A Quieter DailyBean Alternative
DailyBean makes logging a day almost effortless, and charming on top of it: pick the bean that matches your mood, tap a few icons for sleep and meals and weather, done. The little calendar of colored beans is genuinely sweet, and millions of people enjoy it.
But there’s a moment DailyBean users know: scrolling back through a finished month and finding a wall of cute beans that can’t quite say what any of those days were. The bean remembers that Tuesday was yellow. It doesn’t remember why.
Your memories come back
Write one line tonight and that’s your journaling for the day. Seven days on it turns up again, and after that it keeps turning up.
- a week later
- a month
- three months
- six months
- a year
- every year after
little memory
now
Exactly 1 year ago
Peaches at the stand. Bought far too many.
Have it come to you at an hour you pick, or leave notifications off and find them waiting the next time you open the app.
The note is the memory — make it the whole thing
DailyBean does have a note field, tucked at the end of the icons, and some people quietly use it as the real journal. Little Memory is that note, promoted to being the entire app. You write one sentence about your day in your own words — about fifteen seconds, hardly longer than the taps — and a year from now that sentence still holds the day: not yellow bean, work, friends, but the joke from dinner and who told it.
And unlike a bean, a sentence comes back. Little Memory resurfaces what you wrote a week ago, a month ago, and on this date every year after — the whole point of the app, and the reason people call it a little time capsule.
“Not every day is good, but something good happens every day.” During this time, [Little Memory] is helping me to distinguish between the days.
H., reader letter
Little Memory vs. DailyBean
| Little Memory | DailyBean | |
|---|---|---|
| A day’s entry | One sentence in your own words (photo optional) | A mood bean + activity icons (note and photo optional) |
| Time it asks for | About fifteen seconds | Seconds |
| Mood tracking | Sentiment analysis on what you wrote | A bean you pick from five |
| What you reread in a year | Your own words | A calendar of beans and icons |
| Ads | None | In the free version |
| Price | $0.99, with one optional premium subscription | Free, with a premium subscription |
| Platforms | iPhone | iPhone and Android |
You keep the gentle stats by switching, they just grow out of your words instead: emotion trends over time, your most used words, and streaks if you enjoy them. A nightly email reminds you to write — hit reply and the entry is saved. Search, full export, and automated nightly backups to Dropbox round it out, all private by default. Little Memory has been quietly at this since 2011 — over 1,000,000 little sentences from over 30,000 journalers, featured by Apple three times.
Who should stay with DailyBean
If tapping really is all you have for the day — and some seasons are like that — or the icon-habit correlations are what you’re there for, DailyBean does it with more charm than anyone. But if you keep opening the note field because the beans alone feel thin, that note is asking for a bigger home.
(Coming from Daylio instead? Same idea, different beans — there’s a Daylio comparison too, and all the rest at Little Memory vs. other journaling apps.)
