-in is easier to keep than a diary, and takes it somewhere else. Reflectly asks you a question and gives you some motivation back. Luci records the mood along with the people, places, sleep and steps around it, and tells you in plain words what tracks with your better and worse days. It is also a fuller journal, with free writing and over 550 guided prompts, and it keeps your entries on your phone.
Reflectly has changed hands since its early days and is now published by Kodeon, Inc. This page compares the two apps as they are today. 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 4.2.0
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 Kodeon, Inc. · Version 5.0.5
A guided journal that asks you a question each day and answers with a quote, an affirmation and a small challenge.
Reflectly was built in Copenhagen in 2017 and is now published by Kodeon, Inc., a company that runs a group of health and fitness apps. A check-in starts with rating your day on an animated face, then picking what you did and how you felt from a grid of icons, then answering a question the app picks for you. Around that it adds quotes, affirmations and a daily challenge, with mood statistics for Premium members. It needs an account, runs on iPhone, iPad 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. It reads as a journal app that happens to be quick.
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. Luci also leaves it to you to decide what to write about. Plenty of people like that freedom. People who want an app to walk them through the day, one screen at a time, will find Reflectly gentler.
Reflectly is a lovely app to open. Soft gradients, an animated face for rating the day, large type and one question per screen make a check-in feel like a short, friendly conversation. The app greets you by name and keeps the tone upbeat throughout. For someone who has never kept a journal, it is a very gentle place to start.
That guided flow is also its limit. A check-in moves through the same steps in the same order, so on a rushed day it is several screens where Luci is one drag. Premium offers also show up early, starting during onboarding, and reviewers mention them often. Even so, the design has aged well, and nothing in the category is more welcoming on day one.
Reflectly. Its guided, one-question-per-screen flow is the most welcoming in the category for a first-time journaler. Luci is quicker on a busy day and does less hand-holding.
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.
Reflectly's statistics show a mood graph over time and point out correlations between your mood and the activities and emotions you picked, with overviews that sum up a week or a month for you. They are presented with the same friendly design as the rest of the app, and for a light daily habit they are easy to read.
All of it sits behind Premium. On the free tier there are no statistics at all, so you can log for months without seeing what the entries add up to. The inputs are narrow too. Reflectly only knows the activities and emotions you pick in a check-in, with no sleep, steps, weather or location to compare against.
Luci. Reflectly's statistics are friendly, and they are for paying members only. Luci draws on far more kinds of data, ranks what moves your mood by size, explains it in sentences, and keeps pattern discovery free.
What you can change: the mood scale, the things you track, the icons, the colours, 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 icons for the things you track. The choice there is smaller than in the most decorated trackers.
Reflectly lets you pick a color theme, which changes its gradients and is part of why the app is pleasant to look at. You can set when your reminders arrive, including a run of positivity reminders through the day. And when an activity or feeling you want is missing, you can add your own by choosing "other" during a check-in.
Everything else is fixed. The mood scale is the app's own, the questions are chosen for you, the screens cannot be rearranged, and activities and emotions are the only kinds of things you can track. Reflectly is designed to guide you, and it keeps the steering for itself.
Luci. A choice of scale and mood icons, custom chips in every category, eight themes and rearrangeable screens. Reflectly offers a color theme, reminder times and your own activities and feelings.
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.
Guided writing is Reflectly's whole idea. After you rate the day, the app asks a question it has picked for you, about gratitude, what went well or what you would change, and you answer in a few lines. For someone who freezes at a blank page, being handed one question at a time is genuinely helpful, and it is why so many people's first journal was this one.
The trade is range. Reviewers who stay longer than a few weeks report that the questions start to repeat, and there is no library of topics to browse when you want to work on something specific. Entries are short plain notes. You can save a photo or a voice note, but as a separate item, so it is not attached to the day's mood entry. As a guided first step it works well. As the journal you keep for years, it runs out of room.
Luci. Over 550 prompts you choose from, formatting, and photos and voice notes that belong to the entry, against one guided question a day. Reflectly is the easier first step for someone who has never journaled.
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 a motivation layer. There are no daily quotes, no affirmations and no morning pep talk, and a habit is tracked as a chip whose effect on your mood you can see, with no streak goal attached. Luci tells you what it found in your entries. It does not try to cheer you on.
Reflectly wraps the journal in encouragement. Quotes and affirmations turn up through the day, and a daily challenge gives you one small thing to try. For a lot of people a kind word is exactly what gets them to open the app, and Luci has nothing like it.
That is the whole list. Some of the quotes lean on platitudes, and there is no watch app, no reading library and nothing that builds on your entries over time unless you pay for the statistics. It looks lovely, and there is little behind the look.
Luci. Reflectly has quotes, affirmations and a daily challenge. Luci has a watch app, widgets, articles, the year in pixels, achievements and Sparks. If encouragement is what you want, Reflectly's set is the one to look at.
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. On Android the health connection is not currently available, which is the one gap here.
Reflectly's context is what you pick during a check-in: the activities that filled the day and the emotions that came with them, chosen from friendly icons, with "other" for anything missing. Those are the only two kinds of context, so a person or a place can only appear dressed up as an activity.
There is no connection to Apple Health or Health Connect, no weather and no location, and people and places are not tracked as their own kinds of data. Everything Reflectly knows about your day, you told it by tapping those two lists.
Luci, by a distance. Apple Health, weather, location, people and physical state, plus anything you add yourself, against activities and emotions.
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.
Reflectly asks you to create an account, and its App Store privacy label lists your name, email address, user and device identifiers, purchase history and how you use the app as data linked to you. Your entries are stored with that account and processed on the company's side so the personalized questions can work. The privacy policy describes encryption in transit. It does not describe end-to-end encryption.
The policy Reflectly links to is Kodeon's, written for its apps as a group. It says processing takes place in the United States and lists analytics and advertising services from Google, Facebook and others among the tools it uses. You can ask for your data to be deleted. None of this is unusual for a subscription app. It is simply 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. Reflectly needs an account and keeps your journal on its servers, under a policy shared with other apps.
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 iPad on iOS 16 or later, and Android. No Apple Watch app and no Mac or web version. Entries follow your account between devices. English only.
Luci. Both cover phones and tablets on both sides. Luci adds a watch app, a Mac app 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 download, with the daily check-in, the guided question, quotes and the daily challenge. Statistics are Premium only, along with what the store listing calls unlimited stories and a new question and reminder every day. A free trial is offered, and the first Premium offer appears during onboarding.
The US store lists Premium options from about $5 to about $60, which works out at roughly $10 a month or $60 a year at full price. Discounted introductory offers are common and vary from one person to the next, and some reviewers have been offered a lifetime unlock at roughly $80. That lifetime price is lower than Luci's. The yearly one is higher.
Luci. A free tier that includes the statistics, and a lower yearly price. Reflectly's lifetime offer is cheaper than Luci's, if you are shown it.
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 | Reflectly | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Look and feel | Slider entry, warm and roomy, busier once fully set up | Guided screens, animated and friendly, frequent upsells | Reflectly |
| Insights | Plain-language patterns, ranked influences, trends, many data types | Mood graph and correlations, Premium only | Luci |
| Customisation | Three scales, eight icon sets, eight themes, custom chips, movable cards | Color theme, reminder times, custom activities and feelings | Luci |
| Journaling | Rich text, photos, voice, 550+ prompts, compare past answers | One guided question a day, plain notes, photos and voice kept apart | Luci |
| Other features | Watch app, widgets, year in pixels, articles, Sparks | Quotes, affirmations, a daily challenge | Luci |
| Context and integrations | Apple Health sleep and steps, weather, geotag, people, places | Activities and feelings only, no health data | Luci |
| Privacy | On device, no account, on-device analysis, opt-in encrypted sync | Account required, stored on its servers | Luci |
| Platforms | iOS, iPadOS, Android, Apple Watch, Mac, Vision | iOS, iPadOS, Android | Luci |
| Pricing | Free core; Pro ~$6/mo, ~$35/yr, ~$200 lifetime | Free check-ins, no stats; Premium ~$10/mo, ~$60/yr | Luci |
On the count, Luci takes eight categories and Reflectly takes one. That is the most one-sided result in this series, and the reason is worth stating. Reflectly is a beautiful guided start to journaling with very little behind it: two lists to tap, one question, a quote, and statistics only for paying members. On the start itself, it is excellent.
A fair way to decide is to ask what you want from the app a month from now. If the answer is "a nudge to write something and a kind word in the morning", Reflectly does that warmly. If the answer is "to understand what is behind my good and bad days", Luci will do more with the same few minutes a day, 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.
Luci does not import Reflectly entries directly. If you would like it to, tell us at [email protected], because requests are how features get prioritized. Before you switch, look in Reflectly's settings for an export or ask its support team, so your history comes with you in some form.
Reflectly describes itself as an intelligent journal driven by AI, which it uses to choose questions and prompts based on your entries. That means your entries are processed on its side. Luci finds its patterns on your phone, with no account and no AI model reading what you write.
It is free to download and to do a daily check-in. The statistics and a new question every day are part of Reflectly Premium, a subscription. Luci is free to use as well, with mood logging, journaling, statistics and 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. Reflectly's gentle questions and upbeat tone can make a daily check-in feel easier on a hard day. Luci's ranked influences can show what tends to come before your harder days, and its PDF export gives you something concrete 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.
