So, why do we all start journaling? Because we all want to do better.
Begin by asking yourself: how much are you willing to spend?
By 2025, free trading journals will offer high-quality analytics features.
Premium journals offered automation, integrations with trading platforms, and professional reporting capabilities, making it hard to distinguish between the two.
The question is when to begin and when to consider upgrading.
In this guide, we’ll compare free vs. paid trading journals, discuss their pros and cons, and recommend the best journals in each category.
Tradervue: The Benchmark for Paid Professional Journaling
Tradervue remains the benchmark for serious traders who want professional analytics, broker connectivity, and reliability.
As one of the oldest and most trusted trading journal platforms, it’s built for accuracy, depth, and performance visibility.
Tradervue can import trades from dozens of brokers, automatically creates trading sessions, and has reporting capabilities to show you your true win percentage.
You can group by setup, view win rates by time of day, and see your performance over a period of months or years.
Perfect for data-minded traders.
However, the free version is limited to manual entry and summary reports, while premium plan customers can largely automate this process and access analytics that would take hours to compile manually.
Strengths
- Best-in-class trade import accuracy and analytics
- Multi-broker compatibility
- Professional reporting trusted by prop traders and educators
- Proven long-term reliability
Weaknesses
- Premium plan required for full data insights
- Design is functional rather than modern
- Update cycle slower than newer entrants
Best for: Professional traders who want institutional-level analytics and can justify the subscription for precision and performance tracking.
RizeTrade: The Best Free Trading Journal for Day Traders
RizeTrade is a trading journal platform for day traders that focuses on session-based analysis for improving trading execution and consistency.
This is one of the few free journals that is really built for traders and not spreadsheet jockeys.
Because you enter your trades in seconds, you can see how you are doing during pre-market, open, lunchtime, and close.
This gives RizeTrade a particular advantage for the intraday trader looking for real-time feedback.
The platform establishes habits, making it easy to journal immediately after each session.
While premium journals can have more analytics, few are as fast and intuitive as RizeTrade.
Strengths
- Free access to core features and session-based summaries
- Built specifically for day traders
- Lightning-fast journaling workflow
- Encourages consistent daily review
Weaknesses
- Fewer integrations than legacy platforms
- Lacks multi-year data views or deep analytics
Best for: Day traders and short-term operators who want structure, feedback, and simplicity without subscriptions.
Trademetria: Strong Free Option for Multi-Account Tracking
Trademetria‘s free tier is one of the most powerful options in comparison to competitors for tracking performance and P&L across multiple accounts and strategies.
While great for beginners looking to build consistency, larger paid models are available if you later need more.
At the same time, its free plan is very simple to use: its reports are not advanced, but they do help beginners see trends and risk exposure.
Strengths
- Solid free plan for account and trade tracking
- Supports multiple instruments
- Intuitive for beginners
Weaknesses
- Advanced metrics are limited to paid versions
- Interface feels dated compared to modern tools
Best for: Beginner to intermediate traders who want a structured, no-cost solution with room to grow.
Edgewonk: A Premium Option for Process and Psychology
Most professional journals analyze market data, but Edgewonk is directed at the trader behind the market data.
Edgewonk combines analytics and psychology, allowing traders to track their emotional state, confidence score, and discipline rating with every trade.
This makes Edgewonk one of the most reflective trading journals in existence, and most useful to traders who know emotion matters as much as analysis.
Strengths
- Behavioral and mindset tracking
- One-time payment instead of a subscription
- Encourages reflection and long-term growth
Weaknesses
- Manual entry required
- Desktop-only design
- Not suited for traders who rely on automation
Best for: Process-driven traders who value mindset development as part of their trading edge.
TradesViz: Premium Power for Data and Visualization
TradesViz is for analytical traders who want to take complete control of their trading data using hundreds of metrics and dashboards.
You can also search for queries like “Which hour of the day has my worst results?” in natural language.
The free plan presents the platform’s capabilities in brief, while premium access allows more control over visuals, metrics, and reports as per user preference.
Strengths
- Deep customization and advanced analytics
- Supports AI-based performance queries
- Multi-broker and multi-account integration
Weaknesses
- Overwhelming for casual traders
- Requires setup and a learning curve
Best for: Advanced traders and quants who want control over every aspect of their performance data.
Key Differences Between Free and Premium Journals
Free journals such as RizeTrade and Trademetria also allow habit tracking by logging reflections and notes.
They have minimal structure and require no financial investment.
For some traders, this is sufficient for consistency and execution improvement.
Premium journals such as Tradervue, Edgewonk, and TradesViz go one step further, allowing for automation, analysis, and scalability.
This type of journaling is most appropriate for traders who treat trading as an enterprise and metrics as assisting business-level decisions.
Ultimately, however, cost should not be as important as fit: a trader who is regularly journaling in a free journal will get much better results than a trader who pays for something better.
Final Thoughts
Whether your journal is free or not, the goal is the same: to understand and further sharpen your edge.
You can start with tools like RizeTrade or Trademetria, and then, when you’re ready to take your performance tracking and analysis seriously, you can use tools like Tradervue, Edgewonk, or TradesViz to take that habit further.
Journaling is not an expense; it’s an investment.
In trading, today’s statistics become tomorrow’s profits, and you must do everything to protect them.
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