Daylio built its reputation on something init.Habits doesn't attempt: it makes logging how you felt take about four seconds. Pick a mood face, tap the activities you did, done. No typing required. Do that for a few months and the app starts showing you correlations — which activities show up on your good days, which ones cluster around the bad ones. That's a genuinely useful thing to know about yourself, and 4.8 stars across roughly 61,000 ratings suggests plenty of people agree.
The reason people look for a Daylio alternative is usually that they came for the mood tracking and stayed for the goals — and then found the goals were the thinner half of the app. Daylio's habit side exists, with daily, weekly and monthly goals plus streaks and achievements, but it's built to serve the mood log, not the other way round.
init.Habits is a terminal-style habit tracker for iPhone with GitHub-style heatmaps, earned streak freezes (shields), five tracking modes including a pomodoro timer, and 23 editor themes. It does not track mood at all. So this comparison is less "which is better" than "which half of the problem are you solving." Honest answer, as of July 2026.
At a glance
| init.Habits | Daylio | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | track habits over time | log mood and activities |
| Habits | the whole app | goals — a secondary feature |
| Mood tracking | no | the core product |
| Correlation insight | no | mood ↔ activity statistics |
| Platforms | iPhone (synced web coming) | iPhone, iPad, Android |
| Free tier | 10 habits, full stats | core mood logging; limited stats, goals and icons; ads on Android |
| Price | €3.99/mo, €24.99/yr, €34.99 lifetime | about $4.99/mo or $35.99/yr |
| Lifetime option | yes | no |
| Streak protection | earned shields + vacation + sick mode | streaks, no earned freeze |
| History view | GitHub-style heatmap per habit | mood calendar and charts |
| Tracking modes | checkbox, counter, number + unit, timer, Apple Health | activity tags |
| Rating | — | 4.8★, ~61,000 ratings |
Two different questions
Daylio is a diary that doesn't need writing. Its unit is the day and how it felt, with activities as context. The payoff comes from volume — after a season, the statistics screen can tell you that your bad days correlate with short sleep and your good ones with having gone outside. That's insight you can't get from a habit tracker, because a habit tracker never asks how you felt.
init.Habits' unit is the habit, not the day. It doesn't care about your mood; it cares whether you meditated, and how often, and for how long, over months. The output isn't insight about yourself — it's an accurate record.
Plenty of people run both, and that's a sensible answer rather than a cop-out. They genuinely don't overlap much.
Where Daylio's habit side runs thin
If you're using Daylio's goals as your habit tracker, these are the edges you'll hit.
Activities are tags, not measurements. You tick that you exercised. You can't record that it was 5km, or 40 minutes, or that it came from Apple Health automatically. init.Habits has five tracking modes — checkbox, counter, number with a unit, timer, and Apple Health — so a habit with a number behind it stays a number.
The history view is mood-shaped. Daylio's calendar and charts are organised around how days felt. init.Habits draws a GitHub-style heatmap per habit, so one image shows a year of a single behaviour — the dense stretches, the pale February.
No earned streak protection. Daylio has streaks; miss a day and it breaks. init.Habits gives you shields, earned by turning up and spent automatically on a missed day, with separate vacation and sick modes for planned gaps.
Statistics are the paywall. Daylio's free tier covers mood counts and basic activity stats, but the advanced statistics — the correlation work that's the actual reason to use it — plus unlimited goals, moods and icons sit behind Premium. init.Habits includes full statistics free, and gates on capacity instead: 10 habits, 2 routines, 8 of 23 themes.
Streaks, and the day you miss
Daylio's streaks work the way most apps' do: unbroken until they aren't. That's clean, and for a daily check-in it's fine, because missing one mood entry doesn't feel like much.
For habits it lands harder, and there's research behind why. Treating a single lapse as total failure — the abstinence violation effect — is one of the more reliable ways to quit something entirely. init.Habits' shields exist for exactly that moment: a missed day spends an earned shield instead of resetting the count. They're finite, so it isn't a free pass. The full reasoning is in streak freeze.
Where Daylio genuinely wins
- Mood tracking. init.Habits has none. If that's what you came for, this comparison is over — stay.
- The correlation statistics. Seeing which activities track with your good days is the app's real product, and nothing in a habit tracker substitutes for it.
- Speed of entry. Two taps for a full day's log. Very hard to beat.
- Android and iPad. init.Habits has neither.
- Years of entries. If you've been logging since 2021, that archive is worth more than any feature comparison, and it isn't portable into a habit tracker.
- Reputation. 4.8★ across ~61,000 ratings is unusually strong.
Running both, if that's the honest answer
- Keep Daylio for mood and the activity log. Don't try to migrate the history — it doesn't map onto habit records.
- Pull out the four or five behaviours you want to build rather than merely observe. Those are habits, and they belong in a tracker.
- Set them up with a real tracking mode each, not all checkboxes.
- Stop double-logging them as Daylio activities, or the two records will drift and you'll trust neither.
If journalling specifically is the part you value, journaling habit tracker covers keeping that as a habit, and habit tracker journal covers the paper-versus-app question.
FAQ
Is there a free Daylio alternative for habits?
init.Habits has a free tier with 10 habits and full statistics including the heatmap, with no ads. It doesn't track mood, so it isn't a Daylio replacement — only a replacement for the goals half.
Does Daylio track habits?
It has goals — daily, weekly or monthly — with streaks and achievements. They work as light habit tracking, but activities are tags rather than measurements, so you can't record amounts, durations or health data, and the history view is built around mood rather than around each habit.
What's behind Daylio's paywall?
The free tier covers core mood logging with basic statistics. Premium adds advanced statistics, unlimited goals, moods and icons, automatic cloud backups, a PIN lock, and removes ads on Android. It's roughly $4.99 a month or $35.99 a year, with no lifetime option.
Can I track mood in init.Habits?
Not as a feature. You could approximate it with a counter or a number habit, but there's no mood scale and no correlation analysis, so it won't tell you what Daylio tells you. For that specific job, use a mood app.